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Senator Doesn't Buy FCC Justification For Killing Net Neutrality (dslreports.com)
From a report: Senator Edward Markey this week questioned FCC boss Ajit Pai's justifications for killing popular net neutrality rules in a hearing in Washington. We've noted repeatedly that while large ISPs claim net neutrality killed broadband investment, objective analysis repeatedly finds that to be a lie. That's not just based on publicly-available SEC filings and earnings reports, but the industry's own repeated comments to investors and analysts. But that doesn't stop AT&T, Verizon, Comcast and Charter (and the ocean of politicians, think tankers, consultants and other PR vessels they employ to make this misleading argument in the media on a daily basis) from making the claim anyway. And while Pai once again this week breathlessly proclaimed that net neutrality put a damper on network investment, Markey simply wasn't having it. "Publicly traded companies are required by law to provide investors accurate financial information, including reporting any risks or financial burdens," Markey said. "However, I have found no publicly traded ISP that has reported to its investors by law that Title II has negatively impacted investment in their networks. Many, in fact, have increased deployment and investment."
Since that seems to be the paid shill argument de jour about it--the PR whores know they lost the battle against network neutrality, so now they want to convince net neutrality proponents that they were falling into the ISPs' trap all along in supporting it.. even though anyone with half a brain can see the opposite is true. Sad!
Edward Markey is a member of the democratic party, so at this point he has no power whatsoever in congress. It's great that he feels this way but unless he can convince enough other people to care, then he's just pissing in the wind (ie, pandering to his base).
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
From a Gizmodo article about their FOIA request regarding the DDoS attack on the FCC's website:
"Taken at its word, the FCC’s statement means that for a period of about 15 hours, no one in the agency’s IT department wrote a single email or memo, nor did they take down any notes of any kind about the cyberattack that, according to Chairman Pai, caused a malicious 3000-percent increase in network traffic."
(http://gizmodo.com/the-fcc-is-full-of-shit-1797124634)
I've been out of IT for a while, now, but I'm sure others on /. can attest to how impossible this is.
The only reason that the large ISPs hated NN was that it didn't allow them to use their typical "if value, then money" rent-seeking monopolistic means testing.
They were forced to provide a service for a fixed fee that could not be adjusted based on the perceived value of the transfer of bits to the customer. That is, if video is important, then obviously providers like Netflix should pay a higher rate. Even better, customers should pay a higher rate to get those bits from Netflix in a "Giga Blast Video Extreme" network package.
After all, why charge only one side of the equation when both the provider and the consumer can be charged?
Edward Markey is a member of the democratic party, so at this point he has no power whatsoever in congress. It's great that he feels this way but unless he can convince enough other people to care, then he's just pissing in the wind (ie, pandering to his base).
Note that the Democratic party held both houses and the presidency from 2009 to 2011, and nothing useful got done.
Pandering to your base is easy when you're the minority party, or when the other house is controlled by the opposite party.
Then you can pander all you want, placing blame on the other party for preventing you from doing what's right and just for the people!
During 2009 to 2011 the Democrats held majorities in both houses, but not supermajorities! If only the Democrats had just a few more votes, just *think* of all the good things they could have done!
The situation is a bit more interesting right now because many civilian outlets are saying "fix health care or we'll vote you out at the mid-terms". That's about 1.5 years from now, and campaigning starts in about 6 months.
Republicans are between a rock and a hard place with that one, but let's see what happens.
Most likely, congress will flip from R to D, and it still won't matter.
And elsewhere in the hearing was a senator emphatically SUPPORTING the FCC justification. Slashdot could have mentioned both sides of this issue, but instead seems to cherrypick the side it prefers.
In fact, the senator bringing analysis showing a decrease in broadband investment following the Open Internet Order goes farther, not only bringing a counter claim but also showing where the other analysis went awry. This is supportive of the FCC's position that there is a real cost to micromanaging internet service providers, as used to be the bipartisan consensus.
I've made a clip on C-SPAN since this side doesn't get much coverage:
https://www.c-span.org/video/?...
When you watch the video of the exchange, Markey was being given data he was asking for. He just ignored it.
Markey says there's no data that Network Neutrality hurts investment, while Pai responds by pointing to the data saying it does. Markey doesn't do anything to say why he'd ignore the facts Pai is bringing out; he simply restates that it doesn't exist.
Here's the video clip: https://www.c-span.org/video/?...
Elsewhere in the hearing another senator runs with the data provided by the FCC, pointing out that analysis shows broadband investment was harmed by the Open Internet Order while identifying issues with the NYT analysis saying otherwise.
We need to be clear here that Markey was ignoring information that didn't suit his conclusion. He was cherrypicking.