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AT&T Seeks Supreme Court Review On Net Neutrality Rule (bloomberg.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: AT&T and other broadband providers asked the U.S. Supreme Court to overturn the Obama-era "net neutrality" rule barring internet service providers from slowing or blocking rivals' content. The appeals, filed Thursday, will put new pressure on a rule enacted in 2015 when the Federal Communications Commission was under Democratic control. Filing a separate appeal from AT&T were the United States Telecom Association, a trade group, and broadband service provider CenturyLink. The embattled net neutrality rules bar internet service providers such as AT&T, Verizon and Comcast from blocking or slowing some web traffic in favor of other content -- their own or a paying customer's. "The practical stakes are immense," AT&T said in its appeal of a ruling that backed the FCC. The company pointed to a dissenting opinion that said the regulation "fundamentally transforms the internet" and will have a "staggering" impact on infrastructure investment.
It is clear these corporations no longer serve the public good.
Why are they allowed to continue existing?
The Internet is a set of agreed protocols and standards. If these protocols are not adhered to, then the service provided is not "Internet". It becomes something like the late, unlamented AOL.
So if an ISP violates net neutrality, like deep packet inspection, blocking ports, injecting data, prioritizing or blocking specific traffic, it is violating one or more of the protocols or standards.
In such a case, the ISP should lose all Safe Harbor protection, government subsidies and assistance, such as peering, right-of-way access, tax breaks and the like. Of course, under truth-in-advertising regulations, they may not use the word "internet" in advertising or describing their product.
Prove anything by multiplying Huge Number times Tiny Number
Most reasonable people would conclude that the Obama-era "net neutrality" rule barring internet service providers from slowing or blocking rivals' content is what they've asked the U.S. Supreme Court to overturn.
The free market argument works if there's competition. If the customers want net neutrality, they will ditch ISPs which accept payments for fast lanes, and switch to ISPs which honor net neutrality. If customers want services who pay for fast lanes, they will ditch neutral ISPs for ISPs which charge for fast lanes. This is pretty much how Internet service works in most of the world. If your ISP's policies piss you off, you cancel and get Internet using a different ISP.
Unfortunately, this isn't the case in the U.S. The vast majority of Internet providers have a government-granted monopoly, whether it be DSL (local phone service monopoly) or cable (cable TV/Internet monopoly). Without competition, there is no alternate ISP for customers to switch to if they're unhappy with their ISP's policies.
Hopefully the Supreme Court realizes this, and rules that local governments granting ISP monopolies is unconstitutional - state or local regulation of interstate commerce (the Internet crosses state and national borders). That way, everyone wins. The ISPs opposing net neutrality can charge for fast lanes. The ISPs for net neutrality can provide neutral service. And customers can choose whichever ISP they prefer. (For bonus points, websites which don't like ISPs who charge for fast lanes and artificially throttle their service to those companies as a way to "encourage" their customers to switch to a different ISP. After all, what's good for the goose is good for the gander.)
I've heard Idgit Pai, directly from his own mouth, state that companies haven't violated net neutrality and they should be able to police themselves on this issue because they won't violate it.
So, if these companies aren't planning on violating the net neutrality rule, why is it so critical that it be removed?
That's not possible. It's like everyone should have their own motorway to wherever they want to travel. Reality is that from time to time there's traffic congestion that causes problems.
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
Obviously he's outright lying. And given their privileged infrastructure positions these companies can hide a lot of their behaviour.
What they're really complaining about though is the limits this now places on being able to quadruple, or more, dip on the traffic charges. They already double dip as it is, on entry and again on exit.
Then maybe they should stop overselling their bandwidth. Reduce speeds or build out your infrastructure, don't lie about it.
Hey guys, I was a bit concerned about this whole thing, so I spoke to AT&T.
They said they're doing this to better serve their customers, so we have nothing to worry 'bout.
I don't mean any disrespect and I don't mean to offend any US readers, or those in the US who helped create the Internet in the first place.
The thing is, the Internet has become a universal resource, used by people all across the world. Except that many of the global services - and many of the most popular web-based services - are delivered from the United States. In other words, Net Neutrality is simply not a US-specific topic, but one which has global impact.
Much as I am *VERY MUCH* in favour of self-determination, local accountability and democracy-in-action... in this specific case I think that the United States needs to recognise that the consequences of net neutrality have global potential impact. In other words, whilst I am very much in favour of the US retaining the current Net Neutrality legal protections, I don't think they go far enough. I think that Net Neutrality needs to be removed from the control of any single nation state - i.e. put beyond the reach of "local politics".
I accept that this might be an unusual way of looking at this problem, but let's put it another way... Suppose the FCC had the ability to make a decision which could directly degrade the quality of telephone conversations in the UK, or Germany, or China, or Australia. Or suppose a UK citizen wanted to speak to a family relative or friend in the United States, but was left experiencing atrocious line quality. Now imagine that the line quality in that conversation was being controlled by a major US telecoms company that was being paid to carry the call, but which had neither of the two end users as directly paying customers. There would be uproar if that telecoms company started to degrade that call quality just to force the other participants to pay them more money, especially when they had the capacity to offer a flawless service, but were deliberately degrading it so as to coerce their direct and indirect clients to pay more. This would be possible and legal [on the internet anyway] if the Net Neutrality laws are revoked.
I don't mean to offend US readers, but to be blunt: US telecoms companies should not be given the right to do that.
Back in the day, ISPs begged for Common Carrier status because they were being sued over the content of data passing over their networks, and facing criminal charges for the distribution of child pornography. Common Carrier status was granted, allowing them to say "we're just the network, we just pass traffic, and we don't look at it, and therefore have no responsibility."
Now they want to be able to examine everyone's traffic and make punitive routing and delay decisions based on profit, but I argue that the second they start examining the content of everyone's Internet traffic, they bear the legal responsibility to quash illegal content and activities, and should face the full force of criminal law for failing to stop 100% of it.
Net Neutrality isn't "e-mails are slightly delayed so video packets can be delivered faster." It's "video packets from Netflix are slowed down because they compete against us and refused to pay us extra for timely delivery of their packets."
ISPs in many areas are monopolies or duopolies for Internet services. They are seeing competition for their video services, however, so they use their Internet monopoly/duopoly to punish any competitors and prop up their video services. Net Neutrality says that you have to treat all data of the same type the same regardless of where it's from. You can't slow down an e-mail from X provider while making Y provider's e-mails go quickly. You can't slow down Netflix because you want your own video service to seem quicker.
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.