Slashdot Mirror
FCC Plans December Vote To Kill Net Neutrality Rules (bloomberg.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: The U.S. Federal Communications Commission under its Republican chairman plans to vote in December to kill the net neutrality rules passed during the Obama era, said two people briefed on the plans. Chairman Ajit Pai in April proposed gutting the rules that he blamed for depressing investment in broadband, and said he intended to "finish the job" this year. The chairman has decided to put his proposal to a vote at the FCC next month, said the people. The agency's monthly meeting is to be held Dec. 14. The people asked not to be identified because the plan hasn't been made public. It's not clear what language Pai will offer to replace the rules that passed with only Democratic votes at the FCC in 2015. He has proposed that the FCC end the designation of broadband companies such as AT&T Inc. and Comcast Corp. as common carriers. That would remove the legal authority that underpins the net neutrality rules. One of the people said Pai may call for vacating the rules except for portions that mandate internet service providers inform customers about their practices. The current regulations forbid broadband providers from blocking or slowing web traffic, or from charging higher fees in return for quicker passage over their networks.
Mine is pro net neutrality already.
Liberty - Security - Laziness - Pick any two.
Here's hoping that these decisions can be reversed completely and quickly when this absurd administration is left amidst the most shamed corners of the history books.
I'm sure Ajit Pai will sit comfortable and rich when it's all over though - happy in the thought of the damage he did to industries and people everywhere.
"put your business first on the internet" "your website will load just as fast as your competitors" "make sure your potential customers don't die of old age waiting for your site to load" This wonderful package is available for only XX99.99 more than your current package. Call Today !!! bastards
... so responsible for every byte that traverses their network, right?
So if a terrorist sends a threat using an AT&T cell phone, that means AT&T management goes to gitmo, right?
... gutting the rules that he blamed for depressing investment in broadband.
Things are depressing alright, but I don't think it's in investment. But, maybe, with fewer burdensome regulations, carriers will pass any savings onto their customers. [ See, now you don't know whether to mod me informative or funny. :-) ]
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
I remember when the U.S. had a healthier government.
We need MORE overweening government!
Government knows best! The rules are for your own good!
Just ask Venezuelans in their Socialist paradise!
And his equally corrupt cronies. And it's not like he pulled a turncoat like Obama. Let's fleece America first.
....but the technically correct one if not very popular.
Most of that infrastructure was built by and is owned by private companies. If they become "public byways" then that means they're owned by the government, and hence the companies are technically due compensation for the takings.
Personally I think they should be, but that's a different discussion.
Ferret
Net neutrality is great and all until you have congestion, then the interwebs breaks to hell & back.
"Tempers are wearing thin. Let's just hope some robot doesn't kill everybody." --Bender
It's how the USA (currently) operates.
As we cross into Into the valley of the shadow of death, mass consent of the retards blindly follow shit leftist narratives.
The answer here is to start abolishing WHOLE FUCKING agencies
don't get pissy with me, or you'll get shit balls instead of lumps of coal bitch
Or you could just take em to court where the obama holdovers in DOJ, FBI and judges will support your gas baggery
But pat yourself on the back for allowing them into your CAT 5, after all look how fucking well they've done with regulating the broadcast spectrum.
has more to do with greed than anything else. fiber won't get installed, unless it gets forced by governments at this point. Don't expect Telecom which lobbies congress nearly as hard as the healthcare industry to fight any kind of legislation that might protect consumers from them.
FUCK YOU, you shit-for-brains yesman.
Is he putting it to a legitimate vote, or putting it to a "vote"?
the internet should be a utility like electricity or water, not a commodity, make the internet as fast as practical but it should be a utility
Politics is Treachery, Religion is Brainwashing
I remember when I got "@home" broadband; it was such a startling change from 56k dialup. Then there was 1.5Mbit asymmetric DSL, and then more cable-based broadband. I remember Napster, and downloading music 24/7 for *weeks*, and all the filesharing sites that were under the radar for a while. I remember being able to look up all sorts of stuff I never knew existed, and most of all, playing all the versions of DOOM, Duke Nukem 3D, Warcraft 2, and a plethora of other games, online, against total strangers, until the wee hours of the morning. Fun, fun, fun.
No matter. The Internet has been going to shit for a while now, and some piece of crap like Ajit Pai is dead set to pound the last nail into it's coffin. Sure, after Trump and his administration are all tossed out of office and/or convicted of some crime or other, we'll get someone else in the Whitehouse that will start to clean up the mess, but it'll take years, if not decades, to repair all the damage done to everything, all over the Country, and once the ISPs and other asshole corporations get their hooks into the Internet the way they've always wanted to, we may never be able to get things back on track again.
Well, guess when the end comes, I'll have more time to read..
for abandoning the blue collar guys to their fate while chanting 'update your skills'. They voted an administration into office who couldn't care less about them or us, but they really didn't have anything to lose. They're picking us workers apart. Putting us against each other and laughing all the way to the bank.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
You fucking morons.
maybe Google and other tech companies will put money where their mouth is and finally create their own ISP with cheap rates and real 1G speed, eliminating the pro-NN people.
...if there isn't any investment in broadband, why am I not still using DSL and an Edge-network flip phone?
So how is turning the internet into comcast a good idea? Has anyone even looked at what the politicians were doing in the name of net-neutrality?
good paying ones at that. And ones they can already do. Nobody's gonna feed, house and cloth them while they retrain and they're too tired from a 40-60 hour work week to add retraining for a new career on top of that. And that's before they start taking care of the kids they had before everything went overseas.
If you want bad stuff like this to stop happening you have to vote for a country where _everyone_ is taken care of no matter what. We've got the money to do it, but most folks don't want to. For one thing it means you're gonna have some folks who just fuck off all day and still get paid enough to do alright. And that really pisses people who go to shit jobs just to do alright off. There's an old line I think was from Clerks: I may not live well but at least I don't have to work hard to do it...
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
net neutrality has always been a lot of hand-waving bullshit. A recent headline characterized the FCC as 'playing word games'. LOL, the not quite irony that the Federal Communications Commission would be the most expert "word game players" around. LOL.
What do you mean by "vote for a country where _everyone_ is taken care of no matter what" and "fuck off all day and still get paid enough"?
That isn't the same.
Look, people need more than money. They need the self-respect of earning money. The conservative/right/republican voters will vote based on that. You may see it as voting against their own interest, perhaps being hoodwinked, but there is a difference in values here. People don't feel right living off of others. They may accept a government handout, because it is offered and they need it, but that still feels wrong. It feels like theft, and "thou shalt not steal" is deeply ingrained in the culture. These are people with a legit work ethic.
You're also hinting at communism, or at least socialism. That has caused hundreds of millions of deaths, and it is absurd to believe that next time will be different. You'd be pushing against human nature, and it takes violence to do that.
and yet, Cox just raised my cable internet bill by 7%, after a similar increase the previous year.
pai is a idiot.
my computer monitor is bulging at the st0pidity of this person.
the inter net is NOT cable -tv network which it self is an abomination.
luckily for idiot president nominee, most of the peopel dont understand the internet.
it's the hole or area, or playground wherw anything goes and doesnt matter and doesnt hurt in any physical manner unless you allowe it to.
this pai move is a plain sell out of the spirit of the internet. wow-way my ass! nortel!
Arrest the cable companies for fraud. If they tell me they're selling me X bits per second for a certain price, then break my connection to Netflix unless Netflix gives them a cut of the money I give Netflix, that's fraud.
Let's see how far they get being forced to put in blinking lights on the top of your contract, "The price we charge is not the full price we extract from your wallet. We will actually slow down your connection to Netflix unless Netflix gives us some of the money you give Netflix. That amount comes to $2.50 out of your ever-increasing Netflix payment."
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
The internet grew and blossomed into what we got without "net neutrality"; that lack of government intervention and regulation is exactly what made it the free "wild west" that permitted people with little cash, in basements and dorm rooms, to dream big and create new services and new business models and upend long-established business models. That unregulated pre-net-neutrality world gave us Yahoo, Google, Facebook, Amazon, YouTube, Skype, Linux, Firefox, etc.
Then, certain political people with a left-leaning economic world view found common cause with some rather deep-pocketed businesses looking for an edge in business negotiations and some folks who love government regulation of speech and economic activity, and they started pushing the anti-free-market notion that a company cannot charge more for a better product than it charges for a lesser product and that a government agency should be officially empowered to regulate the internet. This garbage was given the mealey-mouthed poll-tested maketing-department-approved propaganda name "net neutrality" and all the gullible usefule idiots gobbled it up like they gobbled up "Obamacare".
Just as the critics of Obamacare were right that the federal-government-driven medical insurance industry swerve into fascism-lite would create an unsustainable mess with sprialling rates and deductibles and insurers leaving markets, the critics of net netrality were also right that funding for further highspeed internet infrastrucure would be decreased if the owners of such infrastructure were to be blocked from profiting from it.
"Net neutrality" was ALWAYS a severely flawed wrong answer to the WRONG PROBLEM, by design, because some of the people pushing it were pushing it for political reasons to justify federal control of the net. The REAL problem and fight has ALWAYS been about the last 5 miles. If local authorities can be forced to give-up the corrution-enabling schemes surrounding the permitting of cable and fiber routing so that the average citizen can have a choice between multiple high speed internet providers THEN the basic market force of COMPETITION (absent for net access in most of America) will take over and alleviate all the problems net neutrality pretends to solve. We have competition in fast food, for example, and the result is that reasonable safe and reasonably tasty food is so available in America at low enough prices that we have an obesity problem. Free market competition works. On the flip-side, everywhere the heavy hand of government gets over-involved (like in healthcare which has been dominated by the government since the 1960s) prices rise, the customer experience gets worse, various forms of rationing are discussed, etc.