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Petition Calls for Ouster of FCC Chairman Pai (whitehouse.gov)
Long-time Slashdot reader speedplane writes:
Yes, we've all heard that net neutrality is on its way out, and it seems NPR was able to snag one of the few (the only?) interview's of Ajit Pai on its effect. Sadly, NPR's Rachel Martin stuck to very broad and basic questions, and failed to press Pai on the change of policy. That said, it's worth a listen.
Pai insists that "We saw companies like Facebook, and Amazon and Google become global powerhouses precisely because we had light-touch rules that applied to this Internet. The Internet wasn't broken in 2015 when these heavy-handed regulations were adopted, and once we remove them, I think we'll continue to see the infrastructure investment that will benefit digital consumers and entrepreneurs alike... I've talked to a lot of companies that say, look, we want to be able to invest in these networks, especially in rural and low-income urban areas, but the more heavy-handed the regulations are, the less likely we can build a business case for doing it."
But New York's Attorney General Eric Schneiderman says he's spent six months investigating "a massive scheme to corrupt the FCC's notice and comment process" for net neutrality, adding that "the FCC has refused multiple requests for crucial evidence." (Nine requests over five months were ignored.) And now over 65,000 people have signed a new online petition at WhiteHouse.gov calling for the immediate removal of Ajit Pai as the FCC's chairman, calling him "a threat to our freedoms."
Meanwhile, The Verge has compiled "a list of the lawmakers who voted to betray you," with each listing also including "how much money they received from the telecom industry in their most recent election cycle."
Pai insists that "We saw companies like Facebook, and Amazon and Google become global powerhouses precisely because we had light-touch rules that applied to this Internet. The Internet wasn't broken in 2015 when these heavy-handed regulations were adopted, and once we remove them, I think we'll continue to see the infrastructure investment that will benefit digital consumers and entrepreneurs alike... I've talked to a lot of companies that say, look, we want to be able to invest in these networks, especially in rural and low-income urban areas, but the more heavy-handed the regulations are, the less likely we can build a business case for doing it."
But New York's Attorney General Eric Schneiderman says he's spent six months investigating "a massive scheme to corrupt the FCC's notice and comment process" for net neutrality, adding that "the FCC has refused multiple requests for crucial evidence." (Nine requests over five months were ignored.) And now over 65,000 people have signed a new online petition at WhiteHouse.gov calling for the immediate removal of Ajit Pai as the FCC's chairman, calling him "a threat to our freedoms."
Meanwhile, The Verge has compiled "a list of the lawmakers who voted to betray you," with each listing also including "how much money they received from the telecom industry in their most recent election cycle."
Too little too late.
I think "A threat to our freedoms" is polarized political mumbo jumbo and not going to serve anyone well in this discussion. The real claim here is that Ajit Pai has a sympathetic view towards corporations that is likely to be a conflict of interest and is using political spin to attempt to justify this position. The political spin is nonsense as far as I can tell. By the way, I'm sure a lot of this is coming from the US Chamber of Commerce and the Business Roundtable. That's the real reason that Ajit Pai should be removed is because he lakes the ability to be impartial and do what's best for the country not corporate America. As we all know, there is a systemic problem of corruption in America and Ajit Pai is the latest to succumb to its influence. It's unfortunately the status quo in American politics.
Now liberals, think about this issue that you care about very dearly. You protest, you sign all these petitions, you blog and project online, etc. and what does the government and corporate America do? They laugh at you because they think you're weak and all talk and no action. It thinks you'll lose interest in the issue and the status quo will continue. Now I wonder.. how else might the people be able to compel the government to represent them? You do the math... and you'll probably move a tad to the right of your beliefs when you realize what the answer to that question is. It's a sad state of affairs in America today that no one seems to have the capability to be reasonable.
We'll make great pets
> If it were really that important, why didn't Obama implement it early in his tenure?
The president was pretty busy, with Iraq and Afghanistan as wars he didn't start but needed to clean up, with the health care program, the difficulty of appointing any Cabinet staff in the face of an obstructionist Congress, and an economy reeling from two Asian wars and the housing market economic meltdown. I think we can safely say that he was _busy_.
Moreover, the FCC is supposed to be an independent agency from the White House. So any guidance or promotion of particular policies at the FCC can take much longer because it can't be done by presidential mandate.
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"The Internet wasn't broken in 2015 when these heavy-handed regulations were adopted,"
2015? Ahhh lets remember 2006 and the various efforts to stop telcos slowing traffic to charge throttling fees..
Here's Senator Stevens:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Series_of_tubes
"A series of tubes" is a phrase coined originally as an analogy by then-United States Senator Ted Stevens (R-Alaska) to describe the Internet in the context of opposing network neutrality.[1] On June 28, 2006, he used this metaphor to criticize a proposed amendment to a committee bill. The amendment would have prohibited Internet Access providers such as AT&T, Comcast, Time Warner Cable, and Verizon Communications from charging fees to give some companies' data a higher priority in relation to other traffic. The metaphor has been widely ridiculed, particularly because Stevens displayed an extremely limited understanding of the Internet, even though he was in charge of regulating it
They keep trying, the FCC blocks them, the Telcos go to court, or block in a slightly different way, and the FCC changes the rules to clamp down on it, and this cat and mouse game has gone on for over a decade. Pai of course knows as an ex Verizon lawyer he helped craft workarounds. He's trying to deceive.
Why shouldn't Pai be answerable for his lies? Why is it extreme to expect him to do his job of regulating the monopoly telco industry so they don't screw over customers?
All Year
A Couple Weeks Before NN Vote
A Week After Vote
Net neutrality has been distorted by idiots like you.
It isn't the content that is being regulated. It is the ability to get that content at all.
Would you use Facebook if you had to pay $5 more a month for social media access?
Would you get kissed off if your Comcast (Which owns msnbc) stopped streaming all fox news streams? Unless you signed up to pay Comcast $10 a moknth to allow fox websites and streams access?
How would fox pay for such things? They charge you for it. So you pay Comcast $10 a month to access fox websites and pay $ fox $10 a month to get access to that plus pay Comcast again for basic internet access?
Net neutrality is only to ensure that Comcast which owns msnbc doesn't use their monopolies to limit what you can get access too. That is what Comcast has started doing. That is paid access that Comcast forces Netflix to pay, to show content that you requested.
All ISP's want this. That is how they monetise the stream. They want to charge 3-4 times for the same network content.
That is what net neutrality is. Everyone arguing otherwise is using distraction and lies to hide the truth.
In Portugal you pay extra to access certain websites like facebook
i thought once I was found, but it was only a dream.
That's a very silly argument that falls apart under even the slightest scrutiny. Changing ISPs means selling your house and moving to another city. Changing to a new search engine or social network requires merely typing a different address at the top of your browser window. The two situations are simply not comparable.
The reality is that anybody with sufficient technical experience could pull together a team and build a new social network or search engine from the ground up in O(months). That's why everybody on the planet has access to multiple social networks and multiple search engines. Regulating them makes no sense, because if you don't like the policies of one, you can trivially leave and go to another, and bring all of your friends with you, if necessary.
By contrast, starting a new ISP involves attaching to utility poles that are owned by a third party and/or digging up roads and people's yards. And the telcos recently managed to get a federal judge to overturn Nashville's laws that are designed to make it more feasible to move existing utility lines in ways that make it practical to add new utilities. The current regulatory environment makes it largely infeasible to start a new ISP in most places. Worse, because of the relatively high cost per customer, it would still be infeasible even without those regulations except in dense urban areas. There's a reason that outside of the big cities, the fiber network in Tennessee is being built by the state government. There's not enough profit in it for a single ISP to run fiber, much less multiple ISPs.
Not at all. The Democrats feel we should regulate monopolies because they are monopolies, and should not regulate industries that have healthy competition, while the Republicans feel we should not regulate anybody, and believe that somehow competition will magically appear in markets with an obvious natural monopoly even though history has shown repeatedly that this almost never occurs in practice. Basically, Democrats believe in the notion of a natural monopoly, whereas Republicans just put their hands over their eyes and pretend that the problem doesn't exist, to the benefit of monopolies owned by their buddies.
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