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FCC Chairman Ajit Pai Criticizes Companies That Oppose His Efforts To Repeal Net Neutrality Rules (recode.net)
Tony Romm, writing for Recode: FCC Chairman Ajit Pai thinks everyone from Cher to Twitter has it wrong when they say that his efforts to roll back the U.S. government's existing net neutrality rules will spell the death of the web. Instead, Pai said during an event in Washington, D.C., on Tuesday that tech giants could pose the greatest threat by discriminating against viewpoints on the internet. "They might cloak their advocacy in the public interest," he said, "but the real interest of these internet giants is in using the regulatory process to cement their dominance in the internet economy." The surprising rebuke came as Pai forged ahead with his plan to end the net neutrality protections adopted by the Federal Communications Commission under former President Barack Obama. Those rules subject broadband providers like AT&T, Charter, Comcast and Verizon to utility-style regulation, all in a bid to stop them from blocking access to web pages, slowing down connections or prioritizing some content over others. [...] He didn't spare tech companies from that criticism, either. Companies like Facebook, Google and Twitter -- speaking through their main Washington, D.C.-based trade group, the Internet Association -- have urged Pai to stand down. In response, Pai sought to make an example of Twitter. He specifically raised the fact that the company at one point prevented a Republican congresswoman from promoting a tweet about abortion, only to change its mind amid a public backlash. "Now look: I love Twitter," Pai began. "But let's not kid ourselves; when it comes to a free and open Internet, Twitter is a part of the problem. The company has a viewpoint and uses that viewpoint to discriminate."
Those are not the same things.
Mike @ The Geek Pub. Let's Make Stuff!
Let this be a lesson.
He's not some old guy who misunderstands technology, and he's not dumb.
This is an act of malevolence.
A government is a body of people notably ungoverned - AC
So, Twitter is bad because they sometimes block content on their platform, and the solution is to allow the ISPs to block content on their pipes?
Ajit Pai is a tool.
All I know about Net Neutrality I learned from Cher and other entertainers via Twitter. And I am outraged.
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
This is so off target it barely even qualifies as "wrong" as opposed to simply "nonsensical." Net neutrality is not free speech applied to packets. It is not concerned with the contents of the packets but their origin and destination. Net Neutrality says you can't discriminate based on origin and destination. You can discriminate based on content, for example, you can drop spam or denial of service attacks. You can even prioritize based on content, so for example you could allow all voice chat packets higher priority, but only if you do it for all voice chat packets rather than creating a paid fast lane for certain people's voice chat packets. Stop listening to insane wight wing sources, they are leading you into dangerous places, like a little lamb to slaughter.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
Let this be a lesson.
He's not some old guy who misunderstands technology, and he's not dumb.
This is an act of malevolence.
Congress mandated that the internet be not be regulated. (1996, Telecommunications act)
FCC tries to regulate the internet (2008-ish)
FCC gets shot down by courts, FCC doesn't have authority to regulate internet (2010)
FCC rebrands ISPs under Title II, then asserts right to regulate. (2015)
FCC changes course, in line with Congress's instructions (2017)
It's interesting how much cheating goes on in the political arena. It seems OK to skirt the rules so long as it gets you what you want, most of the time the cheating is bad in the grand scheme of things but hey... that one polarizing issue got fixed, right?
Now your chickens have come home to roost, because that one good idea you had has to be dumped because you got it by cheating. "Cheating" here is when a federal government overreaches their authority, and goes against Congress's clear directions.
That's bad. That's something that you *do not* want to set a precedent for. That's something that really should be killed with fire, or nuked from orbit.
The *right way* is to get regulation through congress.
What - your congresscritter doesn't listen to you? That's not an excuse for cheating.
What - you can't convince enough other people to make this issue important? That's not an excuse for cheating.
Both of those previous statements are reasons for NOT cheating. Cheating inevitably leads to overreach and misapplication. If it's OK to do it in this one instance, then it's OK in all the other instances.
It's the "rule of man" instead of the "rule of law". It *seems* great in the narrow view of this one issue, but on balance it leads to complete and total corruption.
Fix it the right way, don't let this one good idea get lost because you couldn't follow the rules.
moves the conversation to a broader scope, and then someone chimes in with a detailed critique of how the conversation no longer is about the smaller issue, so the speaker is obviously "wrong"?
"We receive as friendly that which agrees with, we resist with dislike that which opposes us" - Faraday
So Comcast have a broken market model where they sell more bandwith than they actually have (or they over sell it) and you think that some 3d party should pay Comcast for the difference? Remember that Netflix is only serving Comcasts customers, they are not forcing their data down Comcasts throat.
Yeah, and like you just said, that peering agreement is between level3 and Comcast, not Comcast and Netflix. If Comcast is no longer happy with that agreement, they are free to renegotiate it with level3, which will then likely pass on the additional costs to its customers, including Netflix. They can also throttle the bandwidth coming from level3 to enforce the agreement, which wil adversely affect all of level3's customers, including Netflix. And then level3 can then choose to do something about that, maybe by enforcing bandwidth caps, for example. Netflix can respond to that by paying Comcast to host their CDN, which would be cheaper (maybe) than paying level3's bandwidth cap penalty. Etc etc...
All of these are perfectly fine free market contract adjustments, where the contract service is defined as "connection to the Internet to send X data and receive Y data for Z price." If at any time the terms of the contract are exceeded, or one member of the party wants to change the contract, there is nothing wrong with that. The problem is that Comcast does not have a contract with Netflix and wants to force them into one so that it can make money off of Netflix's successful business. It is quite literally a protection racket ("those are some nice bits you have there...wouldn't want anything to happen to them, eh?"), and that is what net neutrality is meant to stop.