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FCC Won't Delay Vote, Says Net Neutrality Supporters Are 'Desperate' (arstechnica.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: The Federal Communications Commission will move ahead with its vote to kill net neutrality rules next week despite an unresolved court case that could strip away even more consumer protections. FCC Chairman Ajit Pai says that net neutrality rules aren't needed because the Federal Trade Commission can protect consumers from broadband providers. But a pending court case involving AT&T could strip the FTC of its regulatory authority over AT&T and similar ISPs. A few dozen consumer advocacy groups and the City of New York urged Pai to delay the net neutrality-killing vote in a letter today. If the FCC eliminates its rules and the court case goes AT&T's way, there would be a "'regulatory gap' that would leave consumers utterly unprotected," the letter said. When contacted by Ars, Pai's office issued this statement in response to the letter: "This is just evidence that supporters of heavy-handed Internet regulations are becoming more desperate by the day as their effort to defeat Chairman Pai's plan to restore Internet freedom has stalled. The vote will proceed as scheduled on December 14."
Here is a simple definition of net neutrality and links to further reading that will clear up you questions.
https://www.eff.org/issues/net...
You are welcome on my lawn.
AT&T willfully and deliberately blocked Facetime because it competed with AT&T's own services. Comcast forged TCP RST's to kill bittorrent traffic they didn't like. Comcast & Verizon were shown in no uncertain terms to be deliberately throttling Netflix in order to make Netflix cough up more money. Given that Netflix competes with Comcast's and Verizon's own "home grown" services, this is explicitly why Network Neutrality was formalized. NN was the way the Internet basically had worked up until the point in time where these large incumbent monopolies did this.
It's not that, it's just that the comments were faked to the FCC by anti-NetNeutraility bots, and they're concerned that America is waking up to their criminal activities in hacking the "vote".
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
Goddamn right - Jesus hated nigs too.
I've been a strong proponent of FCC-enforced NN. However, this article does raise some really good counter points. Pai and crew keep saying that the market should decide, and ignore the fact that there's absolutely no competition for the vast majority of the nation (only one broadband provider in my entire state, for example). The EFF article talks about how fostering competition is really the solution, if it could somehow be done. Here's something that was done in a small town where I used to live that really could make a huge difference.
If you don't feel like clicking on the link, the short story is that there's a municipal fiber network, but they actually don't act as an ISP. They are just a last-leg service and you select from a range of ISPs that have run a service to the town's central hub (which greatly lowers the barrier to entry for an ISP). Some are calling it new and novel, but it sounds to me like the Internet of the 90s, where you pay your phone company for the line and you pay AOL or some such to act as your ISP. Then the phone companies bought out the ISPs and that's how we ended up with today's mess. I vote for switching back to the 90's model like my old town did.
That would be the ideal situation yes; however, the government has granted our current ISPs a monopoly in most markets of the USA. We cannot legally do your example in most areas because of those previous agreements. This is why net neutrality must exist in its current form. The government took away true competition when it made those agreements, because of that we need the regulation so consumers can't be screwed by the monopolies the government allowed to happen.