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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."
Companies will be free to fuck the consumer! Yay! Land of the free! Home of the voiceless!
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."
In other news, people being held at gun point often become desperate when nothing they do can convince the gun totter to let them go.
oh my fuck can we please stop with this "well it was all fine and dandy back then" bullshit.
There are examples all over that provide excellent examples of why ISPs should not be allowed to have direct control over the data that flows over their networks. Even Canada has a shocking example: http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/telus-cuts-subscriber-access-to-pro-union-website-1.531166
This fight has never been about what the state of the affairs was 5/10 years ago, it's about what the state of affairs will be 5/10 years from now, and putting rules in place to make sure that doesn't happen.
So fuck off with your nonsensical "WAH ALL GOVERNMENT IS BAD LET THE MARKET DECIDE" republican horse shit. It's stupid, and only idiots like you believe in it.
"Chairman Pai's plan to restore Internet freedom...." Orwell himself couldn't write better newspeak.
Because the barrier to entry is so high not even Google can afford to do so in most cities.
... Chairman Pai's plan to restore Internet freedom ...
And by that, he means the freedom for ISPs to do whatever they want to customers and their traffic.
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
"Would you care to link to the specific page that has that info?"
Pretty simple:
paid prioritization / availability of some internet sites and providers over others:
example 1: without net neutrality, the ISP can offer a package that only allows access to their own properties. Does the ISP own a streaming service, then your internet service can only reach that service, you the customer can't reach netflix or hulu. Maybe they offer a higher tier internet package you can buy that will let you visit these services... or maybe they don't.
example 2: without net neutrality, the ISP can throttle netflix traffic to a crawl unless netflix pays some fee to your ISP. I mean sure the customers are already paying a fee to access netflix via the internet service, perhaps they are even paying extra just for permission to reach netflix but that's not important. They can also go after payments from each service and server with a "pay us, or people visiting from our network will be throttled to minimal speeds".
The effect of the loss of net neutrality is that:
a) services owned by the ISP do not have to be treated the same as other services. They can do whatever they want to make sure competing services are not reachable, not usable, or cost a lot more.
b) large services will pay the ransoms to the ISP to get their services to consumers. So facebook and netflix will pay the ISP for premium access. This serves to enrich the ISP, and entrench the big players.
If facebook-next comes along, or youtube-next comes along but doesn't have the money to pay all the ISPs not to block or throttle them into oblvious, then oblivion is where they'll stay. Even if they can pay their own hosting and bandwith costs, they also have to pay EACH ISP the ransom due to send those packets to the ISPs customers.
The resulting internt will have a few dozen channels owned by large companies, most of which will belong to the ISPs themselves, and a few more behemoths like apple etc that can afford the pay to be reachable.
Your new website or service, dies on the vine. Comcast users aren't going to pay comcast extra money each month to reach your site, and you can't afford to pay comcast and every other provider money to reach their customers.
I read the front page but there is no mention of ...
Maybe you should read beyond the first page before wasting everyone's time by asking questions that you can easily answer for yourself.
Your posting history shows that you post about network neutrality and little else, and your posts generally add nothing to the discussion.
You have made a habit out of feigning ignorance (as you are doing here), despite having your questions answered over and over. Your only interest seems to be trolling and spreading FUD.
I still don't understand why the answer isn't to start a competing ISP
Well, there are generally three possibilities of a wired ISP: One using phone lines, one using cable, or one using fiber. Most of us have less than all of these options. If you want to start your own competing ISP, then you'll need to create your own infrastructure. To do this, you will need to figure out where to install it, and then negotiate rights with each of the property owners along the way, so that you can locate your stuff on their property. They will probably want money from this, and it'll likely be a lot. And if any of them refuse, you are going to be out of luck. The existing infrastructure was created using rights of way that were created for the telephone system or other government facilitated rights of way.
So maybe you could start your competing ISP using wireless. To do that, you would just need to gain rights to use the public spectrum. Your checkbook needs to open wide to do this.
Look, I am pretty far on the right politically, but the situation here is deeply corrupt. The existing providers are using public, government granted resources to build their businesses, but somehow think that they shouldn't be regulated. If they had to individually negotiate the rights to use - and pay a mutually agreed rent to - all of the property on which they've built, then I would buy the argument. But this is *far* from a free market that can provide competition.
The *only* rational policy is to treat any infrastructure that uses government facilitated rights of way, or public air spectrum, as a public utility. All traffic should be required by law to be routed as efficiently as practical, without regard to content, or origin/destination of the traffic. And it should not be possible for any company to simultaneously own any part of the infrastructure (directly or indirectly), and any content that it carries. And if they don't like it, they should be free to build their own infrastructure with no public aid of any kind.
And they cannot wait for the money to be theirs....
They were paid a long time ago. This deal to repeal NN was done a long time ago, Ajit Pai is just pushing the papers around for show. Nothing we say or do will have any impact. As another poster chimed in: Home of the voiceless. We have no say. If you want a say, better bring a blank check.
In 2013, comcast throttled netflix and extorted millions of dollars out of netflix to allow them to continue to operate. Their own documents showed they were doing it on purpose. It was literally: "Gee - that's a popular website you've got there. It'd be a shame if something were to happen to it."
If it can happen to netflix in 2013, it can happen to the next big thing whenever the big internet kleptocracies want. Personally, I think what comcast did then already falls under fraud, extortion and racketeering laws, but having some clear cut protections would be nice.
That said, I also believe that filing the internet under title 2 is NOT a good idea. That would give the FCC way too much power to regulate the internet if existing regulation of radio under title 2 is any indication. Sure, they *might* prevent another comcast extorting netflix (hey - we can dream), but the same legislation would give them the power to set up the internet equivalents of public decency filters, the fairness doctrine, and who knows what else (all in the interests of fighting terrorism/pedophiles I'm sure).
The result of all of this is that people fall into several groups:
1) Politicians For NN - they see the new powers to regulate the internet and are giddy with joy
2) Politicians Against NN - they are generally getting bribed by the ISPs
3) People For NN - they see things like comcast v netflix and are righteously outraged
4) People Against NN - they see the FCC wants new regulatory powers over the internet and are aghast
5) People who have no idea what NN is, and, if they bother to try and find out, basically end up parroting either 3 or 4 depending on whom they listen to.
Both parties are full of crap and only a complete tool trusts either side.
I'm not finding a reference for when the FCC got a law passed authorizing it to regulate the internet--the closest you get is the Telecommunications Act of 1934, but people had little concept of modern computers at the time, never mind most of the things we do with computers now. They'd consider the El Cheapo calculators we can pick up at a dollar store to be incredibly impressive and not just because those things can fit into a pocket.
It would be...reasonable to ask that, if the internet is going to be treated as telecommunications ect ect, that Congress actually pass the damn law saying as much. Having net neutrality be baked in on that level might also be actually preferable, especially since the ISPs being defined as common carriers by the FCC and having net neutrality regulations has failed quite entirely to prevent things like the MAFIAA from trying to get the ISPs to do their enforcement. (I would suggest not going for net neutrality but rather going straight to requiring they be agnostic about the content of their pipes--with them encouraged to know only the minimum amount of information required to ensure data gets where it's going, and not a single nibble more.)
Seriously, a lot of this feels like watching a group of people working on a program who keep implementing crocks with the assurance that these are only really temporary patches and they'll go back Any Day Now and implement a proper fix or at least a reliably-working kludge...with the distinct feeling that this 'any day' is going to be a few eons after the heat death of the universe. Can we please just implement the proper fix? One that might actually get us the real thing?
What makes you think it's *deregulation* that will lower the barriers to entry?
The thing actually that will lower the barrier to entry is regulation to stop the current players using their current scummy tactics to keep the competition out.
If net neutrality fails it will just mean all the smart people can pack up their shit and start a new internet and scrubs like you can pay by minute on your AOL 2.0. I personally can't fathom why you'd be so excited by this.
Since it solved that problem, which is not hypothetical at all as anyone with experience in the real world prior to the law can tell you, and causes no problems, why would you want to do away with it. This is the proof that Pai and his buddies are morons. They are so stupid they really think that people will believe the "We must do away with it because it is superfluous and has no effect" line of bullshit.
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun