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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."
The FCC took over regulation of interstate communication in 1934 with the Communications Act of 1934. The took over this authority from the Interstate Commerce Commission. Their job is regulating interstate commerce aspects of communication. Punting this to the FTC is disingenuous and probably illegal. Perhaps the executive branch needs to be reminded to follow the law.
For two decades everyone said hey!keep your government hands off of the internet! And then one day some Verizon customers had Netflix get depriotitized and now we want big brother running the thing???
This is not good. Every draft rule seems to have the words lawful traffic. Whatâ(TM)s lawful? Whoâ(TM)s to say that wonâ(TM)t change after your party of choice wins or loses control of the fcc?
Very simple:
* I pay $ISP from my campaign funds.
* $ISP drops packets to $OTHER_CANDIDATE's website, or actively injects malware in the HTTP transaction making it look like the website is malicious.
* I win the election.
And here are a couple of specific examples:
Comcast throttling bittorrent https://www.wired.com/2011/10/bittorrent-throttling-comcast/
Comcast requiring payment from Netflix https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2014/02/23/comcasts-deal-with-netflix-makes-network-neutrality-obsolete/?utm_term=.52c1fd061840
And before you think the second is reasonable, recall that Netflix has already paid for bandwidth to the Internet, and Comcast's customers have already paid for bandwidth as well.
As a consumer I don't like the idea of bittorrent throttling at all, even if I haven't used it myself but I want to be able to.
See, right there bit torrent traffic shouldn't be 'throttled' per se, but it, along with email, and other bulk non-realtime services, should be least priority. VOIP, gaming, etc and other such real-time monitoring should be highest priority. regular web browsing in the middle.
The important thing to note is that despite a lot of bleating by the ISPs about this, this is really nothing to do with net neutrality. Most net neutrality proponents are fine with sensible traffic shaping to the benefit of all users. If my 5GB torrent takes 20 seconds longer to complete so that your phone call doesn't have 10 two second audio dropouts, that just makes sense. When the pipe is full, some traffic has to be dropped, and dropping it based on service type is fine. drop a few torrent packets and keep the voip packets is fine and does not violate net neutrality.
dropping voip packets to competitors voip services, while keeping voip packets from the servcie we own / partner with/ get revenue from however does violate net neutrality.
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.
and then negotiate rights with each of the property owners along the way, so that you can locate your stuff on their property.
You don't locate "your stuff" on their property until they become a customer. Until then you stay on the already negotiated easements and public rights-of-way.
To do that, you would just need to gain rights to use the public spectrum. Your checkbook needs to open wide to do this.
Point-to-point microwave is relatively cheap. We've got a local wireless internet company, and their rates do not reflect a billion-dollar FCC licensing investment.
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,
They already pay a mutually agreed rent for access to the public rights of way. It's called a "franchise fee", and for Comcast in this area it is 3% of their revenue.
The *only* rational policy is to treat any infrastructure that uses government facilitated rights of way, or public air spectrum, as a public utility.
That is an assertion, not an obvious fact.
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.
So telephone companies should not be allowed to operate a 411 (information) service?
You've changed a lot of words between your first claim and this one, but it is still wrong. My responsibility ends at the edge of my network. I cannot control what other network providers do, and I cannot control what bandwidth other content providers pay for.
No. It's you who are squealing like a pig being slaughtered. In case of fucking Comcast they were DECLINING TO BUILD UP THEIR INTERCONNECTIONS. Nobody was asking them to provide free transit to Netflix, they were asked to build up their fucking network so their fucking edge had enough capacity to peer with Netflix.
And Netflix is bending over their backwards to accommodate ISPs, at that.
There are four ISPs I can call at any time for service here, and those are just the ones I'm familiar with. There's 13 listed in the phone book.
I offered this bet several times - if by the end of the next year I have at least 3 wireline ISPs that will provide me more with more than 50Mbps connection then I'll pay you $10000. Otherwise you pay me that sum. I live in a middle of an affluent neighborhood (ZIP code 98119) and I can't get anything except Comcast or slow DSL. Do you believe your own convictions? I'm ready to post that sum into an escrow right now.
No? Then shut up your mouth. I actually used to run an ISP and I fucking know how deeply US ISPs are screwing people.