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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."
then wouldn't a delay actually help the Reptilians... I mean Republicans?
Mike @ The Geek Pub. Let's Make Stuff!
... when it was introduced in 2015? When the regulators sat down in that meeting they must have acted in response to a specific trouble caused by lack of net neutrality prior to that. What was that trouble? I am genuinely interested.
The FCC does not need to be involved in the internet at all.
We have the FTC to regulate companys.
There's nothing special about INTERNET company that needs a new regulatory framework.
Especially the FCC with their censorship under 'content standards'.
They need to fuck off back to regulating the em spectrum. Their job.
Companies will be free to fuck the consumer! Yay! Land of the free! Home of the voiceless!
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?
"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."
Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength.
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.
And they cannot wait for the money to be theirs....
Seriously, while undoubtedly Google and other profit from network neutrality, the ones that profit most are ordinary citizens with not a lot of disposable income and small companies. Doing away with network neutrality is about the most anti-citizen thing the FCC could do. Does fit right in with the tax reform in that though. I guess the ones that voted for this administration just like getting screwed over...
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
"Chairman Pai's plan to restore Internet freedom...." Orwell himself couldn't write better newspeak.
This is just evidence that the billions of dollars to be made by doing nothing except forcing heavy-handed Internet regulations are becoming more desperate by the day.
FUCK HIMSELF.
His staff is welcome to join him.
... 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. . . .
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! --
I hope the Republicans do a complete scorched earth policy on all fronts. A policy so damaging to the country that those 30% of fucking idiots that voted for the Pussy-Grabber-in-Chief and his minions realise they're getting ass fucked through and through. Hope springs eternal doesn't it ?
If Congress had done what they should have done back in the day and mandated that content providers and transmission providers be separate companies I wouldn't have a problem with removing net neutrality provisions. Without a regulated separation between the two we are encouraging content holders and transmission providers to merge together into large conglomerates. Once these large media companies are formed they have an financial interest in selling their customers their content and limiting access to others content which is inherently unequal. If transmission providers were mandated to not provide content the only thing they could compete on would be speed and reliability which is good for the consumer.
They're desperate to accomplish the tasks they were asked to perform by their Lord Trump, before that piece filthy rotting traitor gets impeached.
Bots or not, all those comments are going to /dev/null. No one is reading those. They never had any bearing on this deal.
We need to redirect our efforts elsewhere. The internet's protectors need to be pressuring congress and senate to pass new regulations that overrule the FCC and re-implement Net Neutrality outside of Title II, it's own beast, it needs its own laws. FCC is a lost cause, wasting our time with them. Bother your congress-critters.
But some are more equal than others.
Wouldn't want to get in the way of the Chairman now, would we.
I'm sure he knows best.
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?
You might want to check that again.
300k comments FOR net neutrality were all faked by russian addresses.
Really gotta hand it to google and facebook. They've got you all so turned around you're FUCKING CLUELESS!
But totally sure you're right. And totally sure that google and facebook are the good guys fighting for YOUR rights.
lol
quite the brainwashing. and you won't even admit it's a possibility! that's amazing.
Just look at the editorial stance on Slashdot pushing all the Google-led propaganda in favor of NN, even resorting to wild conspiracies.
The NN camp is desperate. But the battle is lost; NN is about to get tossed into the trash bin of history.
Not really sure what you expected.
No, and I don't believe you're arguing in good faith. It's not like there's a $10 billion fee to start an ISP, or an army of paperwork-clutching government employees trailing after the fiber crews. A large difficulty is negotiating rights of access, especially if one has to negotiate such rights with every individual landowner, and it's also just plain costly to lay lots of fiber optic cable. And aside from a knee-jerk opposition to any and all regulation, there is no reason why there should not be some sort of regulation governing how you are allowed to be an ISP.
You seem to be on quite the streak of douchebaggery these last few days.
Those who advocate genocide deserve every protection afforded by law, and none afforded by common human decency.
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.
Maybe the way to scare these ISPs into leaving this alone is making it an "all or nothing" situation. If you are going to throttle or block certain data, then you become responsible for policing ALL OF IT. If you insert yourself as the keeper of the data, you better be blocking all illegal and illicit content, failing to do so at their own peril.
Eh, wishful thinking, I know.
Considering that all of our telecommunications companies had all the time, resources, and motivation that it would have taken to build the information superhighway for over 10 years and they failed to deliver until one was graciously delivered to them by our government and tax payers.
I would say there is plenty of evidence they will adopt short term measures to nickel and dime consumers instead of providing a general use platform that facilitates broad innovation like the internet as we know it. The problem that net neutrality is attempting to solve is the behavior of our carriers and content providers left to their own devices.
They own the very extensible MMS network and have no restrictions on it's use, we all have access. Why does it suck? It should have replaced the internet by now!
Soon, they'll just refer to him as dear leader.
Since Pai literally said that he would not be taking public comment into consideration, we kinda know that for a fact.
See here
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this decision? It does seem to mesh with the philosophy that government interference in free markets is a net-negative. The argument could certainly be made that the federal government has no business telling Comcast, Cox, et al what to do with their networks. You could argue that they get preferential status, but two wrongs don't make a right. Wouldn't the correct solution be to revoke their monopolies along with the net neutrality regulations?
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I, personally, stink of desperation.
I do not believe in karma. "Funny"=-6. Do good and forbid evil. Yours, Oft-Offtopic Flamebaiting Troll.
Clearly he doesn't think he serves the masses. Unwashed or otherwise.
Madame Defarge has his name. There will be a reckoning. Eventually.
#1 ISP customers requested all of the traffic that Netflix sent.
#2 ISP customers were not receiving the bandwidth that they had paid for.
#3 Netflix offered to put their servers closer to the ISP customers, lowering the bandwidth on backbones.
#4 ISPs artificially throttled Netflix as evidenced by data collection, and proxies bypassing the issue.
#5 Verizon pushed Netflix traffic through congested peer connections as evidenced by an unfortunate Verizon graphic.
We ARE desperate to save the Internet from the shitbags that are trying to destroy net neutrality, and the greedy piece of shit corporations who are looking to make yet more money when they're already raking in plenty.
Given that the FCC is operating under regulatory capture, the sooner they vote, the sooner the courts get to sort this out.
Except that it would require people to be more neighborly, it seems to me this might be a good opportunity for neighborhood-wide mesh networks to spring up. Probably won't happen, but I can dream, can't I?
The FCC was looking for meaningful comments. Taking somebody else's form letter and attaching "me too" to the end will always go straight to the trash. It doesn't matter which side your form letter takes.
Unless you have more money to line Chairman Pai's pockets with you are wasting your breath trying to convince the FCC to delay or forget about eliminating the Net Neutrality rules.
hey, maybe it will fuel innovation.
burn the internet to the ground and maybe a phoenix will rise from the ashes..
Specifically the 10th amendment about powers being reserved for the State. Then cut government power at the state level. Less government is always better.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
Net Neutrality was not introduced in 2015. It was the rule of the internet from the very start. But some big corporations decided that the rules didn't apply to them, so started ignoring the rules, and one of them took the FCC to court to establish that the way the FCC was regulating the internet wasn't legitimate.
The court decided in the corporation's favor, saying that the FCC should instead do it another way. That is what the FCC did in 2015, correctly identifying the internet as a communications service, and carefully restoring the same light touch regulation they had before.
So anyone who wants to overturn the way the internet has been since the very beginning had better establish a serious problem that needs to be fixed by doing so.
Prediction for end of Universe #42: Fencepost error in Quantum_bogosort.cpp
FCC under pai NEVER CARED about us.
NEVER.
CARED.
ABOUT.
US.
just to be clear about things, in case there was any doubt.
I just hope that the next admin can undo all the damage this one has done. just like trump makes it his goal to undo all obama changes; I hope the next guy undoes all THIS admin's changes.
until then, we have no one to speak for us. and they are LAUGHING at us, all the while.
Thanks, Clueless Flyover State Morans. you just fucked us ALL over, real good. I hope stigginit was worth it, because you also stuck it to yourself, you fool!
--
"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
The [FCC] 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.
The FCC regulates the interstate commerce of communication technology and utilities. They didn't take over all consumer protection, especially consumer fraud and antitrust (which remained with the FTC and the Justice Department). If the FCC had taken these over, how would you explain, for instance, the breakup of AT&T?
Most of the bad aspects of "network non-neutrality" are the result either of:
- integration between ISPs and companies that provide the services for which they carry the packets - either outright membership in the same conglomerate or special deals - giving them an incentive to favor the packets of their "partners" and committing anticompetitive behavior,
- penalizing packets of services that are costly to carry, a threat to their partners' business models, or of heavy users - thus providing less than what a reasonable person would expect of "internet service" and committing consumer fraud.
Meanwhile the FCC tends to apply technical solutions to anticompetitive behavior problems, and considers two players "competition" (when "the invisible hand" requires at least 3 and typically four or more competitors before cartel-like behavior breaks down without collusion to keep it stable).
I have, for years, been advocating that Network Neutrality be moved to the FTC and Justice Dept, which have no issues with penalizing or disassembling companies that shaft the consumers.
But the FTC can't just step up to this plate - and Pai is being disingenuous to speak as if it could. Some of the "hands off the Internet" legislation explicitly blocks the FTC from playing in that game. Congressional action is required to re-enable it.
Having said that, one could expect the Trump administration to go for it. The media conglomerates that are driving network non-neutrality are exactly the ones that have run the totally anti-Trump mainstream media. Turning the FTC attack dogs loose on them, with an eye to dismembering their unholy alliances, would be a dandy way to punish his enemies by doing something good for the bulk of the consumers. B-)
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Duh! Trump assigned him there so he could destroy the FCC.
You really ought to lay off the Koolaid, because right now they got you hook, line, and sinker
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.
Ad hominem from an AC, whatever. You should have included explicitly that said terms include no blocking by terms of service use-restrictions. I.e. having a contractual term of service that forbids operating a server. I'm educated enough that I understand how that is implied by what you said, but I think it's an important factor here.
Guess you Trumpsters showed us.
Name makes me associate to Chairman Mao, Chairman Jinping and others.
first russians, now bots. you millennials need to learn how to deal with not getting your participation trophies. because reality does not care for your feelings.
How sad we all need a VPN, of course until "they" start blocking that. Good-Bye internet, sorry for all the suckers who can't live w/o it though. We should be starting a citizens network, and leave the present one to comcast, at&t, and the US government, including those who can afford it.
The FCC was looking for meaningful comments. Taking somebody else's form letter and attaching "me too" to the end will always go straight to the trash. It doesn't matter which side your form letter takes.
Nope. Even if someone sends a carbon copy of another letter it is pretty clear that they support the same stance. FCC should have taken it into consideration.
The only thing they were looking for was mails to validate the position they've already taken.
Pai have already been paid for getting rid of net neutrality, it is too late to change his decision.
This is just evidence that supporters of heavy-handed Internet regulations are becoming more desperate by the day...
See, this statement bothers me. Not because I'm insulted to be called "desperate" or because net neutrality is being called "heavy handed" (which it's not), but because it shows they fundamentally misunderstand their role. If you're in government and the people who you govern are becoming "desperate", that almost certainly means that you're doing a bad job. Your constituents should not be "desperate". Even if you think your constituents are wrong, the idea that their "desperate" should ring alarm bells that you're moving too fast, not communicating properly, or fucking things up in some other way.
But not Ajit Pai. The self-satisfied shmuck is congratulating himself on causing distress among the people he works for.
When this country is finally torn apart in civil war due to assholes like Trump and Pai, make sure you get one more jab in before you're lined up against the wall and shot.
Of course we're desperate. We're desperate to maintain an open and free internet.
Doesn't the law prohibit the legislature from delegating legislative power to the executive branch? I've always been unable to figure put why it was legal for any of the executive regulatory bodies to exist. I'm not very good at grokking law though. Could someone explain it?
refactor the law, its bloated, confusing and unmaintainable.
I just wish I ran the ISP serving Mr. Pai. "Thanks, Ajit! By the way, your bill's going up, and here's the list of tiered stuff you may be interested in."
Net Neutrality is anti-Internet, can never be achieved, can never be enforced, and censorship has only be done by governments and you want the government to control the Internet.
War is Peace
Freedom is Slavery
Ignorance is Strength
#maga
Amazing to smell it coming from the FCC!
You can actually voice your opinion directly from this link: http://gofccyourself.com/
It takes you directly to the FCC website page to voice your opinion.
Click the "Express" link there to get to the relevan case page.
Then, finish filling-out the info and submit.
It is EASY! it is your duty to chime-in!
We, the People, really need to understand and demand what truly serves the People!
(This link was created/maintained by John Oliver's "Last Week Tonight" organization.)
Self-importance and self-indulgence is the root of ALL evil.
Don't they realize that the removal of NN affects them negatively? I mean, why pay lobby money when i can just silence the opposition? I know this is a harsh simplification, but still.....