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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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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. . . .
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! --
So start a competing company.
There are laws against that. Laws that corrupt politicians got a lot of money for and that were written by the lawyers of incumbent telecom companies. You won't get access to utility poles built with taxpayer money. You won't get permissions to put up your own poles. Cities are prohibited from building their own infrastructure.
Net neutrality was a tool the FCC could leverage effectively to limit the price gouging and extortion the companies could engage in after corrupting state and federal politicians. Going after the corruption would have been better but clearly outside the reach of the FCC. Pai has been sent to make corruption great again, and he'll get a highly paying alibi job once he is finished with giving corruption back the leverage that it was intended to yield and couldn't because the FCC was angling for power effective for curbing the effects of corruption.
"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.
can't tell if your shilling or not but obviously when you tried to get that website off the ground, you would have to enter into content agreements with possibly a handful of different ISPs in order to avoid for instance, constant buffering (which translates into no one using your site, because ISPs slowed it down so much that it sucks). The default would be the slow lane, and you would have to pay to get "upgraded". So you wouldn't be able to "start the new youtube" because you would need a few million to even try. Thus raising the barrier to entry on what used to be "any idiot with an internet connection and free web server software".
As i understand it, the telco situation in the USA is monopolies. Content is hardly a monopoly. Video sharing sites alone number in the tens or hundreds. For some americans, as i understand it, they only have the choice of 1-2 ISPs. So im not really worried about google being a monopoly as i personally use duck duck go daily
As a potential lottery winner, I totally support tax cuts for the wealthy
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.
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.
We need to redirect our efforts elsewhere
I do believe that you are correct. I think we can conclude that pressuring the FCC is a lost cause. At least until a new administration is elected in 2020. Putting pressure on congress to do the right thing is one option we have.
Wait, Wait. I know what some of you are thinking. Congress doing the right thing. Well I was reading a story the other day where a French scientist is working on creating a avian sus scrofa domesticus. So it could happen.
But another option that we have to take into account is we can put direct pressure on isp's. Once we become aware of a isp being a problem let them know our displeasure. Refusing to pay bills and just plan old boycotting their services are two options.
I read at +2. If your post doesn't reach that level I will not see or respond to it.
All consumers in the US also have a choice of one and only one internet. Net neutrality absolutely affects the internet backbone. And the backbone is where the damage is going to happen. We have tons of ISPs, not just a few, so if Netflix is going to be throttled then it will be by the backbone owners.
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.