Slashdot Mirror
The Trump Administration Just Voted To Repeal the US Government's Net Neutrality Rules (recode.net)
The Federal Communications Commission voted on Thursday to dismantle landmark rules regulating the businesses that connect consumers to the internet, granting broadband companies power to potentially reshape Americans' online experiences. The agency scrapped so-called net neutrality regulations that prohibited broadband providers from blocking websites or charging for higher-quality service or certain content. The federal government will also no longer regulate high-speed internet delivery as if it were a utility, like phone services. From a report: Under the leadership of Chairman Ajit Pai -- and with only the backing of the agency's Republican members -- the repeal newly frees telecom companies from federal regulation, unravels a signature accomplishment of the Obama administration and shifts the responsibility of overseeing the web to another federal agency that some critics see as too weak to be effective. In practice, it means the U.S. government no longer will have rules on its books that require internet providers to treat all web traffic equally. The likes of AT&T and Verizon will be limited in some ways -- they can face penalties if they try to undermine their rivals, for example -- but they won't be subject to preemptive, bright-line restrictions on how they manage their networks. Meanwhile, the FCC's repeal will open the door for broadband providers to charge third parties, like tech giants, for faster delivery of their web content.
No one is crying for Facebook and Google. It's a much bigger threat to small businesses than to the tech giants.
This comment was blocked due to non-payment for /. access -Comcast
To be clear:
The two Democrats on the FCC — Commissioners Mignon Clyburn and Jessica Rosenworcel — voted to keep the rules in place.
And who appointed Ajit Pai? Trump. He is part of the Trump administration.
Nobody is crying for Netflix, either. This is about small businesses who won't have such an easy time paying the fees that ISPs could charge. It's a completely unnecessary barrier to entry that prevents competition and innovation.
That's like saying the DOJ is "separate". Technically yes but Trump could have prevented this, except in reality he wanted net neutrality repealed.
Gee, I wonder who appoints FCC commissioners? Guess we'll never know!
Linux, you magnificent bastard, I read the fucking manual!
Netflix pays for their internet access just like everybody else, you numbnut.
Hillary had the same exact plan.
Citation for that? She is on the record supporting net neutrality, possibly going even further than the FCC has so far.
You wanna see what FCC chairman Ajit Pai thinks of you? Here is a video he posted yesterday to tell you why you should not worry about losing Net Neutrality.; He posted it on the right-wing website Daily Caller. (for real, you should watch this 1.5 minute video from Trump's FCC chairman, as he reveals he has no idea what Net Neutrality is, and also that he is a massive fuckwit.)
https://youtu.be/JeKK637IYAg
He's telling you all the things you'll still be able to do on the Internet after he signs over control to Comcast. Oh, and by the way, in the part of the video where he does the "Harlem Shake", one of the girls he's dancing with is a blogger who promoted the "Pizzagate" pedophilia controversy.
https://gizmodo.com/ajit-pai-t...
http://www.slate.com/blogs/fut...
You are welcome on my lawn.
Wait a second. Netflix doesn't pay for their own internet access?
See I see it as this, I pay for a connection to the internet, Netflix pays for a connection to the internet. Nobody else should be charging either of us extra to talk to each other as fast as any other website on the internet.
Yeah all on party lines with a FCC chief in charge appointed by Trump. You can't coat this any other way if you're a Trump supporter. Republicans will vote for monopolists over the people every time and are for corruption and big money. The democrats all voted against it.
http://saveie6.com/
It is mind boggling that you have government control on one side by granting potentially abusive monopolies, and at the same time you remove any consumer protective regulation so that these monopolies can be as abusive as they want... Sure, the US has a decent GDP/capita, but that really is no excuse to have up to 10x the telco cost compared to other developed countries (and/or depending the location get stuck with circa 2000 internet speeds).
Well, OK, the fact that it is happening is not mind-boggling - just follow the money... The lack of realization/resistance from the people is the stranger and scarier aspect.
Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent. Polar Scope Align for iOS
If you voted for a candidate solely because the other side made you feel butthurt, who's the real snowflake?
This country would be much better off if more people voted with their brain, rather than their ego.
---
DRM is like antifreeze, to the MPAA/RIAA it's sweet, to the consumers it's poison.
Ok so you have no evidence and are just talking out of your ass, glad we settled that.
To be clear:
The two Democrats on the FCC — Commissioners Mignon Clyburn and Jessica Rosenworcel — voted to keep the rules in place.
And who appointed Ajit Pai? Trump. He is part of the Trump administration.
To be clear, Corporations appointed him.
Sick and tired of reminding people who the government ultimately answers to. Enough of the fucking ignorance that assumes Trump is pulling the strings. And the only ones to blame here are the American people who continue to allow this kind of corruption because they don't give a shit enough to care.
If it is such a non-issue, why would they bother reversing such a law? And why do big ISP put money into bribing (lobbying) for such a change?
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
This isn't theoretical at all. That's disingenuous. There are plenty of examples of ISPs attempting to engage in behavior that was prohibited by NN rules. Those rules are now gone.
This allows ISPs to block content as they see fit. Large ISPs like Comcast have already attempted to do this, though the NN rules did not allow that. Ajit Pai has said he believes Comcast should have the ability to block content or entire protocols. ISPs have engaged in zero rating services or content. For example, Verizon allows businesses to pay for their content to be zero rated. Comcast implemented their own streaming video service that didn't count against their data caps. None of this is theoretical at all.
This policy was pushed through in an extremely corrupt manner. Ajit Pai has made numerous false and misleading statements about NN. Many comments were submitted on behalf of individuals without their consent, people who aren't American citizens, people who are dead, or even people who don't exist at all. Most of the fraudulent comments were opposed to NN rules. The FCC has been far less than transparent in investigating this matter. They've selectively disregarded comments based on standards such as the legal language of the comments that weren't made known to the public during the commenting period. The process was rushed through despite the many objections I just listed. It was an extremely corrupt process by an extremely corrupt administration. If eliminating the NN rules isn't harmful, there would be no need for the process to be opaque, for Pai to make dishonest statements, and to rush the process.
"And who appointed Ajit Pai? Trump. He is part of the Trump administration."
Just to be clear, he was appointed to the commission by Obama in 2012. But Trump appointed him to the position of chairman in 2017.
(And i'd love to see some discussion as to why Obama chose make that first appointment, but it's kind of secondary at this point)
This Space Intentionally Left Blank
(And i'd love to see some discussion as to why Obama chose make that first appointment, but it's kind of secondary at this point)
That's easy. He had to slap two republicans on the council anyway, I don't think he cared who they were as long as McConnell wasn't going to make a big fuss.
Linux, you magnificent bastard, I read the fucking manual!
For the first 5 years, yes and Trump renewed his appointment for another 5 years. He was part of Obama's administration now he is Trump's administration. It is and was Trump's administration who repealed NN. It was Obama's administration who installed NN.
Just like if you were working for Pepsi, if Coke purchased them, you are no longer working for Pepsi, you are employed by Coke. This is no different. Ajit, is working for Trump, not Obama.
I personally do not think much will change, if anything... there is little practical downside to the choice of the FCC, and so much fear mongering from the other side of things that it greatly strains credulity.
In the next 1-2 years? Sure. There's no way they're going to go full corporate dictator at the outset. The first thing they'll do is start negotiating with the big content providers, while fending off the inevitable legal challenges. They'll also need to go full throttle on getting friendly Congresspeople (mostly Rs) reelected next year.
After that? I think we can expect to see a lot more zero rating packages and more investment in their own content services. Data caps will be pushed down to make these services and zero rating more attractive. Further down the line, they'll be extending their "partnerships" with more and more edge providers.
Eventually, they'll have enough deals that cover just enough of what people use that they can start throttling down anything else while most people will neither care nor notice. It may not happen in a year or two, but watch for *this* to happen. It won't at the outset.
You really think they've been pushing and spending this much because they *don't* expect to maximize their revenue and control?
It's customary for the FCC's five member panel to include two members from the opposition party. Mitch McConnell recommended Pai to Obama to be one of the two Republican commissioners.
Not reallt, this will only affect US consumers. Luckily, Internet will hardly notice.
839*929
Netflix pays for internet access, not for a connection to a third party. Just like you pay Comcast for internet access, not just for access to Comcast's WAN. There is enough bandwidth on Netflix's side to reach all transit providers without congestion. The amount of traffic that can pass from the Tier 1 backbone operators (transit providers) into Comcast's WAN is a matter of negotiation between Comcast and the backbone operators. Comcast is not buying enough of that access to satisfy the contracts it has with its customers, who paid for internet access, not Comcast access.
The above explanation of the way every bit of Internet traffic is already paid for should be sufficient, but just to prove that Comcast really has no leg to stand on with that argument, here's more: Netflix will, at their own cost, provide servers and direct peering connections to any medium and large ISP, to cut the transit providers out and reduce the cost to themselves and the ISPs. They don't have to do that. Comcast thinks it should be paid for direct access to the Comcast network. Fine, then they should pay the transit providers. They took their customers' money for internet access, and they need to provide it.
But isn't buying enough transit to carry the data that Comcast's customers paid to access expensive? No, it's ridiculously cheap: You can buy 10Gbps unfettered bandwidth (transit to and from the whole internet) at $1500/month. That's $15 for 100Mbps, with a 1:1 contention ratio. Typical contention ratios for business connections are 1:10, for consumer connections 1:50. That means Comcast would have to pay between $0.30 and $1.50 to actually provide the internet access that Comcast's customers already pay for, but they want to get paid by both sides, so they make up these stories about expensive bandwidth and how content providers get a free ride. They're holding their captive customers hostage to extort money.
Hi. I'm Sarten-X. It's a big deal to me.
I've been working on a silly little web project, that someday I hope to turn into an income-generating company.
Unfortunately, my project relies on having fairly snappy response times (mostly low bandwidth/low latency, but occasionally having bursts of high bandwidth usage) for a good user experience. Without neutrality, I can't expect that any more. Traffic to and from my tiny little project will be queued behind the high-definition stream for Netflix, because I can't afford to pay Comcast (or Spectrum, or Verizon, or AT&T, or whoever else owns the customers) the millions of dollars in fees to get fast-lane prioritization.
Yes, it's speculation. It's also history, because I lived through the last round of these problems. I remember working with ISPs in the 90s and 2000s to figure out why certain traffic was unusually slow... sure enough, it's because that particular service had been deemed "low-priority" and was throttled. Fortunately at the time I had a big enough team of corporate lawyers that we could force a bit more throughput from the small ISP, but that's not usually the case today.
The reality is that probably 90% of Americans won't notice a difference. Their Netflix subscription might cost a few cents more, or their telecom stock value might get a small boost, but that's about it. The real loss is in potential. The next big Internet-based success might just be someone's silly little project today, and it'll likely never be able to grow because of the arbitrary limits placed by ISPs.
No, it's not just about torrents. It's about waiting for a product demo video to buffer, or waiting for an AJAX call to update a GUI, or waiting for a site's style sheet to properly load. It's about my user experience (and thus my project's success) being heavily dependent on how much extra money I pay to which ISPs, rather than how good my actual product is.
Yes, it's a big deal.
You do not have a moral or legal right to do absolutely anything you want.
Well, then the Bush Tax cuts and the Patriot Act are Obama's because he renewed them.
To be fair though, Trump appointed him Chairman... presumably for a reason.
He was appointed to the FCC by Obama because Obama was required to appoint a certain number of Republicans.
Trump made Ajit Pai chairman of the FCC. In fact, it was one of the very first things he did after getting sworn in, and Trump did it with an explicit understanding that the Net Neutrality rules would be thrown out by Ajit Pai's FCC.
http://www.businessinsider.com...
You are welcome on my lawn.
Trump gets a hard-on every time he gets to undo anything Obama managed to accomplish during his presidency.
Also, the two big cable companies that have divided and monopolized the US market get to make more money for crappy service! What's wrong with that?
Just wanted to add that there's evidence Comcast did this on purpose in order to put Netflix in a bind. (Customers have alternative choices with Netflix, but not as many with Comcast.) They wanted to force Netflix to either agree to their demands to have their service unusable. Basically, mafia-style "this is a nice store you've got here, it'd be a shame if something happened to it" tactics from an ISP that holds a monopoly in many areas.
And now these tactics are legal again.
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
I believe he actually went to McConnell and McConnell recommended Ajit. Obama couldn't just put all Democrats on the panel any more than Trump could put all Republicans. So Obama used McConnell's recommendation knowing that his Democrat majority would overrule Ajit. Unfortunately, then Trump elevated Ajit to chairman and Ajit immediately put Net Neutrality in front of the firing squad.
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
Conservatives also claimed that Obama was born in Kenya and there's a secret pedophilia ring under a pizza parlor.
I wouldn't put much stock in what conservatives claim.
You are welcome on my lawn.
No, the founding principle of "the internet" was "let's make sure our missile research people in the DoD can get data moved around between them and some universities who are working on our strategic deterrent against the soviets."
Pretty much everything else has been private companies investing billions of dollars to get their own networks to talk to other people's networks. There is no "the internet" anyway. Just a lot of individual networks with a wide range of agreements between private parties who carry traffic across each others' infrastructure at great expense to the people who own them. Those peering arrangements are not some mandatory unicorn utopia of equality of service across all networks. Never has been.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
The ISP's have no reason to censor
Sorry, are you seriously trying to say that Comcast, Time Warner, etc (The majority of ISPs are also TV providers) have no reason at all to want to censor Netflix, Amazon Video, Hulu? They have no reason to try and get people to switch back (or slow down) people from getting out from under their $250+ cable bills?
Wow.
So I see a lot of negativity about this, even though in the past with no NN rules almost nothing happened, and when it did was shut down quickly (like torrent throttling).
You are mistaken. There's a rich history of actual and intended net neutrality violations in the past before the regulations went into effect. Unfortunately the top link returned by a search on this currently offline, but here is some info pasted from this reddit thread:
There's nothing hypothetical about what ISPs will do when net neutrality is eliminated. I'm going to steal a comment previously posted by /u/Skrattybones and repost here:
2005 - Madison River Communications was blocking VOIP services. The FCC put a stop to it.
2005 - Comcast was denying access to p2p services without notifying customers.
2007-2009 - AT&T was having Skype and other VOIPs blocked because they didn't like there was competition for their cellphones. 2011 - MetroPCS tried to block all streaming except youtube. (edit: they actually sued the FCC over this)
2011-2013, AT&T, Sprint, and Verizon were blocking access to Google Wallet because it competed with their bullshit. edit: this one happened literally months after the trio were busted collaborating with Google to block apps from the android marketplace
2012, Verizon was demanding google block tethering apps on android because it let owners avoid their $20 tethering fee. This was despite guaranteeing they wouldn't do that as part of a winning bid on an airwaves auction. (edit: they were fined $1.25million over this)
2012, AT&T - tried to block access to FaceTime unless customers paid more money.
2013, Verizon literally stated that the only thing stopping them from favoring some content providers over other providers were the net neutrality rules in place.
And...
2005, AT&T suggested giving preferential treatment to some web giants in exchange for money, starting the whole thing.
2014, Verizon and Comcast throttled Netflix data and held those customers hostage to a huge bribe from Netflix.
Also, links for everything you just said.
Madison River Communications: https://www.cnet.com/news/telc...
Comcast hates pirates: https://www.lexology.com/libra... (article from '08)
AT&T VOIP hostage: https://www.wired.com/2009/10/...
Google wallet hostage: http://money.cnn.com/2011/12/0...
Verizon hates tethering apps: https://www.wired.com/2011/06/...
AT&T claimed blocking facetime wasn't a net neutrality issue: http://money.cnn.com/2012/08/2...
"Verizon lawyer Helgi Walker made the companyâ(TM)s intentions all too clear, saying the company wants to prioritize those websites and services that are willing to shell out for better access.": https://www.savetheinternet.co...
Also, the thing to realize is that violations of net neutrality are not likely to be reflected on a general speed test, or necessarily in the fees the ISPs charge. It's much more likely that they will violate it by charging the content providers, like they have already done with Netflix. It will be insidious, and most people will not notice unless they are watching very closely. The effects will like
Well, I mean, they kind of were, weren't they? At least in the case of the Patriot Act, which he used and defended to a greater extent than W...
And unless any big surprises happen, they're now Trumps (or at least soon will be).
Somehow, even with recent national events, I'm still surprised at conservative's ability to blame everything bad on Obama and democrats.
I probably shouldn't be angry that net neutrality is going away, I should really just be surprised it managed to last this long if nerds on slashdot are unable to work out how we got here.
JFC. Generations of Americans who are still breathing helped fight off Nazis AND the Japanese empire simultaneously, won voting rights, landed on the moon, held off nuclear Armageddon, and invented the internet, all of which is harder than establishing reasonable regulations on the internet.
Two days ago, ALABAMA voted in a pro-choice democrat.
You're suggesting we can't stand against a bunch of douche-bag MBAs, corrupt politicians, and lobbyists? Go fuck a rusty railroad spike, you dumb coward. This is fucking easy. You don't need to elect perfect saints in order to make progress on net neutrality or legal bribery, just vote for people who talk about those issues specifically rather than bleat about the bible or terrorism and this solves itself.
If you can't bring yourself to do that, move to another shit-hole country or commit suicide so you're not dead weight in the next census and aren't wasting resources.
Don't worry. Already they're trying to pretend that it's all Obama's fault.