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'There Will Be a [Senate] Vote' To Reinstate Net Neutrality, Schumer Says (arstechnica.com)

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: U.S. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) said he will force a vote on a bill that would reinstate the Federal Communications Commission's net neutrality rules. Legislation to reverse the repeal "doesn't need the support of the majority leader," Schumer said during a press conference Friday, according to The Hill. "We can bring it to the floor and force a vote. So, there will be a vote to repeal the rule that the FCC passed." The Federal Communications Commission voted to repeal its own net neutrality rules last week, and the repeal will take effect 60 days after it is published in the Federal Register. But Congress can overturn agency actions by invoking the Congressional Review Act (CRA), as it did earlier this year in order to eliminate consumer broadband privacy protections. A successful CRA vote in this case would invalidate the FCC's net neutrality repeal and prevent the FCC from issuing a similar repeal in the future. This would force the FCC to maintain the rules and the related classification of ISPs as common carriers under Title II of the Communications Act. A CRA vote lets Congress "undo regulations with a simple majority," without the possibility of a filibuster, as a Washington Post story said in February. Sen. Ed Markey (D-Mass.) announced a plan to file the CRA resolution last week. "It's in our power to do that and that's the beauty of the CRA rule," Schumer said. "Sometimes we don't like them, when they used it to repeal some of the pro-environmental regulations, but now we can use the CRA to our benefit, and we intend to."

11 of 278 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Good, but will it pass? by CrimsonAvenger · · Score: 5, Informative

    Shame that a Senate vote to fix this isn't sufficient. Make it a law (which requires both House and Senate to vote on the same piece of legislation), and it'll really mean something. 51 Senators can vote on anything they want to, but without legislation in the House as well, it's just grandstanding....

    --

    "I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
  2. Re:Good, but will it pass? by davide+marney · · Score: 3, Informative

    Short answer: No. Why? Because a CRA is a Joint Resolution (that means it has to pass both the House and the Senate), and the President has to sign it into law.

    Source: https://fas.org/sgp/crs/misc/R...

    --
    "We receive as friendly that which agrees with, we resist with dislike that which opposes us" - Faraday
  3. Re:Good news by Green+Mountain+Bot · · Score: 5, Informative

    The legislature enacts LAWS. Federal agencies enacts RULES to enforce those laws. In this case, the FCC was enforcing the Telecom Act of 1934. A federal judge found this to be a lawful application of rules by the FCC in 2015.

  4. Re:Good, but will it pass? by John.Banister · · Score: 3, Informative

    Or they could just pass it with sufficient margin as to make a veto attempt pointless, like they did with the Russia sanctioning legislation. Internet in this country is so shitty already, that "voted for slow lanes" may be a label that almost every federal representative wants to avoid. "It's 'cause they voted for slow lanes," is the world's simplest conspiracy theory every time a voter's connection makes them wait.

  5. Re:Good, but will it pass? by Obfuscant · · Score: 3, Informative

    Because it was the FCC's job, which the FCC just chose to stop doing.

    Except for the fact that congress told the FCC not to do it, you're right. From this: "Back in the 1990s, key Democratic senators insisted Congress never intended Title II for broadband." So the people who wrote the laws said that Title II wasn't supposed to be applied to broadband.

    That's why having the FCC decide to do it that way is the wrong way to do it. Congress needs to pass an explicit law. Not just a law telling the FCC to go back to the way they weren't supposed to be doing it, a law that does it the right way. Schumer is wasting everyone's time playing political football instead of trying to actually solve a problem.

  6. Re:Republicans will vote as a bloc by PopeRatzo · · Score: 3, Informative

    You have a common defense against corporations. It's called "the free market."

    There is no such thing as a "free market". Free markets do not exist in nature. Markets are only created where there is sufficient government.

    --
    You are welcome on my lawn.
  7. Re:Republicans will vote as a bloc by PopeRatzo · · Score: 3, Informative

    Net neutrality rules increases government control of the internet.

    No, they don't. There is nothing in net neutrality rules that would affect who or what can connect to the internet. Once again, I guess I have to post a simple, straightforward definition of net neutrality:

    https://www.eff.org/issues/net...

    --
    You are welcome on my lawn.
  8. Re: From whence came the Internet ... by thomst · · Score: 5, Informative

    IMightB inquired:

    Do people not remember the origin of "The Internet"? It started as a Defense Project to ensure communications in the event of a nuclear war... They opened it up to universities, and then to the public. Back then they did a fairly decent job of being hand-off. It wasn't until they turned over to private corps, that it started to go downhill.

    As it turns out, that's a common belief - and it's wrong.

    While it's true that a 1962 RAND Corporation white paper authored by Paul Baran theorized that a packet-switched data network could allow military communications to survive a general nuclear war, that was entirely a thought experiment. The Department of Defense filed it away and largely forgot about it.

    It wasn't until 1965, after accepting a position at DARPA, that an electrical engineer named Robert W. Taylor first got the idea for what would eventually become first the DARPAnet, then the ARPAnet, and finally the Internet.

    As a condition of the DARPA grants that helped fund their experiments, research teams at three different major research centers were required to install remote terminals at DARPA for their - entirely separate and self-contained - multi-user mainframe systems. These were the first computers to operate interactively, rather than in what mainframers call "batch mode", and support multiple, concurrent user sessions via dumb terminals with line printers as their "displays". One of Taylor's assignments was to monitor and liase with the scientists who built and ran this trio of individual experimental systems, and he quickly noticed that something very like what we would think of as newsgroups spontaneously appeared on all three systems. (That is to say that computer scientists who had accounts on all three, separate, not interconnected in any way systems had each decided that something very much like a computer BBS or Usenet-style messaging system would be a useful addition, and had - again, independently - hacked such a tool together for the users of each of these systems to communicate with each other in a way that had some degree of persistence and which was accessible to the entire user community of that particular machine.)

    The fact that users on each system had more-or-less-simultaneously decided such a tool was desireable, and had developed code to create it - and we're talking three different sets of code here - without ever communicating with the other two teams greatly interested and excited Taylor. He immediately wondered what would happen if all three systems were physically connected together in a way that would allow their users to communicate not only with each other, but with users on the other two systems, as well. He took that idea to his supervisor, one Charles Herzfeld, who thought it might have merit. Herszfeld asked Taylor to draw up a formal proposal, and committed, sight unseen, to fund it to the tune of a million dollars (which was real money in 1965).

    So Taylor wrote a proposal, and with a million bucks to spend on it approached the managers of the three, separate multiuser systems with his idea to interconnect their systems. All three turned him down flat.

    Robert W. Taylor was from Texas, where they grow 'em stubborn, so he persisted in pitching his idea to the three managers of different, multiuser mainframe systems, despite their continued objections that each saw no merit in his proposal, and each considered it a potentially major distraction from the purposes for which each of their disparate systems had been created. Eventually, over the course of time, he wore them down to the point where he got two of them to agree to at least test the idea. It took nearly two years from then before all the ducks were duly aligned, the necessary equipment designed and built, and the long-distance, dedicated telephone lines contracted for.

    At 22:30 hours on October 29, 1969, the first two nodes of what was dub

    --
    Check out my novel.
  9. Re:Trump approval rating by Rakarra · · Score: 2, Informative

    Economy is going great

    "Great." The economy was also going "great" before the election, and none of the problems that existed then have really been solved now.

    stock market is soaring

    It was soaring well before the election. It's why Donald Trump mentioned as a candidate that the stock market was a bubble, that you couldn't trust its then-18,000 number. It was hitting record highs under Obama's watch, but Trump poh-pohed that, saying the economy was a disaster. He said this in Dec 2015, he said it in Apr 2016. In Sep 2016, he said "The only thing that is strong is the artificial stock market." Strange how once he got into office and the stock market continued its upwards trajectory that he's crowing about the numbers and incorrectly claiming that the mainstream media never mentions it.

    ISIS is defeated

    You present this as if this was a 180 from what was happening under the previous administration.
    The timeline of ISIS: They made rapid gains since their 2013 founding, peaking with the Caliphate establishment in mid-2014. At Baghdad's request, US planes start striking ISIS, and Obama announced a coalition to strike back against ISIS.
    Jan 2015: ISIS loses several Syrian border towns as the coalition pushes inward.
    Apr 2015: ISIS loses Tikrit, Iraq.
    Nov 2015: ISIS loses Sinjar province in Iraq.
    Feb 2016: ISIS loses Ramadi, capital of Anbar.
    Jun 2016: ISIS loses Fallujah after holding it for 2.5 years.
    Aug 2016: ISIS loses Mambij.
    Oct 2016: ISIS loses Dabiq, the town that they wanted to keep most of all. This is place they fervently believed would be the location of an apocalyptic battle, heralding end times.
    Nov 2016: The SDF starts chipping away at the ISIS capital in Syria, Raqqa.
    Oct 2016 - Feb 2017: ISIS loses Mosul, bit by bit. The last remnants are driven out by July.
    Oct 2016 - April 2017: After losses of territory, ISIS conducts series of suicide attacks.
    Jun 2017: Encirclement of Raqqa complete.
    Oct 2017: SDF declares victory in Raqqa.

    How much of the above was Trump? How much of that happened before he ever took office?

  10. Re:Good, but will it pass? by kenh · · Score: 1, Informative

    51 Senators can vote on anything they want to, but without legislation in the House as well, it's just grandstanding....

    Just a reminder, Schumer only has 48 Senators that caucus with him, he is the Minority Leader.

    --
    Ken
  11. Re:Republicans will vote as a bloc by currently_awake · · Score: 1, Informative

    Running common infrastructure is exactly what government was designed for. Having the Government run the internet, just like they run the roads and highways, is a logical choice.