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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."
Now we find out exactly how unified the GOP is. Spoiler: They're not unified at all. If it's a simple majority I think Ajit Pai is going to have his ass handed to him by Congress, and rightly so.
Just need a simple majority. Doug Jones will be in the Senate, they can't likely wheel McCain's corpse in for a vote, and Collins (R) supports Net Neutrality. Couple this with only 16% of Americans and ignorant enough to believe repealing NN is somehow a good thing for them, the Senators that have a fight on their hands for re-election are going to do whatever they can to get re-elected, even if it means voting to kill off the FCC vote. BTW, fuck Ajit Pai.
Fuck Ajit Pai
The proper way to implement significant policy changes is to change the law.
Because what's done via a pen and a phone are just are properly undone by a pen and a phone.
A big part of the FCC's action was based on a belief that unelected FCC commissioners should not be writing regulations that supercede state control and FTC protections.
Laws passed by our elected representatives in Congress are a completely different story than FCC regulations. It is perfectly possible to support a law mandating net neutrality and also support Pai withdrawing the FCC-level mandate.
Of course, using the CRA to reinstate net neutrality is just plain stupid, because it leaves the unelected FCC in control of the regulations. A CRA resolution would stop the FCC from changing the common-carrier classification, but it would leave the doors wide open to totally changing the meaning of "net neutrality". That is, you could have your net neutrality and find out it only applies to content under the creative control of the ISPs (like Fairness Doctrine) or even more egregious, has something to do with connections of neutral wires to lightning arrestors. To anyone who actually thinks the net neutrality repeal is about pleasing the big corporations rather than federal-state and FCC-FTC balancing, handing the reins back to the same three FCC punks sounds like the worst possible outcome.
Personally, I think that Pai's "net neutrality repeal" which actually is a common carrier reclassification that takes the FCC out of the picture, together with state or municipal regulation, is the correct answer. But I'm far less upset by the possibility of Congress passing an actual law defining net neutrality compared to the "save net neutrality but only until the composition of the FCC board changes again" side that has been making such a big fuss.
Democrats REALLY want the Federal Government to gain control of the Internet.
I am a progressive. I do not want the government to control the internet, and I sure don't want the corporations with government granted monopolies to control it either.
Here's a thought for you: If you don't want the government to step in here, then pass "One Touch Make Ready" and strike down the laws the telecoms got enacted to prevent cities and counties to establish co-ops for internet. They don't have to allow tv, just internet. That would restore open market freedoms and elemenate the telecom monopolies.
Necessity is the plea for every infringement of human freedom. It is the argument of tyrants; it is the creed of slaves.
Step back and think about this on a purely tactical level.
If the measure passes, the Democrats will be given credit even if every single Republican voted for it.
If the measure loses, the situation for the Republicans is not any different than it was today since it's something almost no-one will every know about, and certainly very few voters will care about way off in November.
Republicans voting for this can only lose, there is literally nothing to gain.
Some may still do so though, so it may pass. Not sure what the repercussions are of passing something that denies the FCC has the ability to choose what to do, but if you actually think about things long term it seems like a super-bad precedent to set in terms of choices other agencies make being overridden in similar ways.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
That, and to demonstrate the the GOP is not interested in Net Neutrality in any form. The idea that political theater has no value is an odd one - it demonstrates where the parties differ.
If it's a simple majority I think Ajit Pai is going to have his ass handed to him by Congress, and rightly so.
Even if the Senate Dems were to vote in lockstep, which is less than clear, this would have to pass in the House as well, then survive a presidential veto. That's not going to happen, and TFA says as much. This is nothing but political posturing on Schumer's part.
It might very well pass, both House and president.
The main problem with the existing legislation was legal, not technical. It was passed in opposition to Congress' explicit instructions.
NN is a good idea, when viewed on its technical merits, and if a law gets passed that's a good thing.
Ajit Pai won't be getting "his ass handed to him", he'll be getting explicit direction from congress which is the correct way to do this.
Then it's a good thing that Net Neutrality rules don't put the government in control of the internet.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Even the most rabid libertarian agrees that government is necessary for the common defense. In this case, we need a common defense against corporations. Regulations are necessary to prevent free market abuse, and anyone who thinks zero regulation makes the free market work best doesn't know very much about about history.
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.
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.
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.
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.
And the only "free market" is one that is open for buyers and sellers to freely enter to exchange money for goods and services. The only way to maintain openness is through a set of rules that are constantly and evenly enforced. There's a term for consistent and evenly enforced rules.
Regulation.