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Internal FCC Report Shows Republican Net Neutrality Narrative Is False (vice.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: A core Republican talking point during the net neutrality battle was that, in 2015, President Obama led a government takeover of the internet, and Obama illegally bullied the independent Federal Communications Commission into adopting the rules. In this version of the story, Ajit Pai's rollback of those rules Thursday is a return to the good old days, before the FCC was forced to adopt rules it never wanted in the first place. But internal FCC documents obtained by Motherboard using a Freedom of Information Act request show that the independent, nonpartisan FCC Office of Inspector General -- acting on orders from Congressional Republicans -- investigated the claim that Obama interfered with the FCC's net neutrality process and found it was nonsense. This Republican narrative of net neutrality as an Obama-led takeover of the internet, then, was wholly refuted by an independent investigation and its findings were not made public prior to Thursday's vote.
Using a Freedom of Information Act request, Motherboard obtained a summary of the Inspector General's report, which has not been released publicly and is marked "Official Use Only, Law Enforcement Sensitive Information." After reviewing more than 600,000 emails, the independent office found that there was no collusion between the White House and the FCC: "We found no evidence of secret deals, promises, or threats from anyone outside the Commission, nor any evidence of any other improper use of power to influence the FCC decision-making process." [...] Since 2014, Republicans have pointed to net neutrality as an idea primarily promoted by President Obama, and have made it another in a long line of regulations and laws that they have sought to repeal now that Donald Trump is president. Prior to this false narrative, though, net neutrality was a bipartisan issue; the first net neutrality rules were put in place under President George W. Bush, and many Republicans worked on the 2015 rules that were just dismantled. What happened, then, is that Republicans sold the public a narrative that wasn't true, then used that narrative to repeal the regulations that protect the internet.
Using a Freedom of Information Act request, Motherboard obtained a summary of the Inspector General's report, which has not been released publicly and is marked "Official Use Only, Law Enforcement Sensitive Information." After reviewing more than 600,000 emails, the independent office found that there was no collusion between the White House and the FCC: "We found no evidence of secret deals, promises, or threats from anyone outside the Commission, nor any evidence of any other improper use of power to influence the FCC decision-making process." [...] Since 2014, Republicans have pointed to net neutrality as an idea primarily promoted by President Obama, and have made it another in a long line of regulations and laws that they have sought to repeal now that Donald Trump is president. Prior to this false narrative, though, net neutrality was a bipartisan issue; the first net neutrality rules were put in place under President George W. Bush, and many Republicans worked on the 2015 rules that were just dismantled. What happened, then, is that Republicans sold the public a narrative that wasn't true, then used that narrative to repeal the regulations that protect the internet.
You must be joking! That is unpossible!
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Repubs playbook in the tl;dr edition.
I am unsure what rattles me more... that a politician would lie or that a republican would lie about the Obama administration...
No, you're not going to find evidence of "collusion" between the White House and the FCC, and no, that does not contradict the claim that the Obama administration got the FCC to pass net neutrality. Net neutrality was a huge goal of the Obama administration and a very big political win for them. It IS possible, you know, for like-minded people to work independently towards a common goal. I've heard that happens from time to time.
And, by the way, can we save everyone a huge amount of time and wasted expense and just assume that we won't find any evidence of "collusion" between this White House and the hacking of the DNC email servers or the purchase of Facebook advertisements? And, can we also just admit that like-minded people can be working independently towards a common goal in THIS instance, too?
"We receive as friendly that which agrees with, we resist with dislike that which opposes us" - Faraday
Both major US parties use the same siren song. On the right: "That's what Obama wanted!" On the left: That's what Trump is doing!"
The power brokers now have the ability to galvanize a large portion of the population with a few key buzzwords. It's a lot more work to remain undecided.
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
A more common point that I see is that we didn't have net neutrality until 2015. Not only was the net effectively neutral (most of the time) prior to that, the dial-up internet of the dotcom era was regulated similarly, and even had leasing requirements that meant multiple options and some real semblance of competition. The change from that regime happened with cable and DSL, which were less regulated, but still neutral, until the actions from ISPs that prompted the 2015 rules out of necessity.
So, the actual timeline was: Neutral internet->Deregulated broadband->Dickish ISP behavior->Fixing dickish ISP behavior by re-regulating->Re-deregulating broadband.
This is my signature. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
In 298 days, President Trump has made 1,628 false and misleading claims
While I would actually agree with you, this would probably just drive these companies out of the US. With nothing accomplished aside of jobs in the US being lost.
The main difference is that I cannot choose to use an ISP in, say, Norway, where there are rather cheap and fast internet connections available. On the other hand, it's trivial for Facebook, Twitter and Instagram to shut down their US business and move to any country offering them to do business as they please because on the internet it simply does not matter where your server is located.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
In the comments section of his FCC blog post about giving thanks.
Sdelat' Ameriku velikoy Snova!
please correct
If you are called an ISP then you should only be responsible for the level 1-3. The hire levels 4-7 are outside of the domain, and in general do not require the same level of infrastructure support. Slashdot can moderate down or even delete my comment so it isn't read, even if my comment was legal. Because I am able to post my view in an other forum, or in general being able make my own site relatively inexpensively.
Today for the ISP we are limited in choices, hence why Net Neutrality is important. In my area I have 3 options, Cable (Spectrum) and Cell Wireless (AT&T and Verizon). In my home Cell coverage is spotty so I only have one real option. All three of these ISP sources have interests in additional services that compete against other services which do not own the infrastructure to be an ISP, and many of the ones who can may not be able to get past the local monopolies to implement.
If I don't like Facebook, Google or Slashdot. I can use an other service. If I don't like my ISP well I am kinda stuck, if my ISP says I shouldn't use a service then I may not be able to do so.
That is the real danger. At the moment the ISP are saying they are not planning on blocking anything, or throttling down anything. But they put in a lot of political capital to get this removed... Which make me wonder why the effort if they are not planning to do something.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
I've mentioned this earlier. the Net Neutrality situation is only affecting the physical connection aspect by design. since the physical connection is something that is a natural monopoly and should be regulated like a public utility (water, electricity). the rest of it is content.
Moore was not convicted of anything
That is true but then neither was Hillary Clinton but that has not stopped conservative pundits from dragging her into every conversation about the incompetence, hypocrisy and corruption of their leaders and confidently asserting that she is guilty of a long list of crimes as established fact. So you can think of Roy Moore as the liberal's Hillary Clinton, except while Hillary is merely corrupt Roy Moore is also way, way, way more creepy than she could ever hope to be.
What I acknowledge is what I can see, that is every time someone tries to create competition for the entrenched ISPs you can see them go to their government hos and buy some new laws to ensure that competition does not see the light of day.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
But absence of proof is not proof of absence.
The OIG report didn't debunk the suspicion that Obama had undue influence on the FCC's processes. They simply didn't come across any proof of it in the email records kept by the FCC. They did, though, restate that Wheeler and the president had had conversations about topics like this.
So it still leaves unexplained the FCC's decision to make such a sudden break with longstanding, bipartisan, and legal consensus that the Internet shouldn't be regulated like this.
Since you are already modded up to 5, I'll reply in verbal support. The OSI stack is more of an abstraction after the first 3.5 layers -- the top three layers are all about the software that uses the network, not the network per se, and honestly I think that the idea of applying "net neutrality" to the application, presentation, and session layers is an absurdity as they have never really been a "networking" issue but more a matter of choice of software design at the two ends of the connection. For example, one way of interpreting "neutrality" would be a requirement that the designers of internet-based games write their games to be playable on any top level windowing system in all operating systems -- something like under Steam on steroids. If I wrote a simple game intended to run only under Linux and function only using one particular graphics stack and library set AND wrote it to run over an ISP-run network, I personally could be held in violation of a 7 layer net neutrality law. Imagine Apple, Microsoft, Linux, BSD, OS/2 all being forced by "net neutrality" to make their presentation layers interoperable. A nightmare, impossible to enforce, and stupid -- it would actually inhibit competition, not support it.
What the poster INTENDED, I think, is that the ISP (which is really the NN rules are all about, because they ARE granted a de facto near-monopoly over network connection in many if not most locales -- very few places have a choice of (say) four or five ISPs all with their own wires, and even those places are forced to move packets over common backbones belonging to many different companies (do a traceroute to a dozen distant places or services that you might use if you don't believe me) -- not differentiate their treatment of the bottom 3-4 layers on the basis of the toplevel application being run, but applying NN rules to the application layers themselves is IMO clearly inappropriate at the level of an FCC action and an open invitation to enforce a "universal standard" for all of these layers that believe me, you Would Not Like if you had it because OBVIOUSLY that "standard" would be set by Micro$oft and/or Apple or maybe Google and guess who would control it and regulate it and manipulate it to literally squash all competition that didn't PAY them for complying with the top layer "standards" they set...
I personally do agree that including TCP/UDP in the NN rules makes some sense, but that is primarily because the application layer INTERFACE and the transport layer ROUTING are heavily intertwined -- TCP is designed to make a network connection "reliable" by handling out of order deliver, transmission timeouts, and so on, and an ISP who wanted to MIGHT be able to screw around with this within some set or rules applied "strictly" only to the first three layers. Hence a need for "3.5" layers -- basically requiring ISPs to remain in the business of selling connections that provide their clients with an IP address, some level of bandwidth, some guarantee of QoS that is not modulated by the particular use the client makes of the network within the bounds of some Acceptable Use Agreement. In other words, holding them responsible as a public utility like a power company not to constantly turn off the power to, say, a predominantly black neighborhood in order to keep the power on in the white neighborhood next door, or worse, not to keep the power reliably on unless you buy all of your light bulbs and electrical appliances from the power company itself.
At the same time, I am sensitive to the practical realities of networking (I've written network applications and managed networks all the way back to twisted pair networks without any surviving name). If you are running a network, even in a single building, with your very own routers and DHCP server(s) and so on, that network is GOING to have a finite bandwidth. If you have power users in your organization, one of the IS going to be perfectly capable of saturating your network and degrading the QoS to all of your other users -- the sort of
Even when the experts all agree, they may well be mistaken. --- Bertrand Russell.