Slashdot Mirror
Lawsuit Filed By 22 State Attorneys General Seeks To Block Net Neutrality Repeal (techcrunch.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: A lawsuit filed today by the attorneys general of 22 states seeks to block the Federal Communications Commission's recent controversial vote to repeal Obama era Net Neutrality regulations. The filing is led by New York State Attorney General Schneiderman, who called rollback a potential "disaster for New York consumers and businesses, and for everyone who cares about a free and open internet." The letter, which was filed in the United States District Court of Appeals in Washington, is cosigned by AGs from California, Connecticut, Delaware, Hawaii, Illinois, Iowa, Kentucky, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Mississippi, New Mexico, North Carolina, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Vermont, Virginia, Washington and Washington DC.
"An open internet -- and the free exchange of ideas it allows -- is critical to our democratic process," Schneiderman added in an accompanying statement. "The repeal of net neutrality would turn internet service providers into gatekeepers -- allowing them to put profits over consumers while controlling what we see, what we do, and what we say online."
"An open internet -- and the free exchange of ideas it allows -- is critical to our democratic process," Schneiderman added in an accompanying statement. "The repeal of net neutrality would turn internet service providers into gatekeepers -- allowing them to put profits over consumers while controlling what we see, what we do, and what we say online."
Yes, yes, keep blaming Obama for your reckless embracing of Trump, as if nobody remembers the Imperial Presidency of Bush the Younger, or Saint Reagan's Cult of Personality and treason with Iran. Or Nixon's Secret Plumbing Team. And really, Goldwater wasn't that far from the tree.
Here's a hint: Republicans have been charging pell-mell over the cliff of irrationally entirely of their own volition for decades.
Some of us even remember when you started to hear AM talk radio through the metal plates in your head.
All Trump did was revert back to the pre-2015 "bad days" of no net neutrality. Oh, it was so much worse back then, just a couple of years ago!
Here's a short list of stuff the telecoms did before Net Neutrality:
COMCAST: In 2005, the nation’s largest ISP, Comcast, began secretly blocking peer-to-peer technologies that its customers were using over its network. Users of services like BitTorrent and Gnutella were unable to connect to these services. 2007 investigations from the Associated Press, the Electronic Frontier Foundation and others confirmed that Comcast was indeed blocking or slowing file-sharing applications without disclosing this fact to its customers.
AT&T: From 2007–2009, AT&T forced Apple to block Skype and other competing VOIP phone services on the iPhone. The wireless provider wanted to prevent iPhone users from using any application that would allow them to make calls on such “over-the-top” voice services. The Google Voice app received similar treatment from carriers like AT&T when it came on the scene in 2009.
AT&T, SPRINT and VERIZON: From 2011–2013, AT&T, Sprint and Verizon blocked Google Wallet, a mobile-payment system that competed with a similar service called Isis, which all three companies had a stake in developing.
VERIZON: In 2012, the FCC caught Verizon Wireless blocking people from using tethering applications on their phones. Verizon had asked Google to remove 11 free tethering applications from the Android marketplace. These applications allowed users to circumvent Verizon’s $20 tethering fee and turn their smartphones into Wi-Fi hot spots. By blocking those applications, Verizon violated a Net Neutrality pledge it made to the FCC as a condition of the 2008 airwaves auction.
AT&T: In 2012, AT&T announced that it would disable the FaceTime video-calling app on its customers’ iPhones unless they subscribed to a more expensive text-and-voice plan. AT&T had one goal in mind: separating customers from more of their money by blocking alternatives to AT&T’s own products.
VERIZON: During oral arguments in Verizon v. FCC in 2013, judges asked whether the phone giant would favor some preferred services, content or sites over others if the court overruled the agency’s existing open internet rules. Verizon counsel Helgi Walker had this to say: “I’m authorized to state from my client today that but for these rules we would be exploring those types of arrangements.” Walker’s admission might have gone unnoticed had she not repeated it on at least five separate occasions during arguments.
And that's not all of them!
Nope. Sorry. That's just not true. The Net Neutrality rules went into effect in 2015, and the consolidation of the ISP industry started over a decade before that.
Net Neutrality doesn't have anything to do with how many ISPs enter the marketplace. It doesn't set up or encourage monopolies. It just says that if you're selling broadband, you can't prioritize traffic to help some other division owned by your parent company.
I guess it's once again time for me to post the simplest, clearest definition of Net Neutrality ever posted, from the Electronic Frontier Foundation:
https://www.eff.org/issues/net...
You are welcome on my lawn.
This being slashdot, there are plenty of commentators trying to make killing Net Neutrality the fault of both parties. But the evidence shows clearly that Republicans are overwhelmingly in favor of gutting it, and the Democrats are overwhelmingly in favor of preserving it.
Simple, irrefutable, facts, people.
Actually, no. The new FCC regulations specifically preempt the states from imposing their own rules. As for jurisdiction, the question of whether this preemption is legal shall surely be litigated; in 2015 a court ruled the FCC couldn't preempt state laws on municipal networks. If the FCC new rules are upheld, the most naively obvious thread of consistency between the two decisions may be that whatever makes it easier for giant incumbent telco monopolies to wring more money out of their networks is what's legal.
If you believe the states attorneys general are just grandstanding, rather than acting on the conviction that their position is important to defend, then you may not have been paying attention for several years. The fact that it's also politically popular is a happy bonus. It doesn't take a lot of creativity to reckon why big consumer-oriented telcos, the Republican donor class, and virtually no one else living in a Western democracy thinks that unraveling an open Internet is a good thing.
Net Neutrality relied on and enforced a law from the 1930s that in the case of the Internet was repealed in the 1990s. We are only returned to status quo pro ante 2012.
The lawsuit should fail for lack of standing. Further, the federal government has supremacy under our Constitution in this regard due to the interstate nature of the Internet, so states cannot pass their own equivalent.
The only way to meaningfully change this is through Congress. All else is political smoke and mirrors.
What those who want activist courts fear is rule by the people.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
The Courts do not set public policy nor do they create Legislation.
In common law countries such as the USA, in the absence of legislation or in the case of conflicting legislation, including conflict between the legislature and the Constitution, the courts do create law and set public policy.
For a quick overview, read the first paragraph of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... I'll quote one sentence
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism