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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."
When you can rule by fiat with just one.
As Yoda would tell you - there is another.
That Another is Congress. You know, the guys who are supposed to make laws?
So which would you rather have - an un-elected body making up whatever rules they like (FCC), or rules thought out be representatives from across the country (legislative branch - congress/house).
And they are making an effort to do so. It's WAY BETTER that rules that effect so many companies large and small, come from careful deliberation in the open rather than a handful of commissioners in secret.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
If the governments in these states really cared about having a free and open internet, they would repeal any state laws that restrict broadband competition or the roll out of new players (be it companies like Google, community groups, non-profit groups, municipalities or whoever else) and pass state laws that overrule any monopolies at the local level (be they monopolies put in place by local laws or monopolies granted via exclusive franchise deals).
And they would tell AT&T, Comcast, Verizon, Charter Spectrum and the other last-century dinosaur ISPs to get stuffed when said ISPs complain about having to actually compete.
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!
Yes, being a common carrier would require them to comply with CALEA.
Without the rules, they just comply with CALEA voluntarily on Internet.
You still get wiretapped; you just don't get the projections that them being a common carrier would have afforded you otherwise.
For example: now that they are not common carriers, they no longer have to provide you with 911 service on your VOIP lines.
Absolutely true. When it comes right down to it, the Founding Fathers were basically rich wine snobs who just didn't want to pay their taxes. All the stuff about liberty and equality was just so much happy horseshit to make the yahoos think there was something noble going on while they set up their aristocracy.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Yes. Google "federalism".
It doesn't have to be a "bunch" of AGs. One is enough. It just so happens that all the states where people wear shoes and have dental care joined in this particular lawsuit. And in this case, it's not to get the government to do something, but to stop the government from doing something.
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.
using another service.
How nice when one is available, that actually competes!
there are already layers of reprieve, Antitrust action, FCC itself, Justice Dept
Most of us prefer not to have to go to court every time the service goes to shit. Let's make a preemptive attack on that right now, it will save us time and fees. If the government wants to go one better it could nullify all state/local regulations that prohibit municipal/public internet and other exclusive contracts that lock out competition.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
Yep. I've said this before, but it bears repeating. The US is a great democracy, but its a prototype of a democracy at a time where there where not many examples to go by and forged by revolutionaries without the hindsight we have today. And sadly the old girl is definitely showing her age.
We know that no system is perfect (See Arrows Theorem) but there are many systems that are better. My personal favourite is instant runoff voting, used in Australia and a few others. Another good one is proportional seats, and there are others. And all of these have in common the idea of not wasting votes (Instant runoff does this by incrementally adding in preferences until a clear prefered candidate emerges as having 50+1 majority, good for presidents and individual seats. Proportional works by dividing seats by the number of votes. Good for houses of representation) All of these can be number crunched and manipulated, but so can "Just give it to whoever got the most votes". So if you really want to vote for the Greens or the Liberty, you can do so without endangering your prefered majority party candidate.
The problem is the current system is so favourable to the major parties, I highly doubt we'll see change anytime soon
Excuse the Unicode crap in my posts. That's an apostrophe, and slashdot is busted.
Your feelings of butthurt have exactly no bearing whatsoever on the reality that His Wholelyness describes.
You take pride in your ignorance and you hide behind your resentment of those who embrace knowledge and difference, which is very much the problem with the Right these days.
And we know how to spell and punctuate.
So fuck you and the horse-drawn cart you drove here, Know-Nothing.
This argument has never made any sense to me as a European and a proponent of democracy, especially for the electoral college because what the EC does is flip the situation upside down by giving a minority of people the right to elect a ruler of the country. How's that superior? It's now put you in a situation wherein some states are fundamentally worth more than others to candidates, and you can moneyball the entire election process by competing for those more valuable votes that decide the end result. It in fact makes you more susceptible to groupthink, because you now only have to manipulate a minority of the voterbase to believe you're on their side (as Trump successfully did) and you'll be elected. How does this 'ensure' you against anything? To me it's obvious at this point that it makes the system weaker to populism of the Trump kind, where all you have to do is make grandiose and baseless promises to a minority of people (and it's easier to fool a minority than a majority) and the groupthink of these people will help you get elected. As a 'safeguard' measure it's an utter failure, not to mention fundamentally undemocratic. You're all citizens of the same country, you all have the same president. Trump rules just as much over California than he does over Ohio, so why on earth should votes from Ohio be more important that votes from California? There is no rational justification for this.
Again, this statement has nothing to do with the fact that the EC is fundamentally undemocratic because what it does is it ties the significance of ones vote to one's geographic area, which is irrational and can in the end used to manipulate the result by either side. There is absolutely nothing about a person living in a given area that means he/she will think in a certain way or hold certain beliefs, yet the system as it now is treats people differently based simply on where they happen to live. Democracies have mechanisms which are meant to safeguard minorities from tyranny by the majority, the most important one usually being the constitution and that uphold it. On top of this you have the local elections on a city/state level giving people further influence over the governance of their immediate area, but what you're saying that certain people should have more power in selecting who rules over everyone simply because the happen to live in place X instead of place Y, and that to me is thoroughly irrational. Your place of residence does not determine your intelligence, your values, political beliefs or set them in stone, so it should also rightfully not affect the weight of ones vote.
Imagine a hypothetical scenario where 10 people set up a camp in the woods. 6 of them live in the same building, while 4 people set up tents further away. What you're saying is that those 4 people should get to decide who is elected as the leader of the camp simply on the merits that they're located in a different spot because you want to avoid 'the groupthink' of the 6. So your suggestion is 'hey, let's give power instead to this even smaller group of people, after all, a smaller group of people cannot possibly fall victim to groupthink' . It just makes no sense, from the perspective of equality and the western democratic principles. If indeed you hold, as many Americans so proudly proclaim 'that all Men are created equal', then this system is the very antithesis of that statement and should be done away with.
"It is the business of the future to be dangerous" -Alfred North Whitehead
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.
Yes, how dare governments work for its people instead of its corporations! Don't they know who pays them?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
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