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Lawmakers Continue Fighting For Net Neutrality in the US Senate, Courts, and States (cnet.com)
Here's the latest developments in the ongoing fight over net neutrality rules:
- CNET reports that Democrats in the Senate "have been pushing to use the Congressional Review Act to roll back the FCC's repeal of net neutrality rules. They've gotten the support of 50 senators for the measure, including one Republican, Susan Collins of Maine. Sen. John Kennedy from Louisiana , who's been undecided in his support of the CRA bill, was being courted by Democrats as the tie-breaking vote to pass the measure in the Senate...
"On Wednesday, Kennedy introduced a piece of legislation that would ban companies like AT&T and Comcast from slowing down or blocking access to websites or internet services. But the bill wouldn't prevent these broadband and wireless companies from offering paid prioritization, which many critics fear could lead to so-called internet 'fast lanes.'"
- Axios reports that lawsuits looking to strike down the Federal Communications Commission's repeal of its own net neutrality rules "will be heard in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, the court said Thursday... The lottery to decide the location of the court arguments was the result of lawsuits filed against the FCC in different jurisdictions, including by Attorneys General from more than 20 states, led by New York attorney general Eric Schneiderman."
- The Associated Press reports that on Monday, Washington became the first state to set up its own net-neutrality requirements. But they add that governors in five states -- Hawaii, New Jersey, New York, Montana and Vermont -- "have signed executive orders related to net-neutrality issues, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures. Montana's order, for instance, bars telecommunications companies from receiving state contracts if they interfere with internet traffic or favor higher-paying sites or apps."
We need these legislators to just stop putting bullshit laws like this into place. If Wilson, NC can build a viable fiber ISP wire up another tiny town, we don't need net neutrality. Wilson is not a rich town AFAIK. If they can do it, then so can most communities.
By comparison, look at Facebook and YouTube. You'd have to be a window-licking moron to defend net neutrality at the ISP level and then claim "da magic free market's gonna take care of the big platform companies." To build a service that can compete with Google-subsidized YouTube (still losing like $2B/year!) is significantly more expensive. It would cost at least as much private cash as expanding FiOS to the entire Western half of North Carolina so that every nook and cranny of Appalachia has 500mbps.
Muni broadband is still going to get stuck running over large parts of infrastructure owned by Comcast, AT&T and Cox.
What we really need is a shift in American politics where nobody get elected unless they refuse all corporate and PAC money. Show up to your primaries and vote for candidates who refuse corp & PAC money. If you don't have one and you've got time run. Politicians can't (or won't) serve two Masters.
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of the Internet.
... is designed to put the repeal of Net Neutrality into law, where it can't be overturned by the courts in the many lawsuits against the FCC. Ironically, the bill that Kennedy proposed is pretending to be "for" Net Neutrality, when it was written by the telcos/telco-lobbyists and then submitted in the House by Masha Blackburn and (not coincidentally) an identically worded bill submitted in the Senate by Kennedy. See: https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20180308/08025839389/terrified-losing-court-isps-with-senator-john-kennedys-help-push-hard-fake-net-neutrality-law.shtml
Modern app appers want app apptrality, which lets appers app apps while apping other apps!
Apps!
to have something to distract attention from all the people screaming for gun control.
All that sweet, sweet NRA lobby money has nothing to do with it.
OK state efforts may be useful, but Congress and the courts? Forget about it.
At the federal level, just plain stupid.
What happens if Congress or the courts overturn the FCC? Let's say Comcast violates net neutrality. What happens then? How do you handle it. Answer: file a complaint with the FCC. Which then sits on it.
The way to federal enforce net neutrality is create an agreeable FCC. The chances of that are gone for the foreseeable future. They were gone when the ISPs pushed the idea that net neutrality was an attempt to regulate the internet [1] and radical lefties jumped on the chance to paint it that way.
[1]It's not. It's a change in regulations. The internet was already one of the most heavy regulated industries.
But we've been at war in the Middle East for 17 years running.
Funny how "states rights" are compartmentalized: abortion and medicaid in one compartment, net neutrality in another.
I stopped commenting on Canadian web sites long ago as no matter how innocuous said comments were, they were ALWAYS deleted, censored, etc.
That's pretty much the case throughout North America today. Recently, on a local NPR/fake news show, Week in Review (Seattle, WA, USA), the douchey interviewer asked a "reporter" from The Stranger (whose readership plummeted after it began an extraordinary campaign of censoring its commenters and barring and banning many outright) about "free speech" ????
Somehow, asking any censored site about "free speech," whether it's The Stranger in Seattle, or Cory Doctorow's boingboing.net, is too comical for words!
Net Neutrality is about restricting endpoint discrimination by incumbent monopoly ISPs. Your Ars Technica link did not mention net neutrality once! You might as well have linked to a recipe for macaroni and cheese.
What we don't need is restricted access to utility poles. If the ISPs want to discriminate against endpoints, they need to lose their common carrier status. That way competitors can put wires on the poles too. We call this capitalism.
Let the ISPs compete. Let the market decide. Give the States rights to make their own decisions. Somehow Republicans have forgotten everything that they stand for in this fight.
OK, so governors sign orders barring interference in network traffic. So what happens if the carriers call their bluff and do it anyway?
I am not a robot. I am a unicorn.
He commented on the rules for NN Obama put into place, not the rules you think should be put into place. They are two different things and I suspect you don't realize that is the case.
Obama's NN involved the FEC (Federal Election Commission). I didn't mistype. They would be responsible for censoring, yes censoring, any web content that wasn't following FEC rules for campaign donations and disclosures. If they decided Drudge Report (their intended target) supported one candidate over another and he didn't record the "donation" of his website to the FEC then they would punish him with fines/jailtime and pull his website down for FEC violations.
This is the rules Obama put into place. I'm sure you still agree with them, but they are not what you describe, not even close.
So congratulations for angrily arguing an invalid point and showing your ignorance. Please continue on spewing DNC talking points that you have no clue what you are talking about because the DNC needs as many idiots as possible helping them because the informed know they are against the middle class law abiding citizens.
True net neutrality means not being able to censor web content - it would be illegal to restrict the transmission of "bad/fake information".
And, attempting to stop a denial of service attack would require "non-neutral" traffic management.
Or they would be working to making neutrality an ACTUAL LAW.
THEY DON'T GIVE A FUCK ABOUT NET NEUTRALITY.
What they want is being able to put the fcc 'standards and practices' (censorship) to the internet.
Thats why they keep going the fcc route instead of making neutrality an actual law. They don't give a shit about that....
But lord being able to say 'that website is a hate crime!' and have it shut down.
Thats a democrats wet dream to combat all those evil nazi frogs...
of the Internet.
Vs the internet providers controlling the government?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism