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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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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.
I'm in the middle east now, still want a better (real) version of Net Neutrality in law.
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!
All those voters might matter more.. NRA has lots of members but a lot less money than any cableco (or FB or GOOG or.....). And unlike the noisy shouters, the members DO vote.
Why guess when you can know? Measure!
Not that many people are "screaming for gun control". Lot of people who are "able to get on TV with histrionic appeals" are "screaming for gun control" and the politically-driven media lap it up.
You can get all the gun control you want - you just have to alter the constitution. There's perfectly well-described process for that, but you know for certain that it will fail, so you are trying to do it with an administrative end run, like so many other illegal things you want done.
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.
All that sweet, sweet NRA lobby money has nothing to do with it.
Ever notice how nobody actually says how much money the NRA spends on campaigns? That's because, in relative terms, it's almost nothing.
https://www.opensecrets.org/or...
Median payout to individual campaigns? $1,000. Average cost of a congressional campaign? $10,000,000.
Whoo boy, with the NRA funding a whopping 0.1% of your campaign, you had better toe the line!
My Other Computer Is A Data General Nova III.
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...
You can get all the gun control you want - you just have to alter the constitution. There's perfectly well-described process for that, but you know for certain that it will fail, so you are trying to do it with an administrative end run, like so many other illegal things you want done.
It makes me wonder about what their actual agenda might be.
By creating methods of 'end-running' the 2nd Amendment, they've also created methods for 'end-running' all the rest. You cannot weaken one Amendment without also weakening all the rest. I refuse to believe that the overwhelming majority of those attempting to create an 'end-run' around the 2ndA do not understand this. If they valued the other amendments, would they not refrain from attempting to weaken just the one amendment knowing it will weaken the rest equally?
Either they are so totally ignorant and clueless that they don't understand they weaken all the amendments, or they know full well and using controversy over guns to start the Rights-weakening with the 2ndA since unthinking anger is easy to incite and inflame over guns. Once precedents are set for 'end-running' one Amendment, they can then be used to weaken or nullify others.
If enough people agree then the 2ndA can be amended or abolished with another amendment like Prohibition was.
I don't care if somebody opposes the 2ndA, just go about opposing it above-board the right way. If not enough people agree, then, sorry. You don't get to overrule or 'end-run' the majority decision because you think they're 'stupid-heads' because they don't agree with your views, have a funny accent, live in 'those places', practice weird social customs, and have religious beliefs. The means do not justify the ends. Not even if you think you're really, really, *really* right and believe you're the smartest one in the room.
Strat
Progressivism (aka US 'Liberalism'): Ideas so good they need a police/surveillance-state to enforce.
of the Internet.
Vs the internet providers controlling the government?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism
They can get the vote out. Say some politician is going to take their guns and out come the members. Say some politician is going to allow the wrong people to be armed, out come the members.
Many elections are decided on who gets their voters out and guns seem to do it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism
Not that many people are "screaming for gun control". Lot of people who are "able to get on TV with histrionic appeals" are "screaming for gun control" and the politically-driven media lap it up.
The majority actually:
Overall, 52% of Americans say gun laws should be stricter than they are today, while nearly as many say they are about right (30%) or should be less strict than they are today (18%). [...] Substantial majorities also favor creating a federal government database to track all gun sales (71%), banning assault-style weapons (68%), and banning high-capacity magazines that hold more than 10 rounds of ammunition (65%).
* http://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2017/06/22/views-on-gun-policy/
You can get all the gun control you want - you just have to alter the constitution. There's perfectly well-described process for that, but you know for certain that it will fail, so you are trying to do it with an administrative end run, like so many other illegal things you want done.
The idea that the Second Amendment gives people an individual right is actually a (relatively) recent idea, only first showing up in the literature in 1960:
* http://scholarship.kentlaw.iit.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=3286&context=cklawreview (PDF)
* https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2017/10/12/16418524/us-gun-policy-nra
For the 150+ years before that, it was considered a "group right" for people who belonged to a state militia, which can be considered analogous to (but not exactly like) today's National Guard. The idea of an individual right was a fundamentalist / extremist view that only really started being pushed in the 1970s by the NRA, which went from being an organization for hunters to its present incarnation. The USSC only ruled so in 2008, and before that it ruled three times for the group right; see also Warren Burger's 1991 interview.
Read up on your Madison (his letters are searchable online): "bearing arms" was used only in the context of the military, and not civilians.
The book "The Second Amendment: A Biography" goes over a lot of this, but the above PDF gives a good overview of the legal literature.
Appears to ban QoS...breaking the net.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'