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Net Neutrality Will Be Repealed Monday Unless Congress Takes Action (arstechnica.com)
With net neutrality rules scheduled to be repealed on Monday, Senate Democrats are calling on House Speaker Paul Ryan to schedule a vote that could preserve the broadband regulations. From a report: The US Senate voted on May 16 to reverse the Federal Communications Commission's repeal of net neutrality rules, but a House vote -- and President Trump's signature -- is still needed. Today, the entire Senate Democratic Caucus wrote a letter to Ryan urging him to allow a vote on the House floor. "The rules that this resolution would restore were enacted by the FCC in 2015 to prevent broadband providers from blocking, slowing down, prioritizing, or otherwise unfairly discriminating against Internet traffic that flows across their networks," the letter said. "Without these protections, broadband providers can decide what content gets through to consumers at what speeds and could use this power to discriminate against their competitors or other content." The letter was spearheaded by Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.), Sen. Bill Nelson (D-Fla.), and Sen. Brian Schatz (D-Hawaii).
Whatever happens the person who can influence Trump to keep net neutrality intact must make sure to be the last to talk to him before he decides. That usually seems to do the trick.
-- Cheers!
Instead of relying on the FCC using a shakey legal foundation to enforce net neutrality, Congress should pass an actual law laying out exactly what should and shouldn't occur, and assign an agency to oversee. The problem with the approach from the past few years is the FCC or FTC trying to assume this responsibility without Congress having specifically authorized it. Congress never passed laws granting the FCC to authorize ISPs under Title II, etc.
Congress should pass comprehensive net neutrality regulations and lay out exactly what needs to happen, and assign responsibilities. There's too much hemming and hawing over the FCC rather than going through the legislative process. I believe people should stop asking the FCC to change it's mind since the FCC (not backed by legislation to oversee NN) can just change it's mind in the future when the next administration comes in. Legislation is the right approach to this, not bureaucracies.
Just so.
Note that one good thing about Trump as President is that it MIGHT make Congress stop abdicating its responsibilities to the Executive Branch. They've given the Executive the power to wage war, and entirely too damn much power to (effectively) make laws over the last half century or so. About time they reclaimed some of the Legislative powers they've given away....
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
Well that's how democracy works. We elect representatives to pass legislation. If they don't pass legislation, then that might reflect the actual wishes of the voters. New reps can be elected (and will be in a few months), and those priorities can change.
Just because legislation isn't passed doesn't mean you can subvert the legislative process with unelected bureaucracies assumed responsibilties that aren't theirs.
Drug legalization is happening across this country NOT by bureaucracies or Supreme Court decisions, but by the legislative process. That's the way it should happen in a republic.
That is essentially the problem. The way things like this are supposed to happen is that a few local governments get an idea so they pass a law mandating net neutrality. After some time to gauge the results of the law, a few states take notice and say "this looks like a good idea" and pass their own laws. And after more time to gauge how this affects the states, the Federal government takes notice and says "maybe we should make this a national law." These incremental steps, gradually expanding the reach of a law, allow us to properly gauge the law's effect and make modifications to it if problems should arise, before it affects the entire nation.
Instead, Tom Wheeler short-circuited the entire process and unilaterally declared that net neutrality must be the law of the land. Net neutrality isn't the only possible solution to this problem. The problem is actually government-created - local governments granted service monopolies to cable companies. These companies, assured that their customers cannot flee to another ISP, then intentionally degrade online services like Netflix to extort payments from Netflix to restore service.
The way it should work is some areas try net neutrality, some areas try rescinding these government-granted monopolies and allow multiple ISPs to compete, some areas try some different solution that we haven't yet thought of. Let these different solutions play out for a few years. Then we can study actual empirical data, and decide what's best for the entire country. And only then do we pass a national law with a solution to the problem.
The knee-jerk reaction method used to get net neutrality implemented via the FCC is totally the wrong way for government to operate. Heavy-handed decisions like this without first exploring possible solutions is what nearly saddled us with GSM. The original GSM spec was built on TDMA - each phone takes turns talking to the tower. Europe mandated GSM, and most of the rest of the world followed. The U.S. refused to require it, which allowed a competing service based on CDMA to develop. When phones started being used more for data than talking, suddenly the achilles heel of TDMA reared up. TDMA requires each phone to get a full timeslice even if it has little or no data to transmit. This wastes a huge amount of bandwidth. CDMA on the other hand allows all phones to transmit at the same time (they see each others' transmissions as noise, thus reducing the signal-to-noise ratio), and bandwidth is automatically allocated in proportion to how much each phone is transmitting. No wasted bandwidth. Within a year GSM threw in the towel, licensed CDMA, and added wideband CDMA to the GSM spec for data services. If the U.S. had gone along with the "sensible" decision by bureaucrats to impose GSM, then CDMA wouldn't have happened, and our cellular data speeds today would probably down around 1 Mbps. And many of the services we enjoy on our phones today wouldn't yet exist.
Can you name one industry where the government has not needed to intervene to ensure companies act in the best interest of the public?
I sure as hell can't. Cars keep getting more power, faster, new materials, new bells and whistles - and they are kept accountable by a Gov agency. Televisions got more popular to the point where each home often has more than one, all content via radio/satellite/cable is regulated by the Gov. Electricity? Gov regulated (though often local monopolies). Gas/Water? Also Gov regulated. What happens when a Corporation isn't held accountable? You get another Ma Bell, exactly what we are seeing with Comcast, Google, Time Warner, and others.
I don't believe for a second that ANY corporation won't screw people over given the opportunity. Without net neutrality we *could* end up paying for "Social Media" internet packages to speed up access to FaceBook, or "Streaming" packages to get faster access to Netflix or Hulu. I'd rather pay my ISP for a one-size-fits-all x mbps, NOT a-la-carte based on my browsing habits.
Your state is a failure because it is either red or blue.
I am absolutely so glad I left America with no intention of ever going back. I now live in a country with so many political parties that none of them have the ability to do anything based on party lines. They actually have to sit, discuss and convince others that what they are doing is the right thing to do...not for the people or for the party or for the corporations... they have to convince each other that it's actually the right thing to do.
That said, just like in America, the politicians are uneducated frigging idiots that lack the knowledge to make decisions on what they're supposed to decide and they believe that the experts are the people who dress and speak like they do... which leaves them extremely poorly informed and therefore prone to believe the right thing to do is the idiotic thing.
For the most part though, they are relatively harmless because they can't sign any bills of any real importance into law because no one will ever agree on a large enough level to do so. As such, they have no power and cannot fuck things up too badly.
You on the other hand live in a blue state which means that at a state level, decisions are generally made by a club who all agree with each other because of the team they play on as opposed to on the issues themselves. The same would go for red states.
After all, why would you need to take the time to understand the issue and consider how it would affect the people when you can just vote on party lines and be frigging idiots. Heaven forbid the politicians took the time to understand what net neutrality actually means.
Here's one for you... make a simple case with simple drawings and gartner graphs to explain this :
Revoking net neutrality in the U.S. would make several American corporations stronger, but would make America as a whole weaker. It would hurt the schools, the military, the space program, the content producers, the politicians... it would actually hurt almost everyone except the few companies positioned to better exploit higher tariffs. And because non-US countries that all have net neutrality are not effected, it will give them an edge in every category upon which the U.S. claims to want dominance. Revoking net neutrality would basically place the U.S. on equal footing with Turkey.
The internet became ubiquitous WITH net neutrality, which was enforced at the beginning by two factors: the telecoms that owned the last mile were regulated by Title II as common carries for the phone service they provided, and internet piggybacked on that phone service; and because internet was piggybacking on phone services, ISPs did not own the last mile but rather offered a service on top of it, so it was much much easier to start a competing ISP without having to run new line, and that competition forced them to behave.
With the advent of phone companies themselves, and cable companies, BECOMING the ISPs, you suddenly had regional duopolies directly offering something that was not phone service and so not regulated by Title II. Then they started doing away with the until-then-defacto net neutral practices. Then laws started being passed saying they can't do that, and those laws were overturned because internet service was not categorized under Title II, so the FCC went ahead and made it that way, which it should have been all along. And now that's been reversed in turn, and this bill is just Congress ordering them to put it back.
TL;DR: This bill is Congress ordering the FCC to classify ISPs the same way that phone companies were always classified and thus how the dial-up internet was classified in the beginning, to make sure that things stay the way they always were and not how the new-ish local monopolies want to make them.
-Forrest Cameranesi, Geek of all Trades
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