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GOP Congressman Introduces Bill To Reinstate Net Neutrality Rules (theverge.com)
Rep. Mike Coffman (R-CO) today announced his support for a bill that would institute the basic outlines of the FCC's 2015 Open Internet order, which banned the throttling and blocking of content as well as harmful paid prioritization practices. He is also the first Republican to sign on to the Democrat-led discharge petition, which aims to force a vote on the House floor to roll back the FCC's December decision to repeal net neutrality. The Verge reports: The 21st Century Internet Act aims to restructure the current framework by which the internet has been governed since the '90s. Coffman's bill moves past this argument by amending the 1934 Telecommunications Act and adding the new Title VIII. This new classification would "permanently codify into law the 'four corners' of net neutrality" by banning providers from controlling traffic quality and speed and forbidding them from participating in paid prioritization programs or charging access fees from edge providers.
On top of providing stable ground for net neutrality rules to be upheld in the future, the legislation also makes it illegal for providers to participate in "unfair or deceptive acts or practices." It directs the FCC to investigate claims of anticompetitive behavior on behalf of consumers after receiving their complaints. Transparency requirements are heightened for providers as well, as companies must publicly disclose information regarding their network practices to allow consumers to "make informed choices regarding use of such services."
On top of providing stable ground for net neutrality rules to be upheld in the future, the legislation also makes it illegal for providers to participate in "unfair or deceptive acts or practices." It directs the FCC to investigate claims of anticompetitive behavior on behalf of consumers after receiving their complaints. Transparency requirements are heightened for providers as well, as companies must publicly disclose information regarding their network practices to allow consumers to "make informed choices regarding use of such services."
This is what should have been done in the first place.
I never heard of this guy (I detest politics) but I figured "Damn, I bet he's here in Colorado." The smugness I now feel is, of course, satisfying.
A vote, on the floor, by the entire House - that actually passes. Until then, this is nothing more to the Net Neutrality cause than fruitless posturing.
How dare they!!!
The small guys haven't been able to compete in the ISP market since the 90's, back when we were all on dial-up and "the phone lines" didn't have to be provided by the same company as "the Internet service".
Ever since the advent of broadband, this separation has not usefully existed. We now have to get our service from the same companies that run wires to our houses, which tend to be gov't regulated/mandated monopolies.
Oh, wait; I know: because it's fucking retarded.
Funny, the most common thing I hear about problems competing when it comes to the 'small guys' is the 'big guys' pushing them out with every dirty trick they can think of.
Following some ground rules for being fair to your customers is probably far easier compared to competing with incumbent big name ISPs. Besides, I bet small ISPs don't do enough business to make screwing over customers a valid business strategy. I fail to see how it'd be overly demanding of a small company to expect them to provide their advertised speed and service quality, to not demand they pay extra to use certain websites, etc.
No, I think the companies that stand to lose the most are big ISPs. Perhaps they should have dealt more honestly with the American people and we wouldn't need to legislate them into behaving.
Small ISPs (are there any now) don't even have the budget for the hardware required to violate net neutrality.
Or perhaps you were referring to the part about 'not participating in anti-competitive behavior' making it to harder for the 'small guys' to compete? I imagine it would make it nearly impossible for a small ISP to operate if it couldn't be a monopoly. That makes perfect sense then, as being a monopoly means they wouldn't need to compete at all! /s
WA, OR, and CA have already reinstated Net Neutrality, and we're half of the US GDP.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
Right ... like that law about how everyone should have a right to vote. ...
Oh, and don't forget all those laws about making sure people get fed so they don't starve on tax money
and those horrible laws that stop 'the little guy' from selling tainted meat and medicine that poisons people.
I got you, every law is against the little guy, he never gets a fair shake , we need to go out and pull down those ivory towers comrade.
Just remember what happens to the horse in the end of animal farm.
https://simple.wikipedia.org/w...
I have news for you, there is only one group of people who a rational reason that the powerful shouldn't eat the poor and it's not Darwinist.
âoeTolerance applies only to persons, but never to truth. Intolerance applies only to truth, but never to persons.
In 1992, when I first got on the Internet, I accessed it via a dial up modem which got it's feed over a Pacific Bell owned wire. There were, to my knowledge, ZERO alternatives.
Later in the 1990s I began to receive my Internet through a microwave connection offered by Sprint. At that time the cable companies probably had an offering somewhere, someway, but I did not have access.
Eventually I went to a DSL connection which utilized wires then owned by AT&T.
Today, I can get Internet via a satellite dish, cable company wire, DSL over an AT&T owned wire, over cell transmission services offered by AT&T or Verizon, Google fiber, or a WISP.
The options for internet service have only been growing under free markets. More & more & more.
I don't buy your assertion about limited Internet options.
Caution: Contents under pressure
Since the 90s I've seen my options for broadband providers go from dozens to 2. So yeah, far fewer options.
Your own argument is self defeating. The Satellite company (DirecTV) is owned by At&t, as is the DSL and cell services you mention. That's half of your options under one company. Plus, where I live (60 miles from DC) there is no fiber option, and satellite is too inconsistent + doesn't support VPN connections, DSL is too slow to be true Broadband, and cell services have data caps to make it not useful for home use. Guess what, in reality I only have 1 option, Comcast Cable, to get actually Broadband internet.
How much do they pay you, anonymous POS, to repeat the same lie again and again ?
net neutrality does absolutely nothing for you. your local utility commission has done a deal to lock the others out.
nothing to see here - move along
This isn't the first time this congressman has taken this position. He also stepped up to try and delay a time sensitive NN vote citing "unanticipated negative consequences". Those weren't the actions of a poser. If you genuinely cared about this issue more than silly partisanship, you wouldn't be making accusations like this against someone who is clearly sympathetic to the NN cause. The GOP has not been on the right side of this issue, but attacking any of them regardless of what they do (right or wrong) is both typical and sad.
back in the day you called locally to a stack of modems in the central office and used ppp to authenticate. the phone company still uses much of that infrastructure for authentication on dsl (pppoe - point to point over Ethernet). nowadays it's fiber in the CO or at the cable head end owned by Comcast or Verizon (in my old neighborhood) and they've cut a deal with the local city or county to have a monopoly. None or that has anything to do with net neutrality but it was good to travel down memory lane!
nothing to see here - move along
"... we spent six figures in lawyer fees ..."
You actually spent a lot more than that marketing and lobbying your lies.
The GOP has not been on the right side of this issue, but attacking any of them regardless of what they do (right or wrong) is both typical and sad.
Random comments on the Internet are not an attack on this guy. The primary challenge he's going to face for failing to toe the party line is the attack he should watch out for.
that is a series of paper insulated tubes.
Now with more federal paper work.
With some extra big federal rules.
No new network innovation for you.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
You must be in the minority, then. In the 90s my small town had 4 or 5 dial-up options. Then DSL came in at a much higher price. The dial-up providers survived for awhile then started to drop out one-by-one. Cable then came to the area, finished off all the dial-ups and pushed DSL out. Frontier did come to the area about 10 years ago giving us 1 cable (Spectrum) and 1 very slow DSL (Frontier). I'm paying $85/month to Spectrum just so I can have 2 good quality streams going at the same time.
"Action without philosophy is a lethal weapon; philosophy without action is worthless."
I have very few options if I want broadband. So dialup and basic DSL are out. I have basically two choices - cable internet, AT&T u-verse internet. Satellite internet isn't very good, I don't know about any good or affordable cellular internet that I can get, certainly you can't get any Google fiber within 50 miles of Google's headquarters.
What net neutrality does though is stop Comcast from favoring its own services versus the services you actually want to use.
Everyone doesn't live in the Bay Area.
There are places where the only viable option is the cable company, and the cable company knows it.
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
Back when DSL was the main option for those without cable, there were lots of DSL providers all sharing the same physical copper lines. It would be great if congress would declare that cable company cables were common carriers so we could get some real competition again
NN makes it harder for the small guys to compete since it adds so many rules and laws that ISPs must follow.
As with most laws, Acts, etc etc from Congress, the devil is in the details including but not limited to the implementation & enforcement.
I'll reserve judgement on it until I have more detailed information. On the surface it sounds good. I don't want shady shit going on by/with backbone providers/ISPs or Netflix, Amazon, etc etc any more than anyone else does.
Even if this bill is not what it touts and gets tossed, at least this is the proper way to go about putting these kinds of rules in place...by Congress who we can vote out, not some political appointee at a federal agency that can change with every new administration/Party.
Strat
Progressivism (aka US 'Liberalism'): Ideas so good they need a police/surveillance-state to enforce.
No, you can't. There are developed, populated areas that only have one possible broadband provider or 4G. Nothing else.
Amazing. Every single word of what you wrote is provably wrong.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Or what? There are a number of republicans who regularly oppose the party line or the president with impunity. This particular congressman is taking what I would consider to be a common sense position on an issue that shouldn't even be a partisan one, and I can only hope this goes further. My intent wasn't to take up for the poor congressman, but rather to point out the lunacy in partisan bickering distracting from real issues which isn't very random.
An example would be GOP Senator John McCain. He was elected over and over again for more than 30 years. He 's said some pretty bad things about Trump, and certainly doesn't tow the party line.
There are quite a few Republicans whose views and understanding of the issues go well beyond the "us vs them" you get from Bill Maher and many liberal figures.
shame on you, fool me twice... you can't... you can't fool me again.
Seriously though, I'd like to make the point that while the Democratic Party has a wing that refuses corporate PAC money forget a wing, I don't know of a single GOP politician who does.
I'm not saying it's impossible, but actions speak louder than words. The Republican party have done a lot of bad to me and mine. They're currently working on eliminating the protections for pre-existing conditions for Obamacare and argue that we should end Social Security & Medicare for people under 55 (they're careful not to piss off their base of older voters until it's too late). Their tax cut is causing out of control inflation and interest rate hikes. They just repealed Dodd-Frank (albeit with the help of several right wing Democrats). They cut funding to my kid's schools. They tried to take away my Type-I diabetic buddies insulin for christ's sake (seriously, I'm not even exaggerating here, the ACA and Obama made them back down when he threatened to pull Medicare for the old folks in my red state). I can go on and on.
When I see real, positive actions from them I'll give credit where it's due. But after 40 years of policy that has a demonstratively negative impact on my life you'll forgive me if I'm just a wee bit distrustful.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
The parent post was criticizing the congressman for pretending to want to support net neutrality and the sarcasm was obvious when they said as long as it gets abolished. My point was that after liberals railed against the GOP for trying to abolish NN, it seems hypocritical and counter productive for them to then criticize someone who shares their own views (in other words, regardless of what they do). This is a pervasive pattern in American politics right now. I can only hope that people see NN, not as another partisan wedge issue, but as a serious topic worthy of genuine consideration, and putting politics aside.
Lucky you, I live in a non rural areas and I can get decent internet from cable (starting at $60/mo for 25/5).
I can get 25/? Satalite for $100
That's it for any reasonable definition of broadband
There also "up to 7mbps" DSL for $40/mo
Depending on the tree situation, some people in my area of the city can get 75/75 LoS wirekess for $55/mo
If you go to the burbs, there's about 1/5th covered by FiOS with better prices than the cable (and better prices for cable in that 1/5th
I suppose for $200/mo o could get cellular too, and of course, since we're listing terrible options, I could still use dial up I bet.
Wow, sent an e-mail as suggested when clicking on "use classic" banner, and got a fast response that addressed my msg
And that has what to do with them favoring Netflix over YouTube or some new guy?
Wow, sent an e-mail as suggested when clicking on "use classic" banner, and got a fast response that addressed my msg
NN isn't about protecting other ISPs, it's a recognition of the fact that multiple runs of wire are not going to provide the most efficient solution, and therefore the industry needs regulation (similar to how utilities work).
It's to protect the consumer, since it's not practical to have competition.
Wow, sent an e-mail as suggested when clicking on "use classic" banner, and got a fast response that addressed my msg
CALEA was the Bill Clinton era anti-patriotic law that mandated all cellphones be built for surveillance ("lawful intercept") from the hardware on up. Afaik it has jack to do with Net Neutrality.
it seems hypocritical and counter productive for them to then criticize someone who shares their own views
EVIL. They're all evil, all of them. They eat babies, rape women (or men, Equal Opportunities you know), kick dogs, and step on ants. They hate their neighbors -- they're not even HUMAN. They should all be destroyed.
Pick a side, that's the rhetoric being applied to (one of) the OTHER side. If they're not human it's easy to ignore them and dismiss the bastards. FAR be it to imagine that they're actually thinking people with concerns and a different point of view. The world is black and white; it's not complicated at all, that makes it much easier to process.
On the other hand, what do you do when you've got one person who says, "I insist (something), and I absolutely will not rest until it is" against a different person, "I insist (something opposite), and and I absolutely will not rest until it is." There's only one world, that's the problem with an immovable rock and an irresistible force. (You both want it so much? I suggest pistols at 20 paces.)
And actually, they both sound like kids: "I'm going to hold my breath until I get my way." And with kids, sometimes the answer is "No." Or at least it used to be -- not everyone on Slashdot gets their own pony.
If the universe is someone's simulation -- does that mean the stars are just stuck pixels?
You really couldn't be more wrong here.... Net neutrality most definitely protects him when Comcast eventually starts throttling and demanding fees for not doing so from various internet content providers they may or may not be in competition with. Sure, it doesn't allow him more choice in terms of ISP, but does protect him from anti-customer business practices that would be deterred by competition if there was any.
"Why should I want to make anything up? Life's bad enough as it is without wanting to invent any more of it."
You seem to have missed the parent poster's point entirely.
While you only had access to one provider for your physical phone line, you almost certainly had access to many providers for internet access (local ISPs, Prodigy, AOL, etc).
In the early 90s (and before) I lived in tiny town in Northern California (6k people, 20+ miles to the closest real city) and had Pac Bell as well. However within my "local" calling distance I could reach several small ISPs and all of the major national ones.
Pac Bell only got paid for access to that physical line, a base charge for local calls and per-minute charges for long distance. Their rate didn't change depending on who you called, only where. And they had zero influence on which internet provider you went with.
This resulted in lots of competition in my area and prices going from around $5 an hour for access in 1990 (Compuserve) to around $20/month in 1994 (Sonic.net) to practically free by 1998 (NetZero, AOL free trials for hundreds or even thousands of hours).
Those markets are heavily-regulated to prevent companies from buying all other companies, although most of your options are owned by the same company. There are also provisions pushed by municipal authorities to force these providers to roll out to people in less-densely-populated areas where the cost is higher.
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No, there are large portions of the country, including in big cities like Houston, Dallas, that don't have any choice of provider.
https://arstechnica.com/inform...
You are welcome on my lawn.
"... Sure, it doesn't allow him more choice in terms of ISP..."
nothing to see here - move along
Careful of that "broadband" term, it's widely misused.
That said, were those dozens of options distinct, or were a bunch of them channels for others?
Been going on for a long time in lots of industries, cf. the 1948 Tucker.
You know, the laws against murder also don't give him more choice in terms of ISP... What's you point? That the law wouldn't do something that wasn't intended to do? In any case, Net Neutrality is most useful in the case where customers don't have much (if any) choice in ISP, by limiting the company's ability to subvert and distort the service it is providing to its paying customers.
Fanatically anti-fanatical
no they don't give him more choice in isp's
nothing to see here - move along
Interesting theory. How do you define right? Legal rights come from the law. If other rights exist independent of the law how do we know what they are and everest do they come from?;
âoeTolerance applies only to persons, but never to truth. Intolerance applies only to truth, but never to persons.
But you know... greed. Greed is infinite and you American people say you love it. These companies only do this because of greed. If they weren't this greedy, you wouldn't have any problems with the Net Neutrality or Internet speed in rural areas. Maybe think about greed more. Give it a thought. ;)
"It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society." - Jiddu Krishnamurti
Net Neutrality laws are not supposed to give him more choice in ISPs.
Fanatically anti-fanatical
exactly
nothing to see here - move along