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Can Democrats In Congress Restore America's Net Neutrality Rules? (nbcnews.com)
"Democrats are expected to use their upcoming control of the House to push for strong net neutrality rules," reports NBC News:
"The FCC's repeal sparked an unprecedented political backlash, and we've channeled that internet outrage into real political power," said Evan Greer, deputy director of Fight for the Future, a digital rights-focused non-profit organization. "As we head into 2019, net neutrality supporters in the House of Representatives will be in a much stronger position to engage in FCC oversight...." Gigi Sohn, a former lawyer at the FCC who is now a fellow at the Georgetown Law Institute for Technology, Law and Policy, said she expects Democrats to use their new power to push for the restoration of strong net neutrality rules -- and for the topic to be on the lips of presidential hopefuls. "I have no doubt that bills to restore the 2015 rules will be introduced in both the Senate and the House relatively early on," Sohn said....
Jessica Rosenworcel, an FCC commissioner who has been a vocal supporter of net neutrality, noted that it has become a national issue -- and one that has broad approval from Americans. She pointed to a University of Maryland study that found 83 percent of people surveyed were against the FCC's move to undo the rules around net neutrality... Ernesto Falcon, legislative counsel at the Electronic Frontier Foundation...said he is "extraordinarily confident" that proponents of net neutrality will win. "It really just boils down to how one side of the polling is in this space," Falcon said.
Jessica Rosenworcel, an FCC commissioner who has been a vocal supporter of net neutrality, noted that it has become a national issue -- and one that has broad approval from Americans. She pointed to a University of Maryland study that found 83 percent of people surveyed were against the FCC's move to undo the rules around net neutrality... Ernesto Falcon, legislative counsel at the Electronic Frontier Foundation...said he is "extraordinarily confident" that proponents of net neutrality will win. "It really just boils down to how one side of the polling is in this space," Falcon said.
The incoming Democrats COULD do a lot of things. They won't. They'll spend 90% of their time, energy, and press on a futile, symbolic push to impeach Trump for paying off a woman he had an affair with. A perfectly legal action (though distasteful) that he did before he was President. Symbolic because there is 0% chance the Senate will convict. They may well not even manage to keep their own party in line to get an impeachment - impeachment of the President has only happened twice in US history, most recently Clinton was impeached.
They'll get nothing useful done because all of their focus will be on hating Trump.
What they should pass:
"If you are an ISP, you cannot charge for preferential treatment of packets based on their destination"
What they will pass:
"If you are an ISP, you can't touch packets for any reason unless they are illegal or if the MPAA or RIAA wants them throttled or if they are in relation to a hate site or related to foreign involvement in government.." and two hundred more pages of nonsense that have nothing to do with net neutrality.
My Other Computer Is A Data General Nova III.
The FCC's repeal sparked an unprecedented political backlash, and we've channeled that internet outrage into real political power
Come on, the House win was because of something the FCC did over a year ago?
Sounds like an awesome way to squander what political power they did gain on a fruitless fight for something almost no voters understand or care about.
By the way, if it was such a clear-cut political victory how did the GOP gain two senate seats over what they had before?
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Of the roughly 1% of American voters who have ever said the words "net neutrality", most want it. Most Americans have never uttered the phrase. As far as politics, most Americans have one focus. They either like Trump or dislike him - and they don't really know why. Network neutrality is hyped on Slashdot, not on CNN and Comedy Central, where most Americans get their "news".
Of those 1% who have even thought about net neutrality, so far none can define it in any meaningful, actionable way. It's a set of general, foggy concepts. Unfortunately the technical details of how carrier networks are configured is very, very complex, so it would take 500 pages (probably more) to write net neutrality rules that a) aren't full of loopholes and b) don't effectively shut down the internet if they are actually followed.
The most basic premise of NN, according to most advocates, is "carriers can't require payment before carrying a site's traffic".
One specific problem - just like you are a customer of an ISP, just as you get your internet connection from someone, so do web sites. Web sites pay carriers to take their traffic. That's often called "hosting". Down time kills their business, so sites pay multiple carriers, in order to have multiple redundant connections to the internet.
Remember the basic premise of NN, according to most advocates, is "carriers can't require payment before carrying a site's traffic". But if the site isn't paying at least one carrier, they aren't online at all. So while their heart is in the right place, actually implementing the simple rule most NN advocates ask for would simply take down every web site. It's way more complicated than that to actually implement.
On the other hand, 40% or so of Americans dislike Trump. The Democrat politicians hate him. Compared to 1% who care about net neutrality. The Democrats will focus on pretending to impeach Trump. 40% of Americans will love watching that show.
Another 40% of Americans like Trump and will be angry about the impeachment show. Another 6% will see that snce there is 0% chance that the Senate will convict Trump for paying off a lady had an affair with, before he was President, the whole impeachment show is a waste of time. They'll wish the politicians we're doing something useful instead.
So the Democrats will spend all their time putting on this circus that 40% of Americans like and 46% of Americans don't like.
NN has a cool name, but it's price control and censorship. Net neutrality wasn't passed by law. It was decreed by Obama.
Net neutrality is actually a basic manifestation of something you right wing-nuts like to harp on about: a free market
Obama's royal decree concerning "network neutrality" was badly flawed, but I think the CONCEPT is worthwhile.Let's see how Congress does in working out viable law, which would actually be enforceable, where the FCC was making it up as they went along. And now, since any law would need to be passed by both the Democrat House and the Republican Senate, AND signed by President Trump, we're likely to get a much better law.
Regulation of pricing, enforced contracts, and government enforced censorship is "free market". Right.
The original rules they tried to use were so bad, the EFF came out against them - they were neither "free" nor "market". The later revision was slightly better, but still allowed several types of priority content (while banning some of the worst), and ALSO allowed censorship of content - along with all the other shitty things that companies can do under the Title II provisions.
If you want Net Neutrality, you need to get Congress to actually pass a Net Neutrality law. Trying to force pre-internet laws written for phone and cable networks onto the internet is a bad idea. Do it right.
Federal NN rules protected a few near monopoly networks.
Remove the federal NN rules and let more competition and communities broadband grow.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
More regulation is a freer market??
Obviously that depends on the regulation. Anti-trust laws protect a free market. NN regulations protect a free internet. Other examples are left as an exercise.
Remember the story is about restoring the FCC rules they lost. Liberals crave power, just as the original social democrat Hitler did. More brownshirts, more power, more violence!
Wow, that's one hell of a false equivalence. I'll just let it stand.
If it weren't for deadlines, nothing would be late.
no.
longer answer: the dnc is tied to incrementalism, which means giving lip service to the rabble at the EFF and then doing nothing. because they are just as bought as the republicans, except they are paid to lose.
--
bmo
They already forced a vote to show who was and wasn't in favor of it. We learned two things from that
a. it's an almost completely partisan issue
b. There's not enough votes to overcome a veto.
so I don't think it's a good way to spend political capital.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
if you care about NN vote Democrat in 2020. Same goes for healthcare, especially pre-existing conditions protections. Trump's admin is pushing through a challenge to the ACA that, if Trump gets another term, will likely strike the law down. That means no more protection for pre-existing coverage. If anyone reading this has one now's the time to vote and get your family to vote.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
The news are in on the lie as well, right?
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
A list of losses in the midterms shows that the 40 lost in 2018 would be in 7th place, with Presidents Obama, Truman, and Clinton leading the list at 63, 55, and 54 respectively.
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
NN regulations protect a free internet..
Yet we didn't see so much censorship on the internet til AFTER NN was pushed though by the left. Notice how sites like youtube started doing most their censoring of people's views while NN has been in place?
You are confused. NN is not about what websites publish. It's about how service providers shape traffic.
As for Youtube and other sites, it's entirely up to them what they allow. You have freedom of speech, but Youtube is under no obligation whatsoever to hand you a megaphone.
If it weren't for deadlines, nothing would be late.
NN has a cool name, but it's price control and censorship. Net neutrality wasn't passed by law. It was decreed by Obama.
Regulation of pricing, enforced contracts, and government enforced censorship is "free market". Right.
The original rules they tried to use were so bad, the EFF came out against them - they were neither "free" nor "market". The later revision was slightly better, but still allowed several types of priority content (while banning some of the worst), and ALSO allowed censorship of content - along with all the other shitty things that companies can do under the Title II provisions.
If you want Net Neutrality, you need to get Congress to actually pass a Net Neutrality law. Trying to force pre-internet laws written for phone and cable networks onto the internet is a bad idea. Do it right.
You can take your us-vs-them Obama is the anti-christ rhetoric and deposit it where the sun does not shine. Net neutrality, by definition provides a free market environment on the internet because big players, such as Amazon, would not be able to choke competitors at birth because they, unlike the competitor, get more and better bandwidth. Net neutrality is the natural consequence of an environment where there is true competition between all telecommunications providers. In such an environment of true competition there is always somebody who offers fairer treatment to undercut his rival who does not, so the end result is basically net neutrality. I know this because in my corner of the world we have several telecommunications companies who compete fiercely with eachother nation-wide and the result has been net neutrality by default. In the absence of true competition, and the US is after all patchwork of regional telecommunications monopolies, the only way to provide net neutrality is to impose it if you are not willing to break up the monopolies and create a free market. You can be against the imposition of net neutrality in a landscape of regional monopolies but all that will get you is being screwed over even more thoroughly by those monopolies than you are currently. Judging from your: 'net neutrality is government censorship' rhetoric you thoroughly enjoy being screwed over.
Did they repeal the patriot act? Or DOMA? Or countless other things they could have done when they had the power? It's not a question of "can". It's a matter of "will". Quite simply, like always, follow the money.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
My thesis was that Democrats will spend all their time on "we hate Trump", rather than doing anything useful for the country.
Your rebuttal is:
We hate Trump.
I'm not 100% sure if you're an actual Democrat, or a parody of one.
Price control? Net neutrality doesn't prevent ISPs from charging whatever they want for the bandwidth. It just means they CANT DISCRIMINATE against specific websites or content. They can still treat video different than email for QOS but they have to treat all video the same... No fast lane for their preferred content while slowing down or charging extra for other content of the same type. They can even charge customers extra for faster speeds but again that faster speed is for whatever the customer wants - they don't get to charge extra for specific destinations. Whatever net neutrality was, and whoever first instated it doesn't matter because it's gone. What we need to do now is make a law about what net neutrality WILL BE.
The troll thing is getting old.
I am well aware that a typical law has two or three pages of terms, conditions and remediation.
My point is that the legislation *should* be limited to restricting ISPs from stratifying access based on who you are connecting to, or what service you are using. I would still like a carveout for QoS, so on Christmas morning, when everyone's X-Box is downloading gigabytes of game patches I'd like for Netflix to still work.
What will happen are requirements for special interests, and speech policing, and end-runs around encryption, and monitoring, etc...
My Other Computer Is A Data General Nova III.
Censorship is when ISPs block traffic from specific sites because they don't approve of the content.
Net Neutrality disallows ISPs from doing this.
See how that works?
The problem is that the NN the politicians want to enact is not written to do as you suggest, rather more the opposite. Because being lying, corrupt shits who pass laws they say do one thing but actually do another is what politicians do.
See how *that* works?
The way Google, Facebook, and Twitter have been neutral and non evil has me routing for the ISP's to launch competing services and throttle the hell out of the big three, until you get seconds per frame out of youtube, and can't reach facebook or Twitter at all.
So I am pretty glad the rules got repealed now, and seeing as both my senators are now Republicans I'll be writing them to ask them to keep it that way.
...as long as they can convince the GOP majority in the Senate to pass it as well, and then Trump to sign it.
Do people (Americans) not really understand how the US government works? Do Democrats think winning one house of congress is meaningful in any but a blocking way?
-Styopa
Indeed. Parent is confused.
Many don't realize that 6 of the 7 years just before the regulation was passed in 2015 were under Net Neutrality rules.
And those rules were so horrible... nobody even noticed they were there.
People who think it's onerous regulation don't know its history.
Remember in all of American history, only two Presidents have been impeached. It's not something that normally happens. A president has to be a special kind of crooked to get impeached, or especially hated. "Impeach him" isn't the normal case.
Pelosi wasn't all about impeaching Bush because that would be absolutely nuts. There wasn't ever even any claim that Bush had possibly done anything remotely resembling an impeachable offense. (Aside from, perhaps, fringe nutjobs who call anyone who isn't part of their kook a "traitor").
The Democrats *hate* Trump in a way they didn't hate Bush 43, or Bush 41, or even Reagan. I get it, he's not a likeable guy. But if you're running Congress you have the power and responsiblity to do something more than "I hate that guy". A lot of Democrats are making a lot of noise about impeachment (though none can state any grounds, any "high crime" committed). This isn't 2009, or any other time. I don't think the Democrat leadership will treat Trump like they have any Republican because he's not any Republican, they f*cking hate him. (I'm talking about Democrat House reps here, not ACs who hated Bush while not even knowing the name of his VP).
> She says she wants to do the same thing now
Which may cost her the Speakership, either not getting it this time, or lose it a year in. Sleeping with the enemy won't play well with today's Democrats. Moderates would like a Speaker to get things done, but moderates don't elect the Speaker, Democrats do - including self-described socialists and those who wear the SJW label proudly.
> Trump is kind of a liberal anyway, so he might be willing to go along with it.
Right. He's certainly not a traditional conservative. Traditional Republican leadership dislikes him too, but mostly stayed quiet after the election as he rubber-stamped their bills without reading them. He's not a conservative or liberal, he's a pragmatist and egoist. He'd be glad to make deals with Pelosi - he LOVES making deals.
> (This is all my opinion, of course).
Same. It would be best for the country if you end up being right. I don't think the Democrats have the wisdom or self-control to make that happen.
You are confused. NN is not about what websites publish. It's about how service providers shape traffic.
As for Youtube and other sites, it's entirely up to them what they allow. You have freedom of speech, but Youtube is under no obligation whatsoever to hand you a megaphone.
Arguably, service providers should be content-neutral regardless of if they're an ISP or a server.
However, the method of how you get NN regulations seriously matters. You want something which is on a practical level enforceable and which will stand up in court if challenged--and that means at the very least that there needs to be actual enabling legislation, even if it's done by passing a literal post-it note with a simple statement empowering the FCC to make regulations requiring net neutrality & enforce them.
I would, however, prefer actual robust privacy regulations instead. It's going to be easier to enforce those than direct net neutrality regulations.
Pence and Trump are going nowhere, the losses are among the lower for first midterms, and Kavanaugh will be hearing whatever asinine challenges your side comes up with.
You are beyond delusional - get out of the echo chamber, you are not getting good information.
Hey, it's better than a rapist (Bill Clinton), a war crminial (Bush), or another war criminal (Obama). Remember when Obama bombed a Doctors Without Borders hospital, and then sent gunners in to gun down the fleeing doctors and patients? He needs to stand trial at The Hague. How many wars has Trump started? Zero so far. In fact, he tried to get us out of Afghanistan and Syria, only to be overruled by the unelected government.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
More regulation is a freer market??
Well, ideally not, but it is more free than a market dominated by few players.
If you want a free market you have two choices:
1) The government steps in, takes over and breaks up AT&T, Comcast, Time Warner, Verizon and Charter.
2) Net neutrality.
The alternative is a non-free market controlled by a few companies with the same problems you get with a government controlled internet together with the demand for ever increasing profits.
The free market model only works if you can keep taking your business elsewhere.
If you run out of alternatives and have to go back to someone you were unhappy with then the free marked doesn't work and the vendors can just collude and offer equally bad and overpriced services.
So yes. We all love a free market and would like to see it, but the market isn't infinite so if left unregulated all markets end up as monopolies with less demand for efficiency than a government controlled alternative and no incentive to keep the prices low for the consumer.
It isn't. If you are talking about someone who pays for a specific service getting access at speed to the content they already paid to access, then yes it is a good thing. If you are saying that content providers have some special right to ISP servers and all should get special access beyond having their content routed to specific customer requests then I would not agree that NN is a good thing.
Dunno if the Democrats will succeed at it, but that's the way it's supposed to work. The legislature passes potential changes in the law for the President to approve. This whole mess began when the Democrat-appointed Chair of the FCC tried to short-circuit the legislative process and unilaterally implemented a new policy. When a new President got elected, his appointed Chair of the FCC unilaterally changed the policy. It's hypocritical to support the former but be upset about the latter. In terms of process, they're the same thing. Either both are wrong, or both are OK.
The legislature crafts and votes on potential new policies. If both branches pass it, it goes to the President, who can sign it or veto it. Only if a bill passes this convoluted process does it become law and a new policy. The whole point of having to go through that lengthy and difficult process to implement a new policy is that it then requires we have to go through that lengthy and difficult process again to change that policy. You don't get this idiotic flip-flopping where one appointed individual single-handedly implements a new policy, the next appointed individual reverses that policy, the next individual re-implements it again, repeat. It needs to be hard to change policy. If it's too easy, nothing will get done because we'll be wasting our time changing it back and forth all the time.
Simple example for the perennially stupid. Unregulated free market, easiest way to deal with competitors, SHOOT THEM, a regulated market bans this. In more business like terms, say one health insurance company wants to out compete another. It simple offers cheap policies, that it never intends to pay. Basically chew up all premiums in wildly inflated executive salaries and let the company go inevitably bankrupt. In the meantime they have bankrupted honest health insurance companies because they are not selling insurance because they can not compete. So every one dies because no one has health insurance that will pay anything because the corrupt companies can start, again and again and again, bankruptcy after bankruptcy, zero regulation, voilÃ.
Yes, you have to regulate the fuck out of the free market because psychopathic capitalists do no give one fuck about how many people they kill as long as infinite profits are generated. Capitalism is a business practice designed around failure and not success, no matter how successful, the system is designed so that a new competitor will destroy the existing company, no matter how much worse it is or that it has been designed to extract maximum profits and then fail and push those losses on the rest of the public, whilst the psychopath capitalists run off with the profits (this is not the isolated event but has become the psychopathic insane fucking norm of American capitalism ha ha ha ha ha ha ha).
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
They didn't lose the rules... some power hungry cuck that was paid off by corporations abdicated his responsibility to maintain a level playing field so that the citizens of this country don't get fucked by fascist shit stains like you. I am really sorry you're so fucking stupid. It's really a pity you're nothing more than a partisan waste of flesh.
https://www.snopes.com/news/20...
Given that Nazism is traditionally held to be an extreme right-wing ideology, the party’s conspicuous use of the term “socialist” — which refers to a political system normally plotted on the far-left end of the ideological spectrum — has long been a source of confusion, not to mention heated debate among partisans seeking to distance themselves from the genocidal taint of Nazi Germany.
That epitomizes stupid cunts like you: distancing yourself from your ideology in the eyes of others, all the while being worthless shit stains. No honor, no integrity,party before country.
Fascism: An authoritarian and nationalistic right-wing system of government and social organization. See also: NAZI's
How many wars has Trump started? Zero so far.
Best thing about Trump's presidency hands down.
Still, he once bombed a country over cake, and later couldn't remember which country it was
He described the cake in detail.
He ain't done shit. And speaking of Trump's shit, you have some on your nose.....lots of it.
Fascism: An authoritarian and nationalistic right-wing system of government and social organization. See also: NAZI's
No, the major push for censorship happened when the notion of "safe harbor if compliant" was brought forward with DMCA.
Rather than giving blanket immunity for what subscribers did with a service, and holding the individual subscribers directly accountable, and not the service provider, which was the prior legal practice.
But that was "too hard!!", and service providers had more money, and more direct control that could be enforced, and here we are.
Terms of service documents changed all over as the threat of legal responsibility for the vitriol produced by subscribers became a real and present danger for service providers.
But by all means, continue with this nonsense about NN being responsible. All NN really did was say "No, you cannot suddenly abandon the open-ended agreements the internet started with just because now you can get much more profit by double dipping with charges, and with offering graded or exclusive service levels." That was all.
No shit, check out North Carolina, where ballots were illegally collected and......oh, wait, that was a Republican scam....never mind.
Donald Trump, on a crusade to make Nixon look respectable
Net neutrality is actually a basic manifestation of ... a free market
More regulation is a freer market??
You can almost count the companies for who it is 'more regulation' on one hand: Charter, Comcast, AT&T, Verizon, Sprint and T-Mobile.
But it ensures a free market and level playing field for the hundreds of thousands of companies that are actually providing services on the internet. Without net neutrality, you only reward the current big dogs, while the next Netflix, Youtube, Facebook or Amazon may never stand a chance to even be visible to the public at large.
Regulation is a necessary part of a free market. Without it then you have thugs, whoever is the biggest pushes everyone else around, which is not freedom.
Yes, but it's quite a bit deeper than that because the devil is in the details. At first glance, it is that simple, but then there is the logistics of how this is enforced and under what set of laws and regulations an ISP is to be held. The fundamental debate is whether an ISP is deemed a common carrier or not (IMHO they should be), which provides for a whole host of other regulations many ISP's don't want to be roped into, similar to the telephone system supporting last mile, etc etc. There are also limits as to what they can own. With Comcast owning NBC and a bunch of other content generators and broadcasters, they may be forced to divest certain assets that they would rather not. It is going to be a messy, heavily litigated battle to make net neutrality a law, which is why it went to regulations the first go-round. I believe an ISP is a common carrier and that traffic should not be tampered with, but this needs to be made into a formal law that can stand judicial scrutiny rather than a haphazard regulation that can be unmade as will.
Hitler was a right wing fascist.
Sorry, no. Fascism is on the Left along with Socialism and Communism. Hitler used National Socialism as a means to power and then went relatively straight into a military dictatorship
When Mussolini turned Italy Fascist, Lenin congratulated him as a fellow leader of a Marxism-based nation. Communism, Fascism, and Socialism are all Collectivist-based, central-command-and-control societies where the desires and agendas of "The State"/"The People" (as defined by a few powerful people or person in charge) are paramount over the needs, wants, dreams, and desires of the individual. Everything and everyone exists within the State, nothing exists outside the State.
The only difference between Socialism and Fascism is that where Socialist governments directly control the means of production, Fascists leave figureheads ostensibly "running" things like factories and rail companies so they have scapegoats to throw to the wolves when their central-command-and-control agendas for the economy and society causes collapses, increasing tyranny, and violence as they always do and always have done.
Strat
Progressivism (aka US 'Liberalism'): Ideas so good they need a police/surveillance-state to enforce.
NO.
NN has nothing to do with censorship in the manner that Parent states. That was the point.
NN is about not prioritizing content, and or, not making content exclusive access.
The DMCA on the other hand, introduced the concept of "Site operator is responsible for content, even when they did not create it."
That did not exist prior to the DMCA. It was this introduction that started the chilling effect, not NN.
Yet we didn't see so much censorship on the internet til AFTER NN was pushed though by the left.
How do you call it when a facepalm punches right through your head?
Notice how sites like youtube started doing most their censoring of people's views while NN has been in place?
Youtube is not a censor, it's a private organization.
Ezekiel 23:20
More regulation is a freer market??
Yep, that's how it works for natural monopolies.
Ezekiel 23:20
Sorry, no. Fascism is on the Left along with Socialism and Communism.
First paragraph, bitch.
From Merriam-Webster
"Definition of fascism
1 often capitalized : a political philosophy, movement, or regime (such as that of the Fascisti) that exalts nation and often race above the individual and that stands for a centralized autocratic government headed by a dictatorial leader, severe economic and social regimentation, and forcible suppression of opposition"
Sound like anybody we know?
Oh, you poor idiot. The post didn't mention Obama, didn't blame any party, but just laid out the facts.
What idiots voted up your incoherent rant? You aren't familiar with the US or US laws, and even when I linked to detailed arguments by a pro-Net Neutrality you couldn't be bothered to read them or address their points.
Try learning a little something about US laws, and what the FCC tried to do. Try the EFF - it's a great source. Of course, it requires reading, learning, and understanding, which you may be short on in your corner of the world. But good luck! Maybe next time you won't embarrass yourself with an ignorant rant about something you don't understand.
Yep, undoubtedly a Russian troll. We traced his IP address directly to Stalingrad.
Since the city only gets the name Stalingrad for six specific days a year in reference to its WW II heroism, this will help nail down the time of trolling, right?
No.
They could possibly introduce a bill that has this in it, but unless they throw in enough Republican sweeteners to get it though the senate and past the Whtehouse, the Democrats cannot DO anything.
In reality the past election didn't change much at all. It moved the power of the Democrats to say "NO" a bit towards the House and allowed them to actually get bills onto the Senate, but they cannot force the Senate to debate them or the president to sign them any more than before.
So the balance of power may have moved ever so slightly in that Republicans now cannot get legislation though the house by themselves anymore, but the reality of the situation doesn't change either party's current position beyond a slight shift in news coverage and in the fact the the Democrats can send all the bills they like to the Senate and watch them die.
So no, the Democrats cannot do this on their own come January. All they can possibly do is make a bit of a larger stink about it, pass a House bill to "fix" it, and watch it die waiting to come up for debate in the Senate.
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
Seems to me this whole stream is academic.
In the US system of government - the House, Senate, and President need to agree on a Bill to make it law (Me thinks someone needs to watch School House Rock again..).
With that being said - only the House is in the hands of the Democrat party - the Senate and Presidency are in the hands of the Republican party. Can you say grid-lock boys and girls?
QED - Can't/Ain't gonna happen.
Have you compiled your kernel today??
Public agenda is set by the president, and democrats are a minority in this administration.
Sure, they can try and advance something in the House, but it goes nowhere without the President and the Senate onboard.
Oh, you poor idiot. The post didn't mention Obama, didn't blame any party, but just laid out the facts.
What idiots voted up your incoherent rant? You aren't familiar with the US or US laws, and even when I linked to detailed arguments by a pro-Net Neutrality you couldn't be bothered to read them or address their points.
Try learning a little something about US laws, and what the FCC tried to do. Try the EFF - it's a great source. Of course, it requires reading, learning, and understanding, which you may be short on in your corner of the world. But good luck! Maybe next time you won't embarrass yourself with an ignorant rant about something you don't understand.
Oh, you poor idiot, the OP (which I quoted and you did not read) mentioned Obama, Also, NN has shit-all to do with censorship, it is all about ensuring an euqal playing field when it comes to bandwidth access. And I know all about the US telco marker and what a corrupt and screwed up unholy mess of monopolies it is. None of that changes NN into some kind of censorship mechanism that is ‘Bwaaaaah!!! UNFAIR!!’ to right-wing blow hards.
This is excellent, and it's just a shame no one bothers to teach Civics in any sensible way any more. And very sad and very necessary for our little echo chamber to hear and understand. Much of what has been said here about NN is the product of the bizarro world.
Everyone should *want* rules/regulation/laws *voted on by elected officials* who can subsequently be made *accountable* for the results. Not by fiat of a President, appointed functionaries, etc. It is *supposed to be* very hard to pass laws and *supposed to ensure* that only laws with widespread general agreement get passed and that *individual elected officials* have to go on record with their votes.
The intention of the constitutional arrangement was to preclude the development of a semi-permanent unelected "civil servant" class as in European countries who become the true power in the system, with the representatives acting as temporary figureheads, and no one is accountable for their actions. When Trump, for all his faults, talks about "The Swamp", that's what he means.
The system operated at least somewhat according to the design until 1933, when a radical exploited a panic to implement the concepts of the Three Letter Agency, created ostensibly to develop regulations that are "too complex" for the Congress to work out themselves. The far more relevant side effect is that it also isolated elected officials from accountability for their actions. They voted to create the various agencies and gave them the power to make "regulations", which are de facto law. Of course you have to man these agencies somehow, and Congress couldn't possibly vet every employee, so once they start, they are both essentially immune to politics or the will of the voters, and no one can ever really pin down which elected official to tag for something they don't like. Of course, the same employees work there for years, they write the job requirements in such a way that only career bureaucrats can ever qualify for the leadership positions, so it becomes a self-sustaining "civil service" class. Of course, no one can ever *get rid* of one of these agencies, if you do, then Congress would be held responsible, which is very dangerous for the elected officials. So it only gets larger and larger and more and more dominant and monolithic.
Most slashdotters were perfectly happy when unelected officials instituted net neutrality in a unilateral manner with no popular support or any accountability, because you got what you wanted and didn't care about the fact that it was done by decree. Now many of the same people are upset that it was also undone by decree, and suddenly you want to follow the constitutional process - which is very likely never going to happen because *no one cares about it but you*, and therefore *should not be done under any circumstances* because it has *no popular support* on either side of the fence.
You want net neutrality - convince a lot of people that its important, and that your solution is best. If enough people care, then you will get your law - otherwise, if you haven't defined the problem in a way that people care about or if you haven't convinced anyone that Net Neutrality is a good solution, then *there should certainly not be a law about it*.
Yes, the Dems have the House, but they lost seats in the Senate, and a bunch of moderate Republicans dropped out of the Senate as well. Any attempt to reimpose net neutrality by legislation will never make it through the Senate.
No, not while Republicans control either the House, Senate, or White House. If Democrats controlled the House and Senate, they might be able to pass a bill--if they got 60 votes in the Senate to override a filibuster--but it would still be hard to override a presidential veto by a Republican president.
Dude you just cheered ADOLF HITLER. What the fuck? Can we have your employer so we can report this to your HR department?
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
How tolerant! How understanding of others! You disagree with what others say but will defend to the death their right to say it? No? WTF. That's straight up fascism.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
Consider no other legislation until a Net Neutrality bill is signed into law.
Now, this may cause other problems because the legislature will be shirking their constitutional duties, and the other side will do the same with some other piece of legislation, like that "Border Wall", But "putting your foot down" to advance critical issues is something the corrupt US congress needs to start doing.
Hitler was a right wing fascist. Stupid fucks like you keep being told that by pretty much everyone in the world other than your worthless right wing partisans.
Hitler was a leftie. He was a socialist.
Free market was the DECADES of explosive growth the Internet had. All of a sudden, Obama DECREES changes.
Now, if you ask me if I was the explosive growth of the Internet or I want the censorship & price control of Obama's policies that NO ONE voted on, I'll choose the former.
You are confused. NN is not about what websites publish. It's about how service providers shape traffic.
That's what they want you to think. That's what it sounds like. Do some more research.
who won't do that. There's plenty of honest, left wing candidates that ran in the primary and lost to bought and paid Clinton Democrats. Then show up in the general and vote them in and problem solved.
It isn't even hard to know who's bought off. There's a website called Open Secrets that tracks it. It doesn't list all the dark money shenanigans, but it's not like these folks are trying to hide.
Nancy Pelosi had a left wing primary challenger that didn't take a dime from corporate PACs. For all everybody's bitching she's still speaker of the house. Show up at your primary and vote, dammit.
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Gab is back up. Alex Jones has a website still. Secular Talk is still on Youtube even after the adpocalypse.
I think by "censorship" you mean, "Companies excising their freedom of association". That's part of it too, you know. If you don't like it, you can exercise freedom of association too. Stop doing business with the companies that deplatform folks you like. Directly support them.
And that said, NN has _nothing_ to do with the last round of deplatforming and you know it. Even ignoring the fact that NN wasn't "pushed" by the left but was in fact a reaction to the ISPs abusing their power as carriers you've just said that NN equals censorship. I don't. I can't even. I mean. Wow, talk about missing the point. NN is the polar opposite of censorship.
What you're really doing is a dishonest debate tactic where you take something unpopular with your audience (deplatforming) and conflate it with something popular with said audience (NN) to score points against the latter. It's a nasty trick, and you should be ashamed of yourself for using it.
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That's what it IS. Quit spreading disinformation. Net neutrality rules covered ISPs, period. Websites were completely and totally out of scope for those laws. Do at least a tiny bit of research.
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Hitler was a nationalist populist. Some Nazi positions were left, some were right. But attempting to describe it fully in terms of modern parties is impossible, because no modern party would ever declare that immigrants and members of a particular religion are the cause of all of our country's problems, and that we have to cage them and deport them at all costs, and wall ourselves off from... no, wait....
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
I would be absolutely on board with overturning the Federal Arbitration Act so that customers can do so.
I wouldn't say that it flourished. The United States has consistently been behind the rest of the world, speed-wise, for nearly the entire history of the Internet, largely because unlike the rest of the world, we used government funds to put our network in the hands of private corporations instead of letting the government continue to build out and manage the physical infrastructure. The only thing that brought us even slightly closer to catching up with the rest of the world was when the FCC mandated that incumbent phone companies allow other companies to lease their lines to provide Internet service.
That's a good start, but as long as ISPs exist as a natural monopoly, consumers will still need protection from ISPs that decide to make deals that aren't in consumers' best interests. Even if we broke up those conglomerates, short of it becoming legal to sue your ISP, we would still need some form of net neutrality laws, IMO.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
More regulation is a freer market??
Yes, because you people don't understand the term free market, so we've just stopped differentiating. You see every time you use the word "Free Market" what you actually mean is a "Perfect Market". A Perfect Market is a free market in it's most unstable form with ideal competition to solve problems.
The reality for a free market is there is only one stable condition: Pure monopoly, and the consumers and workers getting fucked over.
So since al'ya'all've been using the term wrong all these years why can't we too?
You've got a causality problem. And your timeline is off since you happily seem to be ignoring "censorship" prior to the NN discussions. Mind you since you're talking about "censorship" I honestly wonder if you have any idea what net neutrality is or why it is being discussed at all.
Some rule of headlines says no anyway. But the reason is that the Dems and Reps will want to nurture it as a wedge issue rather than fix it.
Nullius in verba
Ford attempted to prevent anyone but a Ford dealership from repairing the cars they sell. This was blocked by laws (actually the courts making rules...). The railroads blocked their competition, fixed by laws. It is impossible to have a free marketplace without rules.
The ideal method of enforcing NN in America is for the government to own the network, and to have laws passed by Congress to define how they must run it. If a private company owns the network then the police/NSA/FBI/CIA will pay them to spy on you, just like they do now.
There are 2 axis on the graph of political systems: left to right is Collective ownership / private ownership, the up/down direction is how much control the government has over people (Totalitarianism). Fascism is the merger of corporations with government (top right on graph), essentially the Republicans in a world where nobody tells Trump NO. As for economic ruin, are you suggesting Trump is a Socialist? He's certainly destroying the economy (think Argentina).
E.g. the kind of economically right wing Dems that road Bill Clinton's coattails into office in the 90s.
Meanwhile Bernie Sanders, Liz Warren, Ocasio-Cortez and the rest of the actual left are busy pushing legislation like Medicare for All, tuition free college, ending wars and yes, restoring net Neutrality.
Register Democrat, show up at your primary in 2020, and vote the Clinton Dems out and you can have the government you deserve. Stay home or worse, vote in more of the Clinton Dems or the GOP (same difference really) and, well, you'll get exactly what we've always had.
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What happens to the Internet can wait for now. They have more important things to deal with, like stopping the damage being done to just about everything in our government, and to start reversing/repairing the damage already done. Things got horribly out-of-balance and restoring that balance, so that all voices are heard, not just so-called 'conservative' voices, is much more important right now than anything about the Internet.
I thought the Internet was going to die at the hands of Trump. It seems with Obama's "Net Neutrality" gone, the FCC and various states are finally going after TWC/Comcast.
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Why is it such a big deal? The apocalypse didn't happen prior to then. I'm also pretty sure that the major tech players ignored it whenever they want to.
So, what does it promise to do, and will any of the major tech players care?
Historically, the only action (most) States have managed is to ban community broadband. If you think weaker government means more power to the people history disagrees with you.
Cities are putting up fiber-as-utility all over right now. Just here in Colorado, we have some 6+ cities running their own fiber, they have 1+G connections to the homes (and more to businesses) for less than $100 (several are around $50 for that 1G up/down).
Centennial CO Fiber
Longmont CO fiber Ft. Collins, CO Fiber Oops. Turns out that we have over 100 towns/cities adding/already added GB fiber-as-utility on their own.
How is all this disagreeing with me?
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
All of the telcos need broken up in any case. They are arms of a fascist order, evidenced by thier willingness to partner with government to curtail basic human rights.
Consolidated power seeks the power of government to preserve thier advantage while politicians seek the approval of the consolidated power to further themselves.
Every president does the same things to curry favor with the consolidated powers. That is why nothing changes. No one is enforcing anti merger laws nevermind antitrust.
I object to power without constructive purpose. --Spock
The ideal method of enforcing NN in America is for the government to own the network, and to have laws passed by Congress to define how they must run it. If a private company owns the network then the police/NSA/FBI/CIA will pay them to spy on you, just like they do now.
No, that won't actually work. Either you can trust the government or you cannot. If we could trust the government to own the network, then that bowl of tinfoil hat alphabet soup would not be paying private companies to spy on you. If they are/would be doing that? Then all the government owning the network can do is make it cheaper for the police/NSA/FBI/CIA to spy on you, because they'll own the network...and they can probably make it vastly easier for them to do so and harder to catch them at it because they own the network.
Personally, I think it's more likely that private companies do not care in the least who they sell the data to as long as they make a profit as, it should be noted, the courts have required they do--ban packet sniffers, even by simply having them a huge gaping liability for the ISP, and a lot of the problem should go away and the enforcement issue is made vastly easier because it's easier to show they have awareness of what's going through their tubes than that they know & are knowingly and deliberately manipulating it in illegal manners. (I favor the 'make huge liability' option mostly because it means that we might never need to spend a single taxpayer cent on enforcement that way. We can just kick back, munch popcorn, and watch the MAFIAA to do it for us...which might even keep down on the harm they do, too. If you really want, set it up so ISPs can get hit coming and going with liability, by having their customers also able to sue them with the invasion of privacy being treated as in and of itself harmful.)
Fascism doesn't give two shits what you call the political spectrum it controls.
I object to power without constructive purpose. --Spock
I stated that while Democrats *could* do some useful and good things, they won't because they are too consumed with hating Trump. That's all they can talk about or focus on. They can't focus on anything positive because they can't get their minds on anything but hating Trump.
Your response was a bunch of "I hate Trump". Even when the criticism is "y'all can't say anything other than hating Trump", STILL the only thing that can come out of your mouth is "I hate Trump". Even when that's obviously the absolute worst possible thing to say, because it would prove the point that it's all you can talk about, STILL you can't keep yourself from doing it.
dgatwood was spot on. You on the other hand are a fucking idiot.
Fascism: An authoritarian and nationalistic right-wing system of government and social organization. See also: NAZI's
Under common carrier rules that made NN unnecessary. Rules put in place by the same agency that put forth NN.
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Exactly! Net Neutrality is nonsense! If those rules are again re-imposed, than certain bundles like your cell phone provider giving you free Hulu or free Netflix disappears overnight.
The fear here is that the small blog will get speed throttled and won't be able to compete with larger entities like the N.Y. Times. That, again, is bunk! The Free Market (i.e. all "netizens") would revolt if that happened! The same with your ISP throttling your speed. The outcry would be so great that the ISP would have to un-throttle their service. Again, this is why we don't need Net Neutrality: The Free Market is *MUCH* better at policing ISPs, and the 'net in general than the Federal Government could ever be!
I look at Net Neutrality as I do with most regulations: Control! And the Democrats (read: Commucrats!) LOVE to control everything!
The original proposal for Trump's Muslim travel ban was largely about legal immigration (refugee status in particular).
And arguably, the only reason we have illegal immigration from our southern border in the first place is that our government has this bizarre notion that if we pretend Mexico isn't a failed state, it somehow isn't one. If you use the word "economic refugees" instead of "illegal immigrants", you get something more closely resembling reality.
Trump's wall is basically a repeat of post-WWII Germany, and just like then, the principal effect will be a bunch of desperate people getting shot in the demilitarized zone while trying to escape a failing state that deteriorates ever further. Sad.
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ISPs were never common carriers. That said, the GP was also wrong:
Explosive growth on the Internet was largely in spite of U.S. ISPs, not because of it. ISPs have never acted even slightly like a free market. They're a natural monopoly, because the high cost of infrastructure strongly favors any incumbent provider over any new provider so much that it is almost impossible for a second ISP to begin serving an area except in commercial centers of large cities.
And because adding bandwidth costs money, U.S. ISPs have always done just about everything in their power to keep speeds low and prices high, while the rest of the world improved much faster. It was only the explosive popularity of services like YouTube, Netflix, etc. that forced the ISPs to improve, and they have only done so to the minimum extent necessary to keep customers from challenging their license to continue using public rights-of-way.
The main reason net neutrality laws only started becoming necessary recently is that historically, most ISPs were telephone companies, whereas now, the overwhelming majority of broadband is provided by cable companies that also provide their own competing video-on-demand services and phone services. This gives those ISPs a strong incentive to shape bandwidth in ways that make their VoD services perform better than competing services. And some large ISPs began doing precisely that.
That's the most important thing to understand: Net neutrality regulations were a response to actual bad behavior. Many of those same companies now claim that they support net neutrality. This seems unlikely. Rather, it is far more likely that they're just sorry they got caught, and they'll be more careful in the future.
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Nice straw man. That's not a premise of NN at all. It's a natural side effect of NN, and only applies when that carrier is not that site's ISP.
Net Neutrality can be stated very simply: "An ISP shall carry all traffic in a manner that does not discriminate based on its source or destination." An ideal Net Neutrality law would also add "and shall not throttle traffic below the advertised speed except to the minimum extent required for quality-of-service and other similar network management," but that is somewhat less critical.
That's it. Everything else folks talk about as being part of Net Neutrality, is a natural side effect of that one simple rule. For example, Comcast would not be allowed to charge Netflix a fee in exchange for not throttling Netflix traffic to Comcast customers, because Comcast provides similar types of video-on-demand service, and if it throttled Netflix without throttling its own video-on-demand service, that would be discriminating against some video-on-demand traffic based on its source/destination. (It isn't that it would not be allowed to charge the fee so much as that even threatening to throttle the traffic in the first place would be per se illegal.)
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Here's one to really trigger you.
The Democratic Party planks and the German National Socialist Party planks are, adjusting for language and historical context, nearly identical. Not only that, but the first laws enacted against the Jews in 1930s/40s Germany were copied from the Democrat "Jim Crow" laws with the ethnicities changed.
BTW, OP is correct, fascism is simply a modified form of socialism that leaves some means of production technically in private hands but heavily monitored and controlled by the government as opposed to being owned outright by government like socialism, otherwise they are for all intents and purposes nearly identical.
Wouldn't it be cool if it were as simple as:
"An ISP shall carry all traffic in a manner that does not discriminate based on its source or destination."
There wasn't actually a network neutrality bill that said pretty much that. No blocking the world's biggest spammers, you have to accept their mail. It's illegal to do anything about a DOS attack against you, you have to accept all the traffi from the Russian botnet.
Unfortunately it way, way more complicated than that.
Whenever I point out the obvious consequences of the "simple NN laws" that people with no understanding of carrier networking propose, very often the reply is something like:
"Well now you're just being silly - that's now what I meant. You know what I mean." Unfortunately "you know what I mean" doesn't quite work as a law. It DOES sound silly when I point out the effects of such simplistic rules, because the simplistic rules ARE silly.
I'm totally with you on the *spirit* of what you want with NN. We're in agreement on that. Where we defer is I happen to have enough experience and knowledge regarding large networks to look at the text of a proposed law and have pretty good idea of how it would need to be implemented in router configuration, and what the effects would be.
Ugh, I typed "wasn't a bill" when I meant "was a bill".
That draft died pretty quick when it was pointed out that, among other things, it would take down the Congressional email system. 90% of the email traffic is spam and if it were all allowed through, most email servers would crash under the load.
How exactly do you think traffic gets to the mail server?
The reality is, if we didn't block traffic from bad guys, you wouldn't be able to use this site right now. That's because the bad guys try to send a LOT of traffic. In the case of email, the bad guys try to send roughly twenty times as much as all the good guys put together.
So you have to have "it's okay to block traffic from bad guys".
Which does lewve open the theoretical possibility that Comcast could definitely that Netflix is a bad guy.
How exactly do you think that anything other than the mail server can reasonably judge whether an email message is spam or not? Nobody, and I mean nobody filters spam at the network level, other than possibly DOS blocking, and DOS blocking, as I mentioned elsewhere, can be done in ways that do not discriminate based on source. Just treat all abusive behavior equally regardless of which source is doing the abuse.
No, it doesn't. Netflix cannot realistically ever be considered a DOS attack, because all traffic from Netflix is in response to a request by someone on Comcast's network. It's a pull model, not a push model.
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> Nobody, and I mean nobody filters spam at the network level
ROTFL. In actual fact, any network that doesn't drop connections from certain types of spam outfits, instead transiting it to their peers, will find that their peers drop THEM.
It's fine, not everybody *needs* to know the difference between a packet, a frame, and a flow. If it's not your job to know carrier networking, someone don't look silly for not knowing how this stuff works. One only looks silly when they *pretend* to know, while obviously not having a clue.
And just like with the socialism that Democrats like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Bernie Sanders want to implement, they hide from you the reality that you will end up paying for it.
The premise of Net Neutrality is that all traffic should be treated the same. No fast lanes or slow lanes.
The problem with this is that when something comes out, I'm sure everyone whether it's the new content release for a major video game launch or anything else.. When everyone tries to access the content at once, there's a huge demand and it's a huge problem. ISPs have oversold their bandwidth, just like Internet hosts voersell their storage space. Because in that example, most customers might have 50gb space, or 10gb but they only maybe set up one landing page or something maybe 20mb in size.. etc.
This is why when a new content release for a video game comes out, there are queues and people waiting hours to get in, because the network is flooded with traffic. And then people who have no clue complain about how the servers and all this and how they didn't anticipate this..
The way the ISP's want to solve this is by expanding their infrastructure and they wanted companies like Netflix, Google, YouTube, etc. to pay for this. These companies, don't want to pay for it, in the form of paying to have access to a fast lane. So they want Net Neutrality because that means no fast/slow lanes, and they don't have to pay money. They put out this huge marketing campaigns that say how Net Neutrality provides the same Internet access for everyone and no one is privileged or slowed down. (sound familiar? SOCIALISM .. ding ding ding).. and then they fear monger saying companies will start making piecemeal services for social media, email, etc.
Then smaller companies like Discord jump on the bandwagon believing the marketing and propaganda, thinking that NN repeal would hurt them when in reality Discord uses hardly any of the bandwidth compared to say Netflix.
So what's the truth about this? Well it's not that Net Neutrality is absolutely the correct way to go or that not having Net Neutrality is the right way to go. It's completely opinion based. However here's the low down: If Net Neutrality is in place, ISPs will still want to expand their infrastructure... and they aren't going to pay for it. They will pass it on to consumers.
So without Net Neutrality if Netflix and Google have to pay for fast lanes, then they will increase the price of their services. They are telling you that Net Neutrality protects against this, but in the end, just like with socialism.. You will end up having the tax burden, erm. I'm sorry. Higher Internet costs, as a result.
Truth is both big wig ISPs and big tech companies have MORE THAN ENOUGH MONEY to pay for this on their own, they are just battling out over who is going to pay for it.
However, the past has taught us this: Whenever you enact government to legislate an industry you effectively also implement corruption and government bribery in which lobbyists pretty much fund politicians' campaign funds to get the laws that they want passed, and then you have the corporations controlling the legislation.
This has been seen for the past hundred years in telecom. Stefan Molyneux has an incredibly thorough and factual video on this which cites all of the corruption in the telecom industry going back the past hundred or so years.
So the facts would lead to believe that not having Net Neutrality is a safer way to go, because any kind of government legislation is going to take power away from the consumer dollar, which is number one what should decide what happens.
- Alex