Slashdot Mirror
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.
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.
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
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.
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/
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!
Nancy Pelosi actually has a history of political competence
Whoops there goes all your credibility. Nancy Pelosi is only vaguely aware of who the current president is.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
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.
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?
Well let's see. There were 26 blue seats up for grabs and 9 red seats.
So I guess the answer would be... math?
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.
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.
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.
They'll get along with it. She knows what she's doing. She just doesn't make a big deal of it, and lets the normal fighting go on while she's getting things done in the background.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
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.
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
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
Apparently you don't understand what NN is.It has nothing to do with the different states trying to limit municipal broadband development. And as for competition in general, that what NN does... it makes it impossible for corporations to stifle their competition by limiting access or increasing the costs of bandwidth.
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.
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.
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.
More regulation is a freer market??
Yep, that's how it works for natural monopolies.
Ezekiel 23:20
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.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
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.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
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.
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.
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.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
Fascism doesn't give two shits what you call the political spectrum it controls.
I object to power without constructive purpose. --Spock
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.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
Protecting the same near monopoly brands with years of federal NN rules did not result in the needed new ISP work.
Freeing up the federal NN rules will allow more new networks to get approved and allow people online with new ISP networks.
And unicorns will swoop down and carry Donald Trump off in a flaming chariot.
Seriously, that's about as likely as ISPs suddenly coming into existence because of reduced regulation. ISPs are monopolies or near-monopolies for one reason, and one reason only: The expected payoff for bringing a new ISP into an area is a very large percentage of the total life expectancy of the required infrastructure.
I'll give you a moment to let that sink in. When your infrastructure (cables, amplifiers, etc.) lasts on average only about thirty years and it takes fifteen years to pay it down, there can realistically be at most two ISPs in a given area. And when you start out with one, it is suicidal to add a second one, because the first one, who has already paid off much of its infrastructure costs, can trivially undercut you for a long period of time until you go bankrupt, then buy your infrastructure for pennies on the dollar as a nearly free upgrade. This is almost always what happens when a new competitor enters pretty much any market.
The only markets where multiple ISPs exist in the United States are either markets in which more than one ISP existed in competition from the very beginning (e.g. where the phone company deployed fiber quickly enough to keep the cable company from eating its lunch) or markets in which the community itself built out the infrastructure and leased access to multiple ISPs.
No amount of deregulation can ever change that reality. Starting a new ISP in an area that already has an ISP is a great way to book a giant loss for tax purposes, but otherwise, it isn't a very useful practical to do.
There are only two ways to usefully get broadband competition: build out publicly owned (or non-profit-owned) infrastructure and lease it to ISPs, or pass laws that require all infrastructure companies to lease their lines to other companies, similar to the way DSL is regulated. Other than those two approaches, government cannot feasibly create competition in broadband. The tendency towards monopoly or, at best, duopoly is simply too strong, and this has been proven time and time again in city after city.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.