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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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/