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Net Neutrality Bill 38 Votes Short In Congress, and Time Has Almost Run Out (arstechnica.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Legislation to restore net neutrality rules now has 180 supporters in the U.S. House of Representatives, but that's 38 votes short of the amount needed before the end of the month. The Congressional Review Act (CRA) resolution, already approved by the Senate, would reverse the Federal Communications Commission's repeal of net neutrality rules. But 218 signatures from U.S. representatives (a majority) are needed to force a full vote in the House before Congress adjourns at the end of the year.
Net neutrality advocates previously said they needed 218 signatures by December 10 to force a vote. But an extension of Congress' session provided a little more time. "[Now that the Congressional session has officially been extended, members of Congress could be in town as late as December 21st," net neutrality advocacy group Fight for the Future wrote yesterday. "This means we have until the end of the year to get as many lawmakers as possible signed on to restore net neutrality." A discharge petition that would force a vote on the CRA resolution gained three new supports in the past two weeks, but even if all Democrats were on board it still wouldn't be enough to force a vote. Republicans have a 236-197 House majority, and only one House Republican has signed the petition.
Net neutrality advocates previously said they needed 218 signatures by December 10 to force a vote. But an extension of Congress' session provided a little more time. "[Now that the Congressional session has officially been extended, members of Congress could be in town as late as December 21st," net neutrality advocacy group Fight for the Future wrote yesterday. "This means we have until the end of the year to get as many lawmakers as possible signed on to restore net neutrality." A discharge petition that would force a vote on the CRA resolution gained three new supports in the past two weeks, but even if all Democrats were on board it still wouldn't be enough to force a vote. Republicans have a 236-197 House majority, and only one House Republican has signed the petition.
Except that Democrats are overwhelmingly in favor of Net Neutrality, while republicans are 99% opposed.
Hmm it's almost like there is a clear difference between the parties an a critical issue at impacts all of us.
You might even say that the bothsiderism that people who are stupid or intellectually dishonest constantly engage in is absolute fraudulent nonsense.
the Senate passed it while they could be content in the knowledge that it couldn't pass the House. Now that the House is flipping to Dems it'll die in the Senate next. And in any case it doesn't have a super majority to overcome a Presidential Veto.
I say this on every NN forum, but if this matters to you then you're going to have to change your voting. That means showing up at Primaries, voting against both the GOP _and_ the Clinton Democrats and putting actual, left wing candidates in office who are in favor of government regulation like NN.
Because make no mistake, Net Neutrality _is_ a government regulation on a private industry. The libertarians can argue that it's only a psuedo-private industry and that everything would be fine if the government just deregulated completely (because that worked so well when AT&T was in charge) but it's _still_ a government regulation. If we keep voting for folks who don't believe in government this is what we're going to get.
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Well, lets see, almost all votes for NN are from Democrats, including centrist democrats. Only one single republican supports this legislation.
So when you say to vote out the Clinton democrats you are telling us to vote out the people who actually signed their name to this legislation, while fail to even acknowledge that the republican party is 99% against net neutrality.
This ridiculous claim that both sides are at fault when one is at fault while the other works to protect us is the exact reason that our country is in the mess we are in.
I hope Bernie Sanders gets last place in the primary, tied with some other sore loser who can't tell the difference between his allies and his adversaries.
So called "net nutrality" is a scam, a way for marxist democrat party people to impose HUGE goverment regulation on the free market and make everything about the internet WORSE. If you care about internet freedom, you should join the millions of others like us and voice your oppose to so called "net nutrality".
Yet the vast majority of people want it. Who does the government work for? Certainly not me.
The vast majority of people support net neutrality. If a real net neutrality bill was introduced, it would most likely be passed. When are we going to stop repeating the lie that the regulations that they are trying to put back in place have anything to do with net neutrality? Please, please, please go read the regulations before deciding you support this.
Republicans favor the Net Neutrality we have today.
Democrats want to impose some 30+ regulations over the internet you enjoy and use today, many parts of which have nothing to do with NN.
So by all means, if you hate a free internet do support the actions the Democrats are trying to take.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Such absolute fucking bullshit.
Net Neutrality was enacted to stop rampant ongoing selective throttling of internet services, and that's what it did. Those 30+ other regulations (care to name / describe one?) didn't have any impact that I can see.
But my internet started working properly again when the Obama Net Neutrality rules that Turmp has overturned took effect.
So... It looks like you are shamelessly lying about a subject which is important to all of us, especially the nerds on Slashdot...
I sincerely do not understand slashdot's near religious devotion to this. I honestly want to understand what I am missing. As I understand it, net neutrality basically says that you do not want to have the cost of your internet usage be proportional to how much you use. It does not seem wrong to me that if you use a ton, pay more or get throttled. Otherwise, someone else is paying the bill for your usage.
So, am I off or is this just a case of millennial wanting free stuff?
"Liberalism is a very noble idea, currently controlled by some very bad people. Be sure you do not get the two confused.
Ahh the poster child for Trojan Condoms speaks. I can see it now, a big add with your face, a condom below, and the tagline "Use Trojans, so this doesn't happen again."
Fascism: An authoritarian and nationalistic right-wing system of government and social organization. See also: NAZI's
Why do you need "net neutrality"? The internet became what it bacame without this junk.
Is it because people with vested interests and lots of money propagandized you into wanting it?
Will the Obama-style "net neutrality" level the playing field and make the internet wonderful and free for you? Nope. Its loudest backers are some of the worst entities on the net: Google, Netflix, Apple, Facebook, Twitter, etc ALL of which want the telcos to transport their data cheaply and without discrimination while THEY de-platform, censor and discriminate based on any arbitrary criteria they choose at the moment.
Just what good is "fair" data transport to you if nobody will store your data, serve your pages, serve your videos, allow you to monetize your activity and so forth? Do you TRULY want this phony neutrality enforced by federal government bureaucrats? You might like it with somebody like Obama in control, but would you still want it if the bureaucrats were all Trump acolytes faithfully doing HIS bidding? That's what you get when you give that sort of power to the government - sooner or later it ends up being controlled by the other party. The internet is best preserved by keeping it as far from ANY government power as possible.
The Democrats are pushing this form of "net neutrality" because their huge backers at Google, Apple, Netflix, Facebook etc want it. They will never support a true net neutrality that applies both to the people operating the clouds and other servers as well as the telcos; they are only interested in the sort of faux neutrality that serves the interests of their corporate masters, just as the Republicans in DC would only support a neutrality that would apply to Google, Facebook and the rest without applying to the telcos that support them. The Democrats are NOT "looking out for [your] interests".
If you are truly interested in a massive layer of permanent government control over the internet in the interest of protecting you from some imagined future possible internet where the telcos censor and throttle you unfairly, then try advancing a non-partisan (or bi-partisan) form of net neutrality that the bought-off politicians in DC in BOTH parties would hate. As long as you are on the side of the fake Obama-Pelosi-Schumer-Google-Facebook version you are not for neutrality at all and you will certainly never get half of the country (and the politicians representing them) on board - this is why Obama could never implement it as an actual law.
Trying the same thing over and over again, expecting a different result...
The net neutrality imposed by Obama did NOTHING about any local cable monopoly. You are freaking out about an entirely different issue.
The solution to most of the things you are worried about is MORE PROVIDERS, particularly for the last miles. With multiple competing providers, you could ditch a bad one that filters and throttles. Your local government probably has erected obstacles to keep other ISPs from getting any traction in your area and that's a major problem across the USA that really does need addressing. Using the federal government to force your local cable company to give Netflix and YouTube cheap and reliable data transport so they can grow even more profitable will not increase your freedom one iota. You just might be in a local service area where one provider has a sweetheart deal with the local politicians that blocks other vendors from getting rights-of-way or even getting regulatory approvals. Even local politicians are not above a little corruption, you know.
Oh, did you want unthrottled unbiased data transport for some reason other than to be a brain-dead consumer binge-watching Netflix?
Did you want to start a business or something?
If so, then what good would that neutrality do for you, particularly if you cannot find a host for your data, or your web site, or cannot get payment processing, or cannot run online ads, or cannot buy a domain name? Net Neutrality as currently deceptively marketed does nothing at all to solve this problem which is very real today. Many of the companies providing services and running servers on the net who are loudly campaigning for net neutrality are currently censoring, throttling, blocking, de-listing, and refusing service to people and businesses based on things like politics or nationality or religion. They might well also be doing it based on whether they fear some entity might rise to become as popular as them ans ultimately replace them, but we would not know that and they'd never admit it --- nothing in net neutrality applies to them or requires them to shed any sunlight on their policies.
You presume yourself so smart and you are so desperate for cheap streaming video that you are missing the larger and more important issues.
You would bring the heavy boot of federal regulation down onto the neck of the entire internet just so Netflix can be more profitable streaming videos to you as you hope they pass the savings on to you even though nothing would force them to.
Conservatives know exactly what net neutrality is. They're just not stupid enough to surrender control of the internet to an army of federal regulators just so that little bundles of bytes can speedily flow from Netflix to your iPad with equal priority and at the same price as bundles of bytes of medical data flowing from a research lab to a cancer doctor, or bundles of bytes from a highschool teacher to his student. You think you are fighting a great evil you assume will eventually happenl in the form of ISPs treating network data packets unfairly, but to remedy this you would burden the net with federal regulations that would never end and never reduce and would lock-in bad policies for decades, stifling innovation and all while missing the larger evils that are already happening. Conservatives are simply liberals who have been mugged - they have encountered the real world and now take that into account.
What does it profit a man to save the world and lose his soul?
What good is it to make data transport fair for cloud providers and video streamers and search engines, if you let them be free to wipe out competitors, censor users, suppress views they do not like, bias their search results, and de-platform people they target for any reason they choose and without any regulation? In fact, federal regulations would only make it harder for future competitors to arise, which is one reason these companies love the idea.
You see, it's left wingers who are so damned focused on being drones and shills for the multinational billionares of silicon valley that they cannot focus on the bigger and more important issues. Open your eyes and your mind. There's much more at stake here and you people on the left simply refuse to even look.
Net Neutrality is a lost cause but then again the whole of the internet is a lost cause. With the new copyright and "acceptable free speech" laws, the widespread embracing of walled gardens by the majority and the consolidation of tech "giants", the dream of the original internet as a decentralized, anarchic, chaotic free space for the imagination is dead and buried. Learn to like corporatemarketglobalistnet, it's all you will ever see. Don't dream of another comparable coming up ever, either: Big Money and Big Government have learned. It won't happen again. We lost our chance without even firing a shot.
They can rejoin the internet once they get a clue
They never stopped throttling data. They fucking ADVERTISED so called unlimited data plans capped at 22GB which had additional fees for going over the 22GB cap!!!
Argh! People on slashdot can be so fucking stupid, blind, ignorant and ridiculously tribal.
Facts do not drive your idiocy because you do not even know the facts. You make shit up from whole cloth,
Asshole.
It looks like the recent kick in the teeth Republicans got at the polls wasn't enough to educate them about what happens when Americans get annoyed with their government. Perhaps in a couple of years another electoral kick, this time straight to the balls, will get through to them.
I've calculated my velocity with such exquisite precision that I have no idea where I am.
Is someone defending Obama's war record?
Obama started wars in Syria, and Lybia. He used drone strikes on thousands of people, which we find out many times were not vetted before killing. He killed a US citizen with a drone without a trial. He shipped thousands of assault rifles to Mexican drug cartels, causing the killings of over 200 Mexicans and a US border agent, and then refused to testify to Congress about it.
Obama has basically the worst possible war record of ANY US president. Anyone defending him on a vote about Iraq is a complete imbicle.
Bullshit. Both parties were on board with Iraq, including Clinton. And we are still there and in Afghanistan. Democrats were on board with that one too. I can't believe anyone is this naive in 2018.
The BUSH administration had all this "intelligence" and "reasons" to go to war.
The Republicans LIED. The Democrats went along because they were LIED to by the Republicans.
We're stuck there because of Republican LIES.
YOU are the NAIVE and misinformed one. And we all need to understand that the Republican party does NOT represent the citizens' interests: only their billionaire donors.
And NN is yet another example of how we little people are being sold out for corporate interests by the Republicans. Face it, there is nothing in their platform that benefits the common person - NOTHING.
They take money from every corporation on Earth. I call the "Clinton Democrats" because they got their start under Clinton, but Wikipedia calls them "New Democrats", which is B.S., they don't act like the Dems and don't follow the principles of the party platform).
3 Republicans voted for NN, but they did so safe in the knowledge that it wouldn't pass. I'm guessing the Clinton Dems will do the same. When the vote has a real chance to pass their either abstain to give the GOP the votes to kill it or they'll vote no and pack peddle.
You see the same thing on Medicare for All. There's a whole bunch of right wing Dems who backed Bernie's bill because Medicare for All has a 70% approval rating nationally and they want to run for president. But if you press them to start campaigning for it they clam up and, again, back peddle.
It's actually really easy to spot a politician who's lying to you, and it's not the old "Ha ha, they opened their Mouth, ha ha". Just press them on issues that matter to you and that they take money to oppose and wait for them to either double down and fight for the issue (like Bernie does) or back peddle and tell you how "Oh, that's a wonderful idea but it's just too Pie In the Sky" like Pelosi and Schumer.
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You're confounding wireless with hardlines. These markets are two orders of magnitude different in download caps. Comcast (cable) is guilty of throttling Netflix even when there was sufficient bandwidth; in order to make their own content more enticing. There's an unethical conflict of interest in an ISP also providing their own content. Net Neutrality should mean that ANY requested content be delivered as quickly as possible.
With regard to wireless, I'm aware that some cell ISPs are still throttling video as a "feature" to help people stay within their data plan cap, but that feature can be disabled.
Perhaps Net Neutrality is something best left to the states. This way the effect of net neutrality legislation in certain states could be compared to states that do not have it yet, this allows us to see what works best. This is as the founders intended, that states should be laboratories of democracy where where laws and so on can be tested and improved without affecting the country as a whole.
Also, I think what we need should be called Common Carrier rules, rather than Net Neutrality rules, because Common Carrier is a more accurate and precise legal definition that is more well known. Net Neutrality is too nebulous and easily misconstrued. If it is simply described as applying rules that applied to telephone companies to ensure they could not block your calls, its much less mystifying and based on a concept thats been around since the 1930s.
Its a little bit useful to understand the other side of the debate. The big problem that this is about from the ISPs side is network congestion and the fact most ISP networks are not designed for continuous high bandwidth video streams and instead were designed for burst use of load of static web pages and shorter downloads. So ISPs are faced with exploding bandiwidth congestion and to maintain quality of service, would require significant upgrades to the network infrastructure. So charging Netflix to help improve network infrastructure is seen as a way to keep prices low for consumers and only for people who use high bandwidth, for pay services like Netflix would be hit up to pay for their high bandwidth consumption since Netflix would pass through the cost to its own users. One argument for this is that the cable company has to pay its infrastructure costs for its own video services, while Netflix is getting a free ride. If ISPs are only allowed to charge very high bandwith video services like Netflix et al, and it is not allowed for low bandwidth uses such as static web pages, the effect would be less detrimental to free speech concerns since it would not effect peoples ability to express themselves through static web pages which is a big free speech issue. It could also be based on a formula based on revenue of the video service so that it will not put lower margin free youtube type services out of business.
I am undecided on the issue. Internet service is a little bit too expensive as it is and I would not want to pay more because someone with 4 netflix streams going 24/7 at once of HD video, something I do not use. I also am sympathetic to the side of the websites such as video hosting sites and do not want to see anything that would impact smaller start ups from getting started so we can have a diverse assortment of smaller video services rather than a monopoly. Huge fees from ISPs coming the way of smaller video sites would put them out of business. This is why rules could be designed to protect low margin free video sites .
That's actually a constitutional requirement, that spending laws cannot last 2 years or more. It's precisely because the chance of a government shutdown is part of the balance of powers. Specifically, it's a powerful weapon for the US House. Which is reset every two years. So if the government starts doing X, and the US population doesn't like it, they can elect a new House, which will not fund it.
That's only true if both sets of players are to blame. If you set up a game of chess (cause it's simple), between the world champion chess player and someone who literally refuses to make moves, the game will never finish and is broken, etc. However, replacing the guy who literally refuses to make moves makes the whole system work well.
TL;DR you're assuming both sides are equally at fault in response to someone making a case only one side is, and using that to justify your conclusions. Assuming you won an argument without making it is not valid.
There are panels in some states that do that. I'll point out that there are valid reasons to move boundaries that are not just "equalize the populations." For instance, making lines align with each other, so neighbors aren't in 12 different districts - that is so people in the same school district are in the same state senate district are in the same US Rep. district are in the same...
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This. I know you were joking around. But this is exactly how the repubtard thinks.
Yes, NN is about the transport layer.... BUT THAT IS NOT IMPORTANT in the grand scheme of things.
What does it matter if AT&T or Verizon treats data packets from Facebook equally to those from Netflix?
None of it matters to the actual freedom of the net if the big tech giants are censoring, metering, de-listing, and otherwise controlling which packets get stored on servers and which get onto and off of the internet. Nobody is confounding or confusing ANYTHING. We;re just pointing out that you are picking a nonsensical ineffective weapon from the wrong armory to deploy fighting the previous war- and that's a lose-lose move. There's no point in making sure the data transport layer is a neutral highway if the on-ramps, off-ramps, service stations, and all the rest are NOT neutral. If all the cars on this highway-of-the-future have Apple, Facebook, and Netflix logos on the side and the occupants of the cars are only allowed to ride if approved by those companies and if doing things approved by those companies, then there's no actual freedom on that highway at all.
Wake up, and stop drooling over Tim Cook's next shiny Chinese-made object or Netflix's next binge-worthy couch potato bait.
Let us band together. We will announce that we will cancel our internet service and/or downgrade to the slowest cheapest speed until ISPs enter a contractual agreement to uphold net neutrality. Who's with me? Reply to this comment.
did not read my post and comprehend it.
You dream that NN would guarantee free and even-handed flow of data packets across the net and you would somehow benefit. That's a child's view of the situation, just as it was a seven-year-old's view that Obamacare would improve healthcare (over 10 million people were thrown off of their plans so other people would get chaeper plans, and many millions of others now have higher rates, higher deductibles, and worse service now while we are under it, since the late Senator McCain torpedoed the repeal of it).
Yes, ISPs can currently charge different rates, and throttle, and filter, and charge more for better service etc... JUST AS THEY COULD FOR THE ENTIRE HISTORY OF THE PRE-OBAMA INTERNET. This is normal in business - a company can set rates for delivery of a product or service and charge different rates for different products or levels of service, and it has not been hurting anybody for decades. Is there a potential for harm? Certainly. All big entities can do evil things. Yes, if the heavy hand of federal regulation is brought to bear, some rules can make some of this illegal for a short time until the very smart companies find ways around the new rules (this ALWAYS happens because big rich companies hire smart people, whereas government employs people who were in studfent government in high school). The big companies will untimately be FINE with whatever laws are deplyed - they'll just hire armies of lawyers and paper pushers and lobbysists to influence the regulators. New small upstarts however, will not be able to afford the teams of lawyers and lobbyists needed to start a new internet data transport business in that scenario. It's called "regulatory capture".
The cloud operators and social media companies and others (Google,Facebook,Netflix,Twitter and the rest) will certainly benefit from NN, but nothing will cause them to pass those savings on to anybody. They will, however, almost certainly continue to ratchet-up their control over the net, their manipulation, censorship, shadow banning, de-listing, blocking, spying, and manipulation. Noner of your most fantastic dreams about NN enabling all the little people in society to play on a fair and level playing field on the internet will be for naught if what your NN actually does is further empower the bay area giants while they in-turn stomp on all the little people. If you can get nobody to stream your videos, or host your web site, or enable you to monetize YOUR products on the web, then what good is NN?????
You are wrong. Enabling Netflix and Amazon to print more money by streaming video-on-demand at lower prices does NOTHING to make sure some mom&pop business in Oklahoma or Kentucky or Idaho gets access to the web at all. If Google decides to prefer ads from that mom&pop business over theirs because of some side business deal, or political differences, etc then their ads may not be seen. If they cannot get domain name service, nobody will find them on the web. If PayPal won't process their payments and Amazon won't host their products, then what good is NN? If Bob in Nevada makes music but YouTube won't stream it because bob's in the wrong political party, or bob opposed the H1-B visas that Google loves to use, what good is NN to him? If somebody is running for President but Google and Amazon are supportive of the person he's running against, so they decide to subtly alter search results to influence the public in favor of their candidate, what good is NN?
Every day we are already seening the many many abuses by the firms that so desperately want NN to improve their own bottom lines. THEY have no interest in fairness and neutrality for THEIR services. Most of these firms are tightly aligned with the Democrats (Google executives were in the Obama White House more often than some of Obama's own cabinet secretaries) and by PURE COINCIDENCE, I'm sure the telcos they want tightly regulated by the feds to give them lower priced data transport just happen to be aligned with Rep