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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.
Ah yes, we shouldn't forget about the freedom of our local cable monopoly to block or curtail access to the services that make the internet what it is.
I can't tell if this is satire or something people actually believe. And that's the worse thing about this.
Republicans favor the Net Neutrality we have today.
Yeah, it's so fucking awesome to have a single choice of broadband provider, one which now has carte blanche to implement whatever means they deem necessary to squeeze more profit out of a market they've monopolized.
Government regulation is not the best solution, but voting for regulation is all that remains when voting with your wallet is not an option. The fault is not with those of us who were forced into a corner and vote "left". The fault lies with businesses who have chosen not to play fairly at the game of capitalism. We're simply demanding they be held accountable.
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DRM is like antifreeze, to the MPAA/RIAA it's sweet, to the consumers it's poison.
You're off. Way, way off. Without Net Neutrality, one side's ISP can hold the other side hostage and refuse to deliver the data they've already paid their own ISP for. It's like if the mailman decides he doesn't like one house on the block and won't deliver their mail, even if the sender already paid postage.
That's not at all what it's about. It's the concept that your ISP should be considered as a telecommunication utility rather than a content provider. As such, they should not be allowed to selectively throttle your connection based on what media you consumed, but rather treat all bits as equal. We're paying for the connection already, and the entities we're connecting to are paying for theirs -- nobody is trying to get anything for free.
They can still have data caps, but things like 0-rating to make their own content more desirable would also be illegal. Since most consumers only have 1 or 2 broadband choices, letting them take advantage of their natural monopolies does not lead to a competitive market.
The repeal has far-reaching implications, as with it providers are free to throttle their competitors or even block any content they want to discourage -- we have to take them at the word for it that they won't. And we've actually seen them throttle competitors before, which is the entire reason NN was enacted in the first place.
What you described has nothing to do with net neutrality. NN is what keeps Microsoft from paying Comcast so that Bing loads faster than Google. It's horrible for start ups, as it puts a giant cost in the way of using their service. Plus, who wants Comcast deciding which sites they get to use at regular speeds, and which get arbitrarily slowed down.
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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.
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Please stop confounding NN with content creators like Facebook. NN is about the transport layer, not the content. Treat all content equally, blindly. If it's possible to stream X mb/s from Netflix, don't throttle it to 1 mb/s to upsell your own competing content.
NN also means that all sites on the internet are reachable. ISPs should not be curating the internet nor deciding what's best for you.
But my internet started working properly again when the Obama Net Neutrality
I find this very hard to believe. The Obama rules were barely in use (if at all) when repealed. If you saw a change in your internet service that drastic it's more likely coincidence. Did the squirrel chewing on your phone line die? Can you prove that it was the Obama rules that "fixed" your internet?
Net Neutrality was enacted to stop rampant ongoing selective throttling of internet services
Not the Obama rules. They gave entrenched ISPs guaranteed monopoly status by increasing the barrier to enter the market. And it applied different rules for how internet was delivered. Cable companies had different rules than DSL which had different rules for wireless. Can the executive reclassify certain providers on a whim and cherry pick the regulations that classification has? The later, is a definite no. The executive cannot say "ISPs are telecommunication providers under Title 2 but by the way not all of Title 2 apply because we said so.".
It didn't stop throttling. Even Netlifx throttled their own customers and blamed it on ISPs to push for "Net Neutrality". Why would you believe/side with a company that dishonest about the issue?
which is important to all of us, especially the nerds on Slashdot...
If that were true, I wouldn't see opinion pieces linked as facts, empty rhetoric and name calling for any kind of disagreement. I rarely see anyone discussing the actual language of the law and the legal precedent that got us where we are today. Do you actually care about good law? Or do you care about what opinion piece you read that bastardizes the issue into small bits of digestible propaganda?
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 .
Based on this response it doesn't sound like you do know what net neutrality is.
The lack of Net Neutrality rules does nothing to protect your scenario that medical data or teacher/student interaction. You seem to think that NN somehow allows Netflix to get away with more profits. Without NN there is just as much of a probability that the medical data and/or teacher/student interaction could be throttled. If your ISP decided they could make more money from throttling that data they possibly would.
The main reason that ISPs throttle Netflix (and similar commercial content) isn't to make the other "critical" data move through the system faster. The reason that they throttle companies like Netflix is so they can either charge them to get better access on their networks (not really how the Internet was setup to work) or more likely because they have a competing service so they want to stifle the competition.
As an example, let's say that Comcast is your ISP. They are happily carrying the data of Netflix without throttling it. Then one day they decide that they would like to start a streaming service of their own. They start the service (let's call it Comflix) and offer it alongside Netflix without throttling either stream. Unfortunately very few subscribers are signing up for Comflix. Comcast decides that instead of competing head-to-head with Netflix they will throttle the Netflix stream to 50% and leave Comflix at 100% bandwidth. To further profit from this Comcast also goes to Netflix and tells them if they pay Comcast a small fee (several million dollars) they will open up the bandwidth and only throttle them to 75% of the bandwidth.
You still may not think this is too much of a problem but... change Netflix in that example to a medical service that is providing you that medical data from your doctor. If Comcast decided to start up a competing medical data service would you still be happy with them throttling the data from your doctors medical data service provider.
Making "data transport fair for cloud providers and video streamers and search engines" via NN is also making data transport fair for the individual.
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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