Ajit Pai Thanks Congress For Helping Him Kill Net Neutrality Rules (arstechnica.com)

FCC Chairman Ajit Pai today thanked Congress for preventing the U.S. government from enforcing net neutrality rules. "The Pai-led Federal Communications Commission repealed Obama-era net neutrality rules, but the repeal could have been reversed by Congress if it acted before the end of its session," reports Ars Technica. "Democrats won a vote to reverse the repeal in the Senate but weren't able to get enough votes in the House of Representatives before time ran out." From the report: "I'm pleased that a strong bipartisan majority of the U.S. House of Representatives declined to reinstate heavy-handed Internet regulation," Pai said in a statement marking the deadline passage today. Pai claimed that broadband speed improvements and new fiber deployments in 2018 occurred because of his net neutrality repeal -- although speeds and fiber deployment also went in the right direction while net neutrality rules were in place. "Over the past year, the Internet has remained free and open," Pai said, adding that "the FCC's light-touch approach is working." Pai didn't mention a recent case in which CenturyLink temporarily blocked its customers' Internet access in order to show an ad or a recent research report accusing Sprint of throttling Skype (which Sprint denies).

Comments

Thanks

[110010001000]

A little extra in your pay packet this week!

free and open

[zlives]

fuck you pai, and the congress you rode in on

Congress should make net neutrality law

[melted]

Congress should make net neutrality law of the land. It's insane that the FCC (an unelected body) had the authority for something like that to begin with.

Don't thank Congress

[rsilvergun]

thank the GOP. There have been a few votes to save Net Neutrality and they were lost along party lines (a few GOPers did break ranks but it wasn't enough).

I know folks don't like partisanship, but there are partisan issues and NN is one of them. Had Trump lost the election we wouldn't be reading this story today. Had the Democrats taken the Senate & House by a wide enough majority to override vetos we would be reading about the upcoming vote to restore NN. These aren't debatable points, they're just facts. Cold, hard facts.

We've got another election in about 2 years. Show up at your primary. The Dems have a wing that refuses corporate PAC money. If Net Neutrality matters to you then you know what to do.

Re:Only Tell Me When He Is In Jail!

[Anonymous Coward]

That's only a criminal offense for second-class citizens like you and me.

People like Pai are not held to such standards.

Don't hold your breath about him going to jail....I am being completely serious.

Net Nuetrality hasn't been replealed yet

[rsilvergun]

there's still numerous lawsuits going on. I can't believe I have to even say this on /., but the downsides are:

a. Price increases. ISP will leverage their control of the pipes to charge us more for services like on demand video.

b. Censorship. Again, ISP no longer have to treat all packets equally. That means if they don't like the Alt-Right (or the left) they can ban them.

c. No innovation. Small players won't even be able to get started because they won't be able to afford the bandwidth fees.

d. No more ala cart streaming services. No More cord cutting. It's only NN that made these possible. Say goodbye to Netflix, Crunchyroll and Youtube. Even the big guys won't be able to compete when the ISPs can charge them but not you. Same thing happened with Microsoft. Nobody could compete with them because they could leverage their defacto monopoly.

If I may digress for a moment longer: This is a constant thing I hear on the right and I'm fucking sick of it. To wit:

"We don't need this regulation to stop a bad thing because the bad thing is not happening".

It's like saying Murder can be legal because nobody I know got murdered this week. It's nonsensical and in any other aspect of life folks would call it out as bullshit. But there's a multi million dollar propaganda machine trying to get folks to distrust and hate regulation in general so the rich and powerful can splay us open and gut us like fish. And we're bloody god damned letting it happen.

Re:GOP

[Solandri]

Net neutrality is only "necessary" because of the cable monopolies. If the customers don't have a viable alternative ISP they can flee to, the cable monopoly can get away with anti-consumer moves like degrading Netflix until Netflix pays their extortion fee.

The reason we have cable monopolies is because local governments awarded monopoly service contracts. Usually they granted the monopoly in exchange for coverage guarantees - to insure that low-income areas weren't excluded from cable and Internet service. That's where the screwing over of U.S. citizens began. I can assure you it wasn't the GOP pushing for those coverage guarantees. The road to hell is paved with good intentions.

If you think we have cable monopolies because the cable companies are evil, you have cause and effect reversed. Cable companies became evil because government gave them monopolies. That kicked off the whole "power tends to corrupt; absolute power tends to corrupt absolutely" cycle, turning the cable companies evil. Rather than retain the evil companies and try to control their behavior through legislation which usually takes on the order of decades, we should just require competition to be reintroduced into the ISP markets. Once people have a viable choice of ISPs, they will choose the less evil one on their own, usually in a matter of months.

If there's competition, any ISP intentionally degrading Netflix to try to get Netflix to pay their extortion fee will just hemorrhage customers, who will switch to a different ISP who doesn't degrade Netflix. And the beauty is, competition doesn't just work to punish ISPs who violate net neutrality. It works against any anti-customer behavior by ISPs. The genesis of this entire problem is that a bunch of people in government decided they could do a better job choosing an ISP than The People.

Re:GOP

[JaredOfEuropa]

Not really. The real problem is that most ISPs are not satisfied anymore to just pipe the internet into our home like any plumber, they also want to get into the content game. And as soon as that happens, there’s an incentive to promote your own crap over similar content from other providers. And in any case there’s the temptation of letting someone pay you to give them preferred service, allowing you to collect from both consumers and hosts. We (still) have plenty of providers to choose from here, but they were getting ready to do all that, before our parliament voted in net neutrality. One of them tries and sees what they can get away with, then the rest of them follows suit. A race to the bottom.

Re: Only Tell Me When He Is In Jail!

[houghi]

We luve in a world where people can lie and novody cares. They can even tell the truth and nobody cares.
He could say "I have taken bribes." Nothing woud happen.

Re:GOP

[dgatwood]

The reason we have cable monopolies is because local governments awarded monopoly service contracts. Usually they granted the monopoly in exchange for coverage guarantees - to insure that low-income areas weren't excluded from cable and Internet service.

They did the same thing for telephone. But you're badly mistaken if you believe that removing monopolies will result in competition. Countless towns have tried that over the years, and essentially 100% of the time, they were back to a monopoly within about five years.

Why is this the case? Because wire infrastructure is something economists call a natural monopoly — a product or service in which the startup costs are so high and the payoff over such a long period of time that competition is infeasible.

When a new company comes into a territory with an existing cable company, the new company has to have some way of inducing people to switch — either by lowering their cost or by providing better service. Either way, it is very easy for the existing company to match their offer, because they have paid for their infrastructure, and almost all of their income is profit. So the existing company invariably either matches or undercuts the newcomer and provides enough improvements to their service so that the newcomer cannot steal enough subscribers to cover the payments on their construction costs plus operating expenses.

What happens then? Unless the local government decides to bail out the newcomer to keep competition going, the newcomer typically sells the infrastructure to the older cable company for little more than what they still owe on it, thus giving the incumbent a set of new replacement lines at significantly below cost. And you're back to a monopoly.

That's why, with the possible exception of extremely high-density areas where a new company can get by on a tiny percentage of residents/businesses, the only places where competition has ever really succeeded have been places that have had two or more competing companies since the dawn of cable TV, and even those usually break down to a monopoly eventually.

This is a problem that cannot be solved no matter what you do. Wire infrastructure is simply too expensive to allow for competition in practice. Heck, wireless infrastructure is almost too expensive in most places, forget wired.

The only way to get real competition in Internet service is to separate the wire provider from the actual Internet service provider. In practice, this can happen in one of two ways, both of which involve the government:

• Governments can create regulations that require incumbent cable or fiber providers to lease access to their competitors at a reasonable rate.
• Governments can build out a fiber infrastructure and then lease access to any ISP that wants to provide service over those fibers. Governments can optionally spin off the resulting fiber provider as a nonprofit corporation with a mandate to lease access to any ISP at a reasonable rate.

Either way, the result is the same: You have one company or organization providing wire service for multiple ISPs. When you do this, competition is possible at the ISP level. In practice, though, the second approach (government-built infrastructure) tends to work better in the long run, for two reasons:

• Incumbent providers who own the lines tend to do only minimum maintenance on lines that are in use by other companies, resulting in two companies blaming each other for poor service, and the customer having no real recourse.
• Those sorts of laws typically apply only to a given technology, and have to be constantly updated as the technology changes, or else they become useless. After all, we had such a law for ADSL, but the phone companies then ran fiber out to remote terminals to provide ADSL2 service, and wouldn't lease those fibers, so only the phone company could provide the faster ADSL2 service. And once you switched over, they would cut the existi