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 "The Pai-led Federal Communications Commission repealed Obama-era net neutrality rules, but the repeal could have been reversed by Congress if it acted before the end of its session," reports Ars Technica.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

free and open

[zlives]

fuck you pai, and the congress you rode in on

GOP

[meglon]

Fucking over US citizens every chance they get.

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:Congress should make net neutrality law

[Anonymous Coward]

The actual result was 35.8%. The previous year it was 22%. The interesting aspect of that is it's based upon speed results by a company that measures speed tests. That alone makes it biased since people who upgrade their connection are more likely to run a speedtest vs those who don't upgrade to not running said test. Of course people who are new to broadband will also be more likely to run a speedtest, but the number of people new to broadband may not be increasing rapidly. Finally, speedtests are precisely the sort of thing that net neutrality rules would be designed to prevent being gamed by granting them higher priority to create the appearance of improved performance vs actual average performance.

In short, I'd like to see a more systematic measure of speed from a variety of metrics that in aggregate could be used to measure actual broadband penetration, speed, etc. It's not enough to read a news article linking to one website's numbers and accept it as fact any more than I'd trust Steam statistics as fact.

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.