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FCC Struggles To Convince Judge That Broadband Isn't 'Telecommunications' (arstechnica.com)
A Federal Communications Commission lawyer faced a skeptical panel of judges on Friday as the FCC defended its repeal of net neutrality rules and deregulation of the broadband industry. From a report: FCC General Counsel Thomas Johnson struggled to explain why broadband shouldn't be considered a telecommunications service, and struggled to explain the FCC's failure to protect public safety agencies from Internet providers blocking or slowing down content. Oral arguments were held on Friday in the case, which is being decided by a three-judge panel of the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. Throttling of firefighters' data plans played a major role in today's oral arguments.
Of the three judges, Circuit Judge Patricia Millett expressed the most skepticism of Johnson's arguments, repeatedly challenging the FCC's definition of broadband and its disregard for arguments made by public safety agencies. She also questioned the FCC's claim that the net neutrality rules harmed broadband investment. Circuit Judge Robert Wilkins also expressed some skepticism of FCC arguments, while Senior Circuit Judge Stephen Williams seemed more amenable to FCC arguments.
Of the three judges, Circuit Judge Patricia Millett expressed the most skepticism of Johnson's arguments, repeatedly challenging the FCC's definition of broadband and its disregard for arguments made by public safety agencies. She also questioned the FCC's claim that the net neutrality rules harmed broadband investment. Circuit Judge Robert Wilkins also expressed some skepticism of FCC arguments, while Senior Circuit Judge Stephen Williams seemed more amenable to FCC arguments.
Ajit Pai needs to be replaced. Does he know what voice over IP is? That's not a category of telecommunications? Does Pai know what Whatsapp and Skype do?
At one time, we used analog modems at 300 baud over a copper land line. That was telecommunications. Now we use fiber optic cable and much faster digital modems. That's telecommunications using a 7 layer stack.
Hello, Mr. Pai. Maybe people on the other side of the world use smoke signals. Not here. Get with the times.
"Just pass a law" is a lot tougher than "random employee of major telcom makes a decision while taking a poop". We need strict government regulation of Internet connections ASAP. The "free market" doesn't work in this case.
I don't respond to AC's.
That's of minimal help. If you have any experience with satellite internet you know how much it sucks. Latency is a bitch.
"Just pass a law" is a lot tougher than "random employee of major telcom makes a decision while taking a poop".
Sometimes the needful is hard. We need a law because anything less is trivial to change, and fuck us over again.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
the Internet ran over Dial-up phones (telecom) and now phones run over the internet. And I'm communicating with you at a distance electronically. Tele-com.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
This is why the Republicans win time and again. They fight to win. While you're busy debating whether the existing laws allow for Net Neutrality they're busy taking over state legislatures so they can gerrymander and keep your pro-NN law from passing.
The existing laws are there, use them. You just need to vote for people who will enforce them. Fight to win or get ready to lose... everything.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
Competing in mobile requires the purchase of spectrum and building cell towers on a few select sites. Competing in broadband has huge right-of-way and construction costs associated with it. The spectrum is sold by the Federal government. The hard-line side of things is controlled by every individual municipality out there (along with right of ways along interstates or other routes for the fiber connecting you to the big players. And really, even in mobile there aren't that many competitors in many markets because of right of ways to construct cell towers and spectrum issues. Bandwidth is higher today. But bandwidth is higher in general for most customers only because the cable companies were able to run internet over cable. That's the only reason that is relevant to most people in the country. You aren't having to lease your own T1 for a measly 1.5 Mbps (compared to dialup) and in a lot of places the modern day equivalent to dial up that the phone companies offer isn't that much faster than dialup was. Once you start running internet over a cable system, you're at the mercy of the cable system for what they decide to upgrade in order to offer anything faster or whether they even want to serve an area. Our company is on the other side of the street from where cable is run. It has been a struggle to even get the local cable company to come and look at putting a connection over to any of our buildings on the block we are situated on (and we even have conduits running under the two of the facing streets. Comparing mobile to broadband is silly. It's like saying look at all the switch manufacturers we have (handsets)... Everything must be cool.
Never smoked anything heavy (or light for that matter).
Competition? In 10 years we've gone from 5 major cellular providers in the US to 4 (soon to be 3 since the Sprint and Verizon merger has been approved). If the government hadn't prevented one other merger, it would likely be 2.
No. Your packets are not more important than mine, regardless of what you are doing. Just because you are engaged in something you feel is important does not make it so.
Good-bye
Go and look up the latency from Elon Musk's space internet - you will be pleasantly surprised - is 25ms ok for you? - he is not using geostationary satellites 36,000 km away.
It's a big problem for gaming or ssh sessions, and for pathetically poorly designed sites that require a bunch of back-and-forth with AJAX to fill in a page
The problem is that's most sites now. Even loads of blogs which are basically static text and images won't even render anythng without JavaScript. Naturally, the promise of AJAX (that it would make everything faster because there was no need to fetch whole pages) never panned out.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
I want VoIP/SIP traffic to be prioritized using QoS
Then you buy a plan that allows a certain amount of traffic at higher QoS levels for a few dollars more. You just pay the same for that plan as every other customer. That is what NN is all about.
No, that isn't what Network Neutrality is about. Network Neutrality is about preventing prioritization of certain sources/destinations over others, which ISPs do in order to use their monopoly position as an ISP to restrict competition in the media market. It's not about people streaming videos and playing games versus people using voice communication, it's about stopping monopoly abuse.
Yes, especially when the choice is laws or Madmax, because that's what you get without laws.
Honestly, I can get pretty pissy about government overreach, but this isn't that.
The war on drugs was doomed to failure from inception because they were trying to legislate a morality that most Americans are ambivalent about or are actively in disagreement with. Over half of all Americans are (or were willing to be temporarily) on the illegal side of that war: https://www.drugabuse.gov/publ...
Consequently, the LEAs wound up in a game of whack-a-mole, where they arrest a dealer and a new one pops up in his place before he gets arraigned. And, as an ex-con, I'm here to tell you that they are good at arresting dealers. I met a lot of drug dealers inside. Of course, for a lot of cops, this is just job security, so they don't really mind.
NN is different because the number of offenders is vastly smaller and the violations are exponentially harder to hide (this is the problem with crimes that actually have victims). Additionally, because the network operators' money is actually already in the banking system, they have much more to lose.
As to whether we fare better behind NN regulation or NN law, I don't know. Legislation is probably less prone to abuse, but it is also much slower to respond to changing market conditions.
So use the Sherman Act to remove media ownings from Telecom companies.
More dangerous by far is the fact that webkit is becoming a monoculture and Google is talking about removing the api that lets ublock origin work ... MS is ditching one of the few competitors to it (chrome, chromium, Vivaldi, Safari and others all use webkit).
Adblock will still work, because they're going to let it work. Why? Because they can pay to whitelist themselves on it. Along with anyone else with the bucks, and we're back to malware distribution via ads again.
While more secure DNS might make pihole not work, the pushback is to not allow anything BUT the one URL you surfed to serve anything at all to you. Drastic, like noscript, but if people do that - websites will clean up very quickly, and start vetting any internal ad content because then they will be liable - and easy to prove it - (let the lawyers do some good for a change) if they infect your stuff...
Why guess when you can know? Measure!
but it is 100's and 100's of pages of legal speak(confused, conflicting, legalistic gobbly gook).
;)
If Net Neutrality is
- peek in to the packets you loose your common carrier liability protections.
- don't peek in to the packets you keep your common carrier liability protections.
I am all for that definition of Net Neutrality
But the government/businesses and activist are in the courts arguing about certain little things in the 100's and 100's of pages of crap. And who gets what and who pays who!! On both sides!!
And most things that come out of our courts today are rarely good for the people! Because it is a bunch of unethical lawyers and judges who are ideological/paid off arguing their causes or to get their clients, someone else's money.
If Net Neutrality is not the simple definition I stated above. I want the governments slimy fingers as far away from the internet as possible. Would things get bad? Yes, but eventually the individuals, businesses and the market would figure out what people are willing to buy.
Just my 2 cents
I'm on a LTE connection, a type of wireless. I get about 75 ms to a location 50 miles away. It's hard to imagine how it'll do a third of that when traveling hundreds of miles and still having to convert the signal at the endpoints.
>speedtest-cli
Retrieving speedtest.net configuration...
Testing from Telus Communications (209.52.xxx.xxx)...
Retrieving speedtest.net server list...
Selecting best server based on ping...
Hosted by Tech Futures Interactive Inc. (Burnaby, BC) [20.74 km]: 77.833 ms
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism
Really? Neither the dictionary nor the Telecommunications Act have such a narrow defintion:
OK. But by that argument the FCC shouldn't have the right to regulate use of frequencies that are not powerful enough to be detected in another state.
I think I like that. Regulating that should be up to the various state governments, and Alaska would rightfully have a different set of rules than Rhode Island.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
At the very least self-consistency should be demanded. Right now we have a definition of "information service" which depends on "telecommunications services" to facilitate providing the information service. By definition an information service cannot exist without telecommunications service to facilitate it.
This begs question where is the telecommunications service required to support "information service"? If you blanket assert ISPs are information services then your argument fails self-consistency.
Internet is layered sufficiently to clearly separate providing access to IP network from servers (NNTP, Gopher, WAIS, CHARGEN, WAP..etc) that offer information services over IP.
Saying an ISP can't offer both information and telecommunications services is like saying a movie theatre can't charge for admission to a movie and popcorn.
Arguing ISPs are information services because they have DNS servers is like arguing the business of movie theatres is selling popcorn not film viewing.
I personally would rather not see Title II applied to broadband or anything else.
Much better off with clean NN or meaningful legislation which actually encourages competition instead of FCC using its power to shield large providers from the burden of having to compete.
Why didn't she do it when Democrats were in control of the House, the Senate, and the Presidency?
Because the Republicans filibustered everything almost never let anything come to the floor for a vote.
They hated Obama with a passion that went beyond rational thought and fucktards like Mitch McConnell were willing to wreck the legislative process in order to frustrate anything he did.
Mitch McConnell is a genuine impediment to democracy- his bushwacking of the Merrick Garland appointment (for example) is a clear demonstration that he's using his power as a sword instead of a shield.
From Mitch's own mouth: "One of my proudest moments was when I looked Barack Obama in the eye and I said, 'Mr. President, you will not fill the Supreme Court vacancy.'"
Is that how government is supposed to work?
Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
Laws are government force enforced with violence.
Is this what you really want?
Yes, that is what I want.
Some entity MUST be the "ultimate authority" and have a monopoly on the use of force. That's the way governments work unless you're a libertarian living in la-la land.
Would you rather that your heavily-armed, meth-smoking neighbor to be the decider of who gets to do what?
Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
Is that how government is supposed to work?
No, it's really not, and those of us who don't live in the US are a bit worried how you guys have sunk so low so fast.
At some point one of your political parties decided that winning was more important than anything else, and stopped governing in a responsible manner.
They are supported by a bunch of fools like the A/C above, who think that:
High time for Trump's executive branch to apply Andrew Jackson's words: "John Marshall has made his decision, now let him enforce it.
is a reasonable way to run a country.
I don't think you can argue with someone who claims to believe the old "violently imposed monopoly" nonsense.
They are a libertarian, and so they believe in magic.
At some point one of your political parties decided that winning was more important than anything else, and stopped governing in a responsible manner.
Exactly. In the 1960s the Republicans adopted what was called the "Southern Strategy", which "refers to a Republican Party electoral strategy to increase political support among white voters in the South by appealing to racism against African Americans."
Basically the GOP, primarily composed of racist goobers who wanted to live in 1863 rather than 1963, threw in their lot with older white men and religious people, both of whom were on average much more racist than the rest of the country. They hitched their wagon to a dimming star as America inevitably became (becomes) more racially diverse. "Segregation now, segregation forever!" was one of their rallying cries. (Look up "Governor George Wallace" for an example.)
Except their target audience was literally dying off and not being replaced, and the GOP became more and more desperate to hold on to whatever was left of a shrinking base.
Eventually they realized that counting on just white men to vote in sufficient numbers was a losing game- they were going to be a minority as the country matured...and so they threw out their morals, ethics, sense of fair play, and honesty because that was literally the only way they could remain in the game. "Cheat cheat cheat" was the name of the game. Voter suppression and gerrymandering are the province of the GOP/Republicans, and while it occurs on the left, it's a fraction of what occurs on the right. This is a fucking fact although I'm sure many here will dispute it.
So to boil it down, the entire country swerved out from under them, moving toward the left, while at the same time the GOP was veering madly to the right. It's why they're so out of touch with the average American. The GOP became irrelevant in the 1970s and early 80s and have remained so ever since. They've become "The Party of No" because that's about all that they know how to do anymore.
Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
They are a libertarian, and so they believe in magic.
And they can't even agree on a definition of "magic".
Poll 500 libertarians and you'll get 500 definitions of what a "libertarian" is.
Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
This is a young country, but it's not THAT young. The classic definition is long-distance communication.
The Constitution of 1776 put all the known channels of telecommunication (post offices, post roads, and navigable waterways) firmly in federal control, so that states and local for-profit enterprises couldn't interfere.
The office of Postmaster General pre-dates those of Chief Justice, President, Senator, and Representative. Communication was too important, back then, to be delayed; it still is.
Be careful to make sure you don't just feel that way because you don't like "the other side" - there's plenty of dirty pool being played by both parties.
Stop with the false equivalency- the GOP and Republicans do this so often and so regularly that they've practically made it into an art form.
Yes, shit goes on with the Democrats too, but the Republicans have been the masters of dirty tricks, voter suppression, and gerrymandering for decades.
Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
That is the reputation Americans have where I live, honest, brave and hardworking.
I think that generally speaking, most Americans are decent people who don't agree with the tone and actions of the current administration. But this administration's actions are destroying many of the core values that the majority of American hold, and it may take decades to repair the damage.
And yet his goober-brained followers hoot and holler and gleefully applaud the destruction of the very things that has made this country such an amazing place.
The text below explains in part why they're so partisan and excuse everything Trump does...I didn't write it but it's a good description of what's going on:
Identity Fusion - aka “Sports team” mode
A majority of the United States is confused by the behavior of ~34% of the rest of the country. To grasp what has happened, you just have to realize that some political supporters have gone into “Sports Teams” mode. They have turned politics into an Identity Fusion issue.
Basically, they have stopped thinking about the representative government as a functional group of public servants. They are thinking about it as if it's their "team" and everything political has become "us versus them."
Some characteristics of a team fanatic (I'm using Trump Supporters as an example because it's currently the most obvious example, but it can apply to both sides to some degree.)
Once you realize this is what's happening, the common attributes are there to see:
- Wearing identifying clothing (hats, badges, colors, logos, slogans) in everyday life.
- Loyalty regardless of performance or behavior of their "team."
- Instant disrespect for any member of the opposing team based solely on team affiliation.
- Hatred of any perceived disloyalty from fellow team fans.
- Having rallies and parades even when there is no pending game with the primary goal to celebrate and re-enforce being loyal.
- At gatherings, fans chant slogans and/or sing.
- Team players (not fans, but players) are 100% supported unless they leave the team. Then they are ostracized and demonized even though they are basically the same person.
Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...