NCTA Asks For Net Neutrality Law Allowing Paid Prioritization (arstechnica.com)

DarkRookie2 shares a report from Ars Technica: Cable industry chief lobbyist Michael Powell today asked Congress for a net neutrality law that would ban blocking and throttling but allow Internet providers to charge for prioritization under certain circumstances. Powell -- a Republican who was FCC chairman from 2001 to 2005 and is now CEO of cable lobby group NCTA -- spoke to lawmakers today at a Communications and Technology subcommittee hearing on net neutrality. Powell said there is "common ground around the basic tenets of net neutrality rules: There should be no blocking or throttling of lawful content. There should be no paid prioritization that creates fast lanes and slow lanes, absent public benefit. And, there should be transparency to consumers over network practices."

Despite Powell's claim of "common ground," his statement on paid prioritization illustrates a divide between the broadband industry and proponents of net neutrality rules. Obama-era Federal Communications Commission rules banned paid prioritization as well as blocking and throttling, while Trump's FCC overturned the ban on all three practices. Net neutrality advocates are trying to restore those rules in full in a court case against the FCC, and any net neutrality law proposed by Democrats in Congress would likely mirror the Obama-era FCC rules. Republican lawmakers are preparing legislation that would impose weaker rules. The report notes that Powell's proposal for paid prioritization is full of caveats: "There should be no paid prioritization that creates fast lanes and slow lanes, absent public benefit." "His testimony to Congress didn't explain how ISPs can charge online services for prioritization without dividing Internet access into fast lanes and slow lanes, and his statement seems to indicate that slow lanes would be allowed as long as the paid prioritization creates some 'public benefit,'" reports Ars. "How 'public benefit' would be defined or who would determine which paid priority schemes benefit the public are not clear."

Comments

dishonest story

[Anonymous Coward]

Here's the lie that exposes the bias of the whole article:

  "Obama-era Federal Communications Commission rules banned paid prioritization as well as blocking and throttling while Trump's FCC overturned the ban on all three practices."

Those obama-era rules were not in effect during the first 7 years of the Obama era, and were under challenge and not yet in full bureaucratic effect in his last year; they were rules set to actually kick in with full bureaucratic rules and enforcement as he left office. The 2012 election cycle when Obama was re-elected was conducted on a free (as in speech, not beer) internet untainted by the fraud of "net neutrality" whereas an actual Obama priority (Obamacare) was implemented as rapidly as possible after he was elected. Yeah, people were free to do bad stuff back before Obama's "net neutrality" but they were also free to do great stuff, that's precisely the point of freedom. The fact that some telco in the future might do something really bad was never sufficient to trigger a federal government takeover of the internet for the benefit of Google-Facebook-Netflix.

Had the Bush administration enabled all sorts of internet badness and then Obama implemented his "net neutrality" early on in his administration and produced good results, followed by Trump taking away the Obama rules and returning the badness, then the article would be honest. That's not what happened however and this article is thus just a piece of Orwellian history rewriting. A population that pays attention is not fooled by such sloppy attempts to rewrite.

Wrong Language

[logicnazi]

I worry this whole debate has gotten mired down in the wrong language/descriptions.

Everyone believes that some kinds of internet traffic need to be sent faster, more reliably and with less lag. Absolutely no one wants a legal regime in which you can't torrent files while streaming a movie because your ISP isn't allowed to prioritize the streaming packets over your torrents. Fundamentally, different levels of QoS are a good thing

This fact doesn't change just because one has to pay for QoS. As long as the ISPs came out with a fair universal pricing policy for high QoS or high bandwidth services that treated like content as like it really wouldn't matter how we accounted for the extra data usage. If adding a netflix subscription to your account boosts your data usage by 10GB it's really irrelevant if you want to pay an extra $10/month to your cable company to bump your cap or pay an extra $10/month to netflix so they can pay to bump your cap.

The real problem is that attempts to repeal net-neutrality are end runs around regulations limiting utility pricing and attempts to leverage monopoly control over the internet into other businesses but that's hard to explain

So here's my suggestion. Instead brand the fight as giving the people control over their own internet. You could imagine a slogan like: "Would you like to choose when your internet video plays nicely or let netflix?" That answer is so obvious it might force people to realize something else fishy is going on with paid prioritization.