Democrats Will Introduce Bill To Bring Back Net Neutrality (thehill.com)

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Hill: Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) announced Monday that Democrats will introduce a net neutrality bill to replace the open internet rules that were repealed in 2017. In a letter to her Democratic colleagues, Pelosi said a bill called the "Save the Internet Act" will be unveiled Wednesday and will be introduced in the Senate as well. The text of the legislation has not been released, and it's unclear what will be included in the bill. Democrats have railed against the Trump administration's Federal Communications Commission (FCC) vote to repeal the net neutrality rules, which happened more than a year ago. The 2015 regulations prohibited internet service providers from blocking or throttling websites or creating internet fast lanes.

Comments

Should of done it this way in the first place

[ASCIIxTended]

Should have been law in the first place, not policy decided by 5 unelected guys in a closed room. Trump himself even said so much.

Now, the problem with the Democrats doing it is the bill will probably be 5000 pages long and include all kinds of other bullshit having nothing to do with net neutrality.

Re:Trump overruled by the Senate already.

[Anonymous Coward]

Perhaps if Congress would have done it's job instead of playing political games. The Democrats don't want to fix immigration because they'd give up one of their talking points. A talking point they've heavily invested in and that they believe gives them ownership of an entire demographic. Fixing things just isn't good for elections.

Re: Trump overruled by the Senate already.

[Cmdln Daco]

Do we have to put up with this crapflooding forever? Can't a few choice keywords like 'faggot' and maybe 'traitor' trigger an automatic downmod? This is pure unadulterated crapflooding, and extremely uninteresting to need to skip over.

Re: Trump overruled by the Senate already.

[Cmdln Daco]

Yet another reason to laud President Trump. He is doing an excellent job of totally trashing "executive overreach" in the Federal Government. By the time he leaves office the wings of the Executive branch will be severely clipped, and the precedent will stand. We couldn't be more fortunate as Americans that it is happening. Bush, Obama, Clinton, etc. should never have had the power they wielded in the past.

Re: Trump overruled by the Senate already.

[Cmdln Daco]

Double down on your zealous ignorance, motherfucker. Yes. Play with your poop some more. Thats a good crapflooder. Keep it up.

Doesn't solve the problem

[Solandri]

The ISPs do not have natural monopolies. They have government-granted monopolies. Instead of passing Net Neutrality, which only attempts to address one of the symptoms of these monopolies, why not just solve the problem altogether? Pass legislation prohibiting local governments from granting monopolies. Require at least two cable and two phone companies in every local jurisdiction. Then if one of them tries something stupid like throttle Netflix as a ploy to extort Netflix into paying them, their customers will simply cancel and switch service to the competitor ISP.

Re:Doesn't solve the problem

[dgatwood]

The ISPs do not have natural monopolies. They have government-granted monopolies.

For the majority of the country, the monopoly is, indeed, a natural monopoly. The average lifespan of a second cable company in most of America is measured in single-digit years. We've seen it time and time again. A new company comes in because the old cable company is charging extortionate prices. The existing company drops their prices, undercutting the new company and preventing them from getting enough subscribers to pay off the interest on their physical plant (all those cable lines). After three to five years, the newcomer gives up and sells off its assets to the incumbent, who gets a new (often government-subsidized) network infrastructure at a fraction of the cost of building it themselves.

A local government can "require" two cable companies all it wants to, but in practice, the only way that is ever going to happen is if that government steps in and pays for the cost of running the cable lines. Otherwise, there is way too much first-mover advantage for a second company to ever succeed. And this is true very nearly everywhere, with the possible exception of major cities.

And if the government is building out the infrastructure anyway, then doing it for a for-profit company is just corporate welfare. Why not instead create competition the right way — by leasing the use of that infrastructure non-preferentially to any competitor that wants to do business in your community? This approach, unlike competing wire providers, actually works in practice.

Re:Doesn't solve the problem

[thegarbz]

You're viewing this to narrowly. Yes the ISP's monopoly is government granted, but it is also most definitely natural. Being an ISP has an incredibly expensive cost of entry which creates the natural monopoly. How do you fix that by legislation? You can't legislate a company into existence. Mandating competition where naturally none exists doesn't work. The only alternative is for the government to enter the field directly and pay for the infrastructure which is how countries get into this situation in the first place when the result gets privatised.

There's a word for that: Duopoly and it's no better than a monopoly.

As a Democrat I completely disagree

[rsilvergun]

data is data. Whether it's your voice or bits. Common carrier applies because it's for the same thing. They're both just communicating over a wire. We wouldn't even be having this conversation if it was still all modems since it would literally _be_ voice. The point is the intent of congress, which was to force what was then the principal means of telecom to behave.