Slashdot Mirror
Democrats Introduce 'Save the Internet Act' To Restore Net Neutrality (cnet.com)
As expected, Speaker Nancy Pelosi and other House and Senate Democrats on Wednesday introduced the Save the Internet Act, which aims to restore open internet rules that were repealed in 2017. From a report: The Obama-era rules, which lasted from 2015 to 2018, banned broadband providers from slowing or blocking access to the internet or charging companies higher fees for faster access. Democrats in Congress have said the repeal allows for large broadband and wireless companies to "control people's online activities." "86 percent of Americans opposed Trump's assault on net neutrality, including 82 percent of Republicans," said Pelosi during the press conference on Wednesday. "With 'Save The Internet Act,' Democrats are honoring the will of the people." Massachusetts Sen. Ed Markey tweeted out a copy of the bill on Wednesday, saying nearly every Democrat in the Senate had joined him to introduce it.
Facebook and Amazon are big supporters of this bill. For that reason alone I'm skeptical.
Yes PLEASE, give us Bernie, the guy who embraces the crazy left wing of your party... PLEASE!
Polls suggested that Sanders could have beat Trump, and that Clinton couldn't. And lo, she didn't.
Sanders' popularity has led every other Democrat towards the left, because he showed that centrism is not the winning strategy.
At least some (if not many) people who voted for Trump claimed they would have voted for Sanders, because they wanted to shake up politics. It is likely that those people will vote for Sanders if he makes it through the primary. They might well be enough to swing the vote.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
It's only 3 pages long, read it yourself: https://twitter.com/SenMarkey/...
The amazing thing is that they took three pages to basically write "The FCC's reversal of its existing policy in [declaration number] is hereby reversed."
This bill stinks on ice. It doesn't actually enact net neutrality, but rather weakly allows Internet services to be regulated under a section of FCC code that would allow the FCC to regulate net neutrality if it so desires through rulemaking. The bill makes no attempt at defining net neutrality, nor any attempt at defining what constitutes reasonable rulemaking, leaving it entirely up to an unelected body (the FCC) to make those decisions.
To be fair, I'm not saying that they shouldn't pass this. It's an okay stopgap measure, except insofar as Pai's FCC is unlikely to actually issue any meaningful rulemaking to protect net neutrality, which makes this bill largely an empty gesture. But this isn't the end of the story. It is barely even a beginning.
What we actually need is an Internet Users' Bill of Rights that lays out what is and is not acceptable behavior by ISPs in concrete terms. Until we have that fundamental framework, merely having the authority to regulate ISPs over net neutrality concerns still doesn't buy us a whole lot.
Trump was the one that got rid of net neutrality through his appointments to the FCC. Let's not pretend that he's in favor of it. If it weren't for him, we wouldn't need a bill.
Pai wasn't his appointment. President Trump just promoted him to the top spot.
If President Trump even has a position on Net Neutrality, I would expect it to be extremely superficial, limited strictly to what his advisors have told him is the best policy. After all, even fairly tech-savvy people consistently misunderstand what net neutrality means and/or deliberately try to coopt it to suit their own desires. There's essentially zero chance that President Trump understands it at all, even superficially, because almost nobody does.
That said, I very much doubt that he has any position on Net Neutrality whatsoever. He probably doesn't even know that the controversy exists. After all, it doesn't have anything to do with his reputation and it doesn't benefit his business ventures, so why would he care about it? Just saying.
But I guarantee if we could create a really well thought-out bill and name it the Donald J. Trump Net Neutrality Bill Of Rights, he would not only sign it, but would insist that Congress pass it. :-) Just saying.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.