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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Senate Democrats on Wednesday introduced the Save the Internet Act, which aims to restore open internet rules that were repealed in 2017.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.
It's only 3 pages long, read it yourself: https://twitter.com/SenMarkey/...
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.
Well, they know that. It's the same as when the Republicans put bills on Obama's desk to repeal the ACA. They knew he'd veto it and that they wouldn't be able to override it. It's about signalling to the voters "this is what we'll be able to do if you put us in charge." It's not a new phenomenon.
by bringing light to an issue that's being ignored. The hope is you'll see this and turn out in the next election and give them a Democratic Congress (House & Senate) and President so we can pass it in 2 years.
The only question is, what will you do? Me? I'll be there at the primaries voting for Bernie.
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Intentionally I think. It took me a second to realize you were conflating Net Neutrality with Google (YouTube) & Facebook kicking right wing pundits off their platforms for questionable (and let's face it, violent) rhetoric and commentary.
Honestly if you left it at that I think you coulda got a +5 out of your troll post, but that bit about the UN ties in with all sorts of off the rails conspiracy theories. The key to a good shit post is knowing when to stop. It helps to have some honest belief in what you're posting. And you're not gonna convince me or anyone else that you believe that malarkey.
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Well, they know that. It's the same as when the Republicans put bills on Obama's desk to repeal the ACA. They knew he'd veto it and that they wouldn't be able to override it. It's about signalling to the voters "this is what we'll be able to do if you put us in charge." It's not a new phenomenon.
The Republicans tried to repeal the ACA 54 times when Obama was in office. IIRC, only one of those times did a bill make it out of Congress and to Obama's desk, where he vetoed it. So I think it's "bill" in the singular.
If it weren't for deadlines, nothing would be late.
This vote is every bit as meaningful as all those votes to defund Obamacare prior to 2016, when the Republicans ran the House - in other words, not meaningful at all. It's very easy to take a stand when you know the bill will never pass the Senate, or survive the President's veto. It gets much, much harder when the vote actually stands a chance of passing. Note how quickly the support to defund Obamacare evaporated the moment the Republicans controlled both the House and Senate.
Now the Democrats are playing the same game. No one cares about meaningless symbolic gestures. But if the Democrats had control of the Senate, suddenly a great many of them would be getting visits from lobbyists for major telecom companies, reminding our elected representatives just who is calling the shots, and net neutrality would suddenly be taken off the table.
It's only 3 pages long, read it yourself: https://twitter.com/SenMarkey/...
You're begging the question, here. What you've linked to just says "put it back the way it was under Obama." The guy you're replying to said "Trump asked congress to introduce such a bill to codify NN into law, not executive policy."
So in the end, this is still executive policy, but it's even worse than that--because the legislature (who is supposed to make laws) is not doing their job, they're telling the executive what their rules are supposed to be. It's not supposed to work that way.
What part of "shall not be infringed" is so hard to understand?
Facebook and Amazon are big supporters of this bill. For that reason alone I'm skeptical.
I don't think playing the abortion idea is a good one.. It may shore up the base but if the polling is any indicator, it's a net loss for democrats as the overwhelming majority of voters do NOT support unlimited right to abortion past viability (say about 22 weeks), much less up to the moment of birth. And I believe that the polling is about 50/50 for abortions just before a detectable heartbeat.
It may play better in heavily democratic areas, and shore up the base, but abortion is an issue that inflames the other side of the debate too, so I'd be *really* careful about that issue as a democrat running for a national office. It could hurt the overall stance of the democrat party nationally, using this issue in local elections.
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it gave exemption's to companies like google and Facebook which did exactly what they are claiming their rules are preventing.
Google and Facebook are not ISPs. Net Neutrality never applied to them in the past, and would not apply to them in the future.
Net Neutrality requires ISPs treat all similar packets similarly, regardless of origin or destination. That's it.
Sanders has changed the discourse of an entire nation. We're seriously talking about universal healthcare for the first time since the mid 90s.
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Besides real net neutrality is neutrality of content, not of service levels and speeds for different types of uses.
Wrong. Net neutrality has nothing whatsoever to do with the content of packets - it's all about the delivery of those packets. The principle of net neutrality is that all packets, regardless of their source or destination, *within the same QoS tier* are given the same priority on the wires. That's it. (percieved) censorship/"deplatforming"/whatever is an entirely different discussion.
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.
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