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House Democrats Refuse To Weaken Net Neutrality Bill, Defeat GOP Amendments (arstechnica.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Democrats in the U.S. House of Representatives yesterday rejected Republican attempts to weaken a bill that would restore net neutrality rules.
The House Commerce Committee yesterday approved the "Save the Internet Act" in a 30-22 party-line vote, potentially setting up a vote of the full House next week. The bill is short and simple -- it would fully reinstate the rules implemented by the Federal Communications Commission under then-Chairman Tom Wheeler in 2015, reversing the repeal led by FCC Chairman Ajit Pai in 2017.
Commerce Committee Republicans repeatedly introduced amendments that would weaken the bill but were consistently rebuffed by the committee's Democratic majority. "The Democrats beat back more than a dozen attempts from Republicans to gut the bill with amendments throughout the bill's markup that lasted 9.5 hours," The Hill reported yesterday. Republican amendments would have weakened the bill by doing the following: Exempt all 5G wireless services from net neutrality rules; Exempt all multi-gigabit broadband services from net neutrality rules; Exempt from net neutrality rules any ISP that builds broadband service in any part of the U.S. that doesn't yet have download speeds of at least 25Mbps and upload speeds of at least 3Mbps; Exempt from net neutrality rules any ISP that gets universal service funding from the FCC's Rural Health Care Program; Exempt ISPs that serve 250,000 or fewer subscribers from certain transparency rules that require public disclosure of network management practices; and Prevent the FCC from limiting the types of zero-rating (i.e., data cap exemptions) that ISPs can deploy. An additional Republican amendment "would have imposed net neutrality rules but declared that broadband is an information service, [preventing] the FCC from imposing any other type of common-carrier regulations on ISPs," reports Ars Technica. "The committee did approve a Democratic amendment to exempt ISPs with 100,000 or fewer subscribers from the transparency rules, but only for one year."
Commerce Committee Republicans repeatedly introduced amendments that would weaken the bill but were consistently rebuffed by the committee's Democratic majority. "The Democrats beat back more than a dozen attempts from Republicans to gut the bill with amendments throughout the bill's markup that lasted 9.5 hours," The Hill reported yesterday. Republican amendments would have weakened the bill by doing the following: Exempt all 5G wireless services from net neutrality rules; Exempt all multi-gigabit broadband services from net neutrality rules; Exempt from net neutrality rules any ISP that builds broadband service in any part of the U.S. that doesn't yet have download speeds of at least 25Mbps and upload speeds of at least 3Mbps; Exempt from net neutrality rules any ISP that gets universal service funding from the FCC's Rural Health Care Program; Exempt ISPs that serve 250,000 or fewer subscribers from certain transparency rules that require public disclosure of network management practices; and Prevent the FCC from limiting the types of zero-rating (i.e., data cap exemptions) that ISPs can deploy. An additional Republican amendment "would have imposed net neutrality rules but declared that broadband is an information service, [preventing] the FCC from imposing any other type of common-carrier regulations on ISPs," reports Ars Technica. "The committee did approve a Democratic amendment to exempt ISPs with 100,000 or fewer subscribers from the transparency rules, but only for one year."
It's just showboating at this point.
"Don't teach a man to fish, feed yourself. He's a grown man. Fishing's not that hard." - Ron Swanson
Nice to see the Democrats showing some balls. But it is pointless grandstanding at this point, as it will never get to Trumpy's desk, let alone him signing it.
First law of people: People are generally stupid.
Both parties are the same, no difference... Blah blah blah... Let's get the mental midgets on here defending Republicans...
He sure knows what he's talking about... just let the corporations have their way!
The bills busting local and state rules that prohibit new entrants into markets, utilities from entering into that market, muni, etc.? Also, why stop here? Why should monopolies like Twitter, Facebook and YouTube not be required to be common carriers? It's much easier in terms of capital to build new ISP than one of those.
Open the pipeline bay doors, HAL!
P.S.: WA,OR,CA already have Net Neutrality by law, this is just if we want to talk to the rest of you.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
That's not how you boil a frog...
Bad Congress -- I think government control of internet content and data transfer will be a net loss for society.
Good Congress -- if it's going to be done, under the American system, it ought to be passed as a bill in Congress, not decreed by a President or a President's appointee.
Hollywood, Television, has become the dream machine. We need to take that back; each of us is a Dream Machine
Per the article:
"broadband is an information service, [preventing] the FCC from imposing any other type of common-carrier regulations on ISPs"
If broadband is considered an "information service" which now prevents the FCC from imposing any regulations on ISP's, why does the US government give $$$$ away to broadband carriers to offer higher speeds such as the Connect America Fund (CAF) ? If the FCC is the government's form of regulating communications services in the United States how can they offer CAF funding to promote faster internet speeds but at same time the FCC claims it can't regulate it?
Something here does not add up.
Let me preface this post with: Shut the fuck up ivan.
The difference between you and literally every slashdot poster 10 years ago is obvious.
"stop regulating business"
Regulating business has been central to every society with laws since 1776 bce with hammaburi's first 300 or so laws. ^^^ . This is the sort of statement I expect from the typically well educated posters who hang out on Slashdot.
You sound like this:
Durrr govanment isn't supporsed to be messing with business. Y don't they do imporannt work like bring back coal jerbs
Which is exactly the sort of retarded argument I'd expect from the sort of poor unwashed prole that would have zero interest coming here unless you paid him.
Bad Congress -- I think government control of internet content and data transfer will be a net loss for society.
Good Congress -- if it's going to be done, under the American system, it ought to be passed as a bill in Congress, not decreed by a President or a President's appointee.
Fascinating!
Why don't you talk to us about the technical ramifications and issues surrounding net neutrality?
Since you're totally a Slashdot regular with an interest in news for nerds.
Want to fix America? De-authorize the entire Republican party. Round up all GOP congresscritters, interrogate the living fuck out of them, extreme investigation into every aspect of their filthy corrupt little lives, put the guilty in prison, put the worst of them up against the wall for a firing squad, with their heads on pikes all along Pennsylvania Avenue as a warning to all American politicians: do not fuck with U.S.. Then root out all the Democrats who are corrupt and jail them. Institute a vetting process for political candidates several orders of magnitude more intense, especially for POTUS, so we don't get a retarded criminal like Trump ever again. Elect non-retarded, non-corrupt replacements for Congress. Then maybe we can fix all the goddamned fucking damage these assholes have caused.
How you do it right is to *mysteriously* slow down or break competing services like netflix. For some reason always when people are home. Strange, that.
on the wireline paper insulated monopoly NN protected networks.
Bring some new innovation and speed into your community.
Stop thinking the federally protected monopoly networks are finally going to be upgraded.
Get community broadband in to your community.
Allow some innovation and free market competition.
Escape past the federal NN laws and rules that kept your network slow.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
The point is to get the GOP on record supporting something that will likely raise your cable bill (or phone bill if you're on DSL). That's an issue that can resonate with voters. From there it becomes election fodder to win seats and push the presidency over the edge.
Finally when the Dems have a Majority they can pass the bill. It's that a PIA? Yes, yes it is. But it's the only way to get pro consumer shit done. It's not like consumers have a multi million dollar lobby to stand up for them. All we've got are a few left leaning Dems and the facts on our side.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
I hope you understand that you deserve any horrible fate which may befall you, your family or your friends for abusing the fixed width font to draw more attention to your posts.
So when Republicans do something, Democrats spend their entire time to reverse it. And vice versa. Meanwhile the people are getting screwed.
Politicians are all the same. Kill them all.
Democrats could not give less of a crap about anything other than their own power. Just look at all the lies upon lies upon lies the last few years. To top it off they intentionally delayed the Mueller investigation until after the last election, I'm sure knowing full well that they found nothing - Mueller's 13-man team leading the 'investigation' are all registered Democrats.
I do not belong to the church of the lowercase 'i'
Real life translation: Democrats don't care, or don't want, it to pass. They just want to virtue signal how pro-internet freedom they are, as the hand behind their back takes all your freedoms online.
House Democrats Choose Political Grandstanding Over Legislating.
Yeah, sure, you've got the usual delusional people who blather about "on the record" political tactics. Who, exactly, winds up on the record here? In the House, nobody other than people in safe-enough seats that they survived the 2018 Democrat wave. In the Senate, nobody, because the unamended bill will never reach the floor.
The only purpose of this is cynical base-pandering in the quest for campaign donations. Which will work, because there are a lot of idiots in the market for empty symbolism.
It requires all ISPs to comply with warrentless searches and requires meta data collection.
This is not the net neutrality that was promised to me.
The sub sub paragraphs matter folks. Don't rely on what they say it does, you actually have to parse the legal obfuscation that is in these things.
We cannot have fairness commerce without a level playing field.
https://www.youtube.com/c/BrendaEM
they have a very specific agenda, to wit:
1. Cut taxes on their donors.
2. Cut regulations, which sounds good in theory, until you remember 2008 and how cutting regulations got us there. Or safety regs on mines. Or live in a place like Flint, Mi, or any one of the thousands of regulations that help you personally that folks like to forget about or pretend won't be cut.
3. End Social Security & Medicare. It's at the point where they'll have to raise the cap on taxable income to pay for it, and that would mean cutting into their donor's profits, again.
4. Give the Evangelicals anything they want so long as it doesn't inconvenience their donors. Overturning Roe v Wade, allowing discrimination against the folks evangelicals don't like and yes, that's up to and including theocracy. Look at Saudi Arabia and how the ruling class lives large and without moral constraints while the working class follows the Koran to the letter. Think that but with King James.
5. More war, more empire building.
6. And while all this is going on take as much money for themselves as they can
There are others, and yes you'll find right wing Dems like Joe Biden and Beto O'Rouke going along with most if not all of the above (both Biden & Beto have got behind a program to end Social Security and replace it with a means tested welfare program, and Chuck Schumer & Pelosi have been selling us out to their donors for years. ).
It's always the same damn thing though. Our ruling class is clawing back the ground they lost post WWII. What I find so frustrating is how obvious they are about it and how nobody seems to give a damn. Especially if they've got theirs (fuck me).
But getting back to my point, the GOP is _not_ just being contrarian. They have a very specific agenda, long term and well financed. The sooner we figure out that their agenda isn't compatible with our continued well being the sooner we can do something about it.
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right after Pai was in and signaled he would kill NN my ISP started metering my bandwidth. They hadn't done that for a few decades (literally, I've had high speed cable since the 90s when it was only $40/mo. I got it because it was literally cheaper than dial up and a second line). That wasn't a co-iniki-dink. Pai emboldened them.
They're also busy fucking with Netflix. The only reason they haven't started charging a Netflix tax is they're worried if they do it too soon folks will rebel and elect a Democrat in 2020. The mass of voters respond consistently to very, very little, but there's one thing that _always_ moves them: Price increases. 60-80% of Americans live paycheck to paycheck (depending on if you consider $1000 bucks in the bank as "not paycheck-to-paycheck") so it's no damn surprise. Hell, I'll say this, I know folk who'll admit to living paycheck-to-paycheck. Lots of them. It's so pervasive that it's not a stigma anymore. We're not "temporarily inconvenienced millionaires" anymore. We know which side our bread's buttered on and it's the wrong side.
Raise the cost of internet & NetFlix and make sure every damn body knows Trump & Pai were responsible and you'll have a revolt at the polls. Metering you can get away with because it's tough for the rank and file to get their heads around. But make no mistake, the Netflix tax is coming and much, much worse.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
You force the issue and get politicians on the record, so you can drive them out of office for it in future elections. Limiting yourself to "what we can pass now" is very poor strategy.
i'd blow up the whole whitehouse and take out Trump Pence and all the rest of those pieces of garbage if I could just to piss off you republican whitetrash
Nothing new here. Like all of their "legislation" it contains a tax on the general population. It also incorporates a general assault on privacy rights with warrantless searches. Give me a break you G-damned shills.
I remember Net Neutrality has been talked about for over 15 years. The result of lack of Net Neutrality has been some video streaming companies (Netflix) have had to pay money to the last mile telecom companies. Video streaming uses lots of data, so it is not much of a surprise. What else has big telecom done? Have they blocked political web sites?
I always find it difficult to say What Net Neutrality is. Net Neutrality is often described in Near Plutonic terms. Few people would disagree with how it's described. But when a bill comes through in Congress with how to implement it - the implementation is often a far cry from the original description. The implementation often has lots of caveats and special favors.
The devil is in the details. Is it truly neutral? Or is that just a nice term to mean neutral (friendly) to some but unfriendly to others. I realize some may feel the details must eliminate much of advertising and money on the net. Others may mean something else. In my opinion, at the least, "Net Neutrality" must encourage and maintain freedom of expression for political and spiritual beliefs before it begins to approach what it says it is.
What about you?
Imagine being so stupid that you vote Republican, and for the interests of the super rich while screwing yourself over.
Republican voters are stupid.
Democrat voters are stupid. The only difference between the 2 groups of voters is one of degree. But both groups get fucked front and back repeatedly.
If voters were really intelligent they would have thrown out democrats and republicans a long time ago and voted for third party candidates. Or at least candidates that want to implement a social democratic agenda that benefits the majority of american citizens.
Don't make shill quality posts if you don't want to be called a shill idiot.
What you call me is entirely up to you. It's slashdot, so there's no damage to me regardless of your comments. Meh.
I first started reading /. on a 9600 modem before the JonKatz days
So you're saying you're not really all that into computers? . Because people were giving away faster modems for free by the time slashdot was around
If someone had given one to me for free, and it had fit the expansion slots in my 486, I would have gladly used it. It is good that you had the money and resources, and lived in a community during that time which allowed you to obtain free hardware.
You'd think a big tech nut with portman grits and beowulf car analogies would have had a better set up!
Just because you can spew stupid memes doesn't mean you're capable of a coherent story and you also fail to make technical points on net neutrality. It would have been a moot point anyhow I was setting you up to look stupid because I work closely with entities in this field.
You're about 5% over the troll-believability line with this paragraph. Dial it back a bit to hit the sweet spot. Also, there's too much bald-faced projection when you make the "big tech nut" comment (a claim I never made, of course) and then end the paragraph with your own claim to work closely with "entities" in this field. Most readers will pick up on that and recognize the troll signature.
The old congress removed net neutrality at the request of corporate lobbyists because it's difficult to plan a business around the whims of the FCC chairman. That's at least the story they like you to hear and of course there is more to it than that. From the very beginning Ajit Pai and the republicans had sworn up and down they just want to make net neutrality into law because it's proper and will allow telecoms to make solid plans for the future.
Naturally there was a bunch of "extras" they were hoping to get... and there were.. pushed by the republicans..:
Exempt all 5G wireless services from net neutrality rules; Exempt all multi-gigabit broadband services from net neutrality rules; Exempt from net neutrality rules any ISP that builds broadband service in any part of the U.S. that doesn't yet have download speeds of at least 25Mbps and upload speeds of at least 3Mbps; Exempt from net neutrality rules any ISP that gets universal service funding from the FCC's Rural Health Care Program; Exempt ISPs that serve 250,000 or fewer subscribers from certain transparency rules that require public disclosure of network management practices; and Prevent the FCC from limiting the types of zero-rating (i.e., data cap exemptions) that ISPs can deploy.
[Clippy popup] tap tap tap.... It looks like you're trying to... attack Republicans and their proposals which you perceive me to be defending?
Go ahead and attack Republicans. I'm certainly not here to attempt to defend them, that would be a heavy task.
Go ahead and scratch your chin and consider that someone paid money and expended man hours to get those exemptions in the bill. So yeah the republican net neutrality would have passed and the flyover states would have been transformed into an actual internet ghetto. Depending on the details it may have even been possible for ISPs to build gigabit in some podunk town one block at a time and then throttle every market that doesn't have adequate competition. Dense man. Are you really not a shill? Nobody is paying you to be this stupid?
Since you claim to have browsed the web, presumably over a slip or ppp connection which both have plenty of overhead; on a 9600 baud modem. Maybe you're just feeling nostalgic.
PS If you've been on slashdot that long and you can't afford a house then you should be honest with yourself t
Hollywood, Television, has become the dream machine. We need to take that back; each of us is a Dream Machine