No. Title II is intended to regulate monopolies. Not the same thing.
A monopoly is not a competitive market. That's why we have antitrust laws. In the case of broadband, we already have a de facto oligopoly. It therefore has to be either broken up, so there can be actual competition, or regulated, to ensure some semblance of fairness to the consumer.
Those are the only 2 options in a free market system: either ensure there is a free market by breaking up the monopolies and oligopolies into smaller competitive companies, or regulating them because there isn't a free market. There is no third option.
I don't think you know what an oligopoly is. Cable companies don't compete with each other because of exclusive municipal franchise agreements, which make it illegal for another company to run cable. Companies don't price fix with other companies because they're not competing with anyone. (In areas where they compete with fiber optics, they compete with the fiber company and you'll see lower prices.)
If you had two options for cable companies, and they both raised their rates at the same time while keeping service the same, that would be an oligopoly. What you have with cable companies are a bunch of small monopolies.
Generally speaking, a monopoly gets that way because the government grants them a monopoly. This is certainly the case with your cable company. The municipal franchise agreement is a law that enshrines you cable company in a monopoly status forever. Title II's price fixing* does that too. Both laws perpetuate monopolies. They also regulate the monopoly, sure, but they guarantee that the the company has monopoly status forever.
Banning exclusive municipal franchise agreements would remove the ability of local governments to grant monopolies. That would break up the monopolies, and that would be an actual pro-consumer move. Title II was undertaken because of a pressure campaign sponsored by guys who give a lot of money to one party, and that party answered the bell. But don't forget for a second that Title II hurts your cable company's monopoly status.
Yes, that's a better answer. But that's not within the FCC's powers.
Imposing Title II isn't within the FCC's powers either.
Title II got implemented because of a huge special interest pressure campaign, because Obama is deified by a certain demographic (the press) and because Wheeler hates the cable companies.
If the pressure campaign had been directed towards state and municipal governments (or towards Congress directly, who could make this law at a national level), exclusive franchise agreements could be banned and then there would be actual monopolies. Republicans in Congress were ready to pass an anti-traffic shaping law (Net Neutrality without Title II) in February, but Democrats refused to go along with it.because they wanted Title II.
Title II was implemented because it helps a whole bunch of tech companies who back Obama and the Democrats (the guys who appointed Wheeler) cut costs. Not out of some kind of concern for fairness or whatever. They spun up the pressure campaign to get exactly the result they wanted. For you and me, that just means that the Comcast monopoly gets deeper entrenched.
The idea that people can know what the laws are and the what the penalties are is a myth. Nobody, *NODOBY* knows all the laws that cover their behavior. Not only are there too many, the're all subject to judicial interpretation.
(You can often make a good guess whether some particular law applies, but that's a very different argument.)
I don't know what I'm supposed to take from your comment.
If laws are too complex to follow, we should demand that the laws are changed to be made simpler and more easily followed.
You're right, that argument is WILDLY different from "The government should not be deciding whether something is illegal retroactively." That's what the FCC is doing here, giving itself the ability to make ex post facto rules if they don't like your traffic shaping practices.
Of note, this didn't happen. No traffic shaping ever undertaken by the ISPs is illegal under the Title II regulation.
In fact, there was a bill in Congress that just implemented Net Neutrality (but not the rest of Title II), but Congressional Democrats wouldn't support the bill because they would rather enact Title II and bring the Internet under the thumb of their party.
So, what you are saying is that the market was stagnant for a century until Ma Bell was broken up. See, isn't it fun to draw vague generalities without an ounce of consideration for any greater context?
I don't think you know what you're saying. Yes, there was lots more innovation after the government broke up Ma Bell's monopoly.
Here's the thing though. Ma Bell got that monopoly from the government in the first place, through Title II legislation. Title II is essentially a deal between the government and the company. The government will protect the company's monopoly, but in exchange, the government can impose otherwise illegal rate controls. (Wheeler has said that the FCC will practice "forbearance" on rate controls and not implement them. If you are paying attention, it is IMPOSSIBLE to trust him on this.) Title II is intended to perpetuate monopolies.
If you want to expose Comcast to competition, what you need to do is regulate municipal franchise agreements, where a provider gets an exclusive right from a town to wire it for broadband. Enacting that would be a strike against broadband monopolies, but Wheeler and Obama just moved the ball in the other direction.
I don't get why any supporter of Title II would want to bring up the end of Ma Bell's monopoly.
Maybe they don't deserve the benefit of the doubt. But they DO deserve to know what the rules are up front, and not have the FCC be able to swoop in and declare something illegal retroactively. We write the laws down up front and let people see them (hey, wait a minute..) EXACTLY BECAUSE WE WANT PEOPLE TO FOLLOW THEM
Microsoft has outright said that "free for a year" means "you have one year to redeem the offer. If you redeem it, it's a full copy, not a subscription." The subscription stuff was just dopey clickbait by a couple of disreputable sites.
The Constitution doesn't require that states cast electoral votes in a winner take all fashion. The rules you are talking about are state laws, which individual states can change. In fact, two states DO cast proportional EVs.
The real problem is countries getting too greedy about profits all over the world, though. America wants to tax Apple for iTunes sales in Europe, and whines when Apple opens a European subsidiary that gets contracts and sells its iTunes tracks and thus doesn't have American income. Well, that's a European company operating in a European market making European profits; do you also want to tax Mercedes-Benz for their profits in Germany?
That's the problem. Of course $GOVERNMENT wants to tax someone they're not already taxing.
One wonders if this clause might also explain some of the blatantly unconstitutional legislation that's occasionally introduced (since it's been suggested elsewhere that such an action should be punishable by law).
That's exactly what the clause is for. It protects legislators from being arrested for advocating for things (or proposing laws) that the executive dislikes. Even if the executive dislikes a bill because it's unconstitutional, he can't have the sponsor arrested.
At the beginning of the ACA, they define a bunch of words as used in the Act. For ACA purposes, "The word "state" means one of the 50 states or the District of Columbia."
you are misinformed in more than just your spelling, sir... Where does it say in the constitution that our legislative branch is immune from the laws that they themselves make?
Sorry about the poor spelling, I was on a cell phone at the time. Anyway, you're looking for the Speech or Debate Clause, which is in Article 1 Section 6 of the Constitution.
The Senators and Representatives shall... in all Cases, except Treason, Felony and Breach of the Peace, be privileged from Arrest during their Attendance at the Session of their respective Houses, and in going to and returning from the same; and for any Speech or Debate in either House, they shall not be questioned in any other Place
The Wikipedia article on the clause has a couple of good examples of elected representatives getting off for things.(they don't mention the dirtbags who got off for DUIs by claiming they were en route to the Capitol.) They even have an example of a Senator reading a classified document into the Congressional Record.
Like all members of the federal Legislature (the House and the Senate), Wyden is Constutionally protected from being punished for any action taken in the course of his official duties. (Dipshits from both parties have gotten out of drunk driving tickets by saying they were on their way to the Capitol, so this is a pretty broad protection.) If Wyden obtained a classified document about surveillance programs and ordered it read into the Congressional Record, which is a routine thing that Senators and Representatives do, he couldn't be punished for it. (The Pentagon Papers were read into the Congressional Record this way, for example.)
The reason that doesn't return the results is because the FCC doesn't pass "bills." Passing "bills" into law is a Congress thing. The FCC makes "rules." Thus, of course you won't get news storie from a Google search on that string.
In any case, the first page of the search results from the string "Google lobbyist net neutrality" (without quotes) brings up this Politico story on the first page of the mobile search results returned by Bing, Google, and DuckDuckGo.
The Vice article is factually inaccurate because it intentionally obscures the fact (which was widely reported at the time of the article) that the Republican Commissioners were not allowed to read the final version of the rule until immediately before voting on it.
"Basic edits" is propaganda, by the way, just like the rest of the Vice piece. The Republicans couldn't edit it (because by that point, it had ALREADY BEEN VOTED ON.) What they were submitting was their objections to the document. Whoever gave Vice that quote wanted to whip people up, and in your case, it looks like they succeeded.
The Republicans submitted 100 pages of objections to a rule that Democrat-sponsoring lobbyists ordered changed after the Republicans were provided the supposedly final copy.
The law gives them 30 days to submit their edits, and they took less than 14. Occam's Razor, man. They had to redo their edits because the Democrats and their lobbyist friends/puppetmasters changed the document in violation of the rules.
The Vice article was written by a shill, based on a quote by another shill, and you fell for it. That happens, man. But the article is dishonest, and in the future, I advise you to refrain from posting it.
What are you talking about? Of course the changes Google's lobbyist suggested aren't against the new Net Neutrality rule. Google's lobbyist had unspecified changes added TO THE RULE ITSELF. What do you think lobbying is?
By the way, the reason the article doesn't detail Google's changes is because at the time the article was written, the rule was still under seal to the common man. (Not to Google, of course.
And finally, getting back to the actual assertion, Google had the changes that weren't presented to the Republican Commissioners until the morning of the vote. Get out of here with that "around the 20th" bullshit. The article, and several contemporary articles, make it clear that the changes were made on the evening of the 25th after Google's consultation with the Democrats, and the Republicans couldn't see them until the morning of the vote on the 26th.
That's what the reason for the delay is. The Republican Commissioners had to read THE NEW RULE and make objections to the new stuff. They did so in a timely fashion (within 14 days, when the law says the have up to 30.)
Here you go.
Politico is a source in your Obama shill only bubble, right? As you can see, they changed the rules being voted on right before the vote. It then follows that the commissioners would need to re-read the thing so they can object to whatever cronyist bullshit Google had added. Hence, the delay, which, again the Republicans could have stretched to 30 days and still be within the rules.
The proof is math. By law, unless there are extenuating circumstances, the Republican commissioners had 30 days to submit their objections. That clock started on February 26th, when the vote was taken. The Republicans submitted their objections in time for the order to be published on March 12th, 14 days later. (Keep in mind, there's a lag between Republicans submitting the objections and the order being published.) If the Republicans wanted to cause a delay, they could have caused one twice as long while staying within the letter of the law. Given that they decided not to cause the 30 delay, it doesn't make sense that they set out to cause a 14 day delay.
The Republican Commissioners objected to things in the justification and background section, moron. It doesn't matter what Wheeler's pretend page count is. The Republicans weren't given the document that were voted on before the morning of the vote. (They were given a different document which was alleged to them to be the final document.) When Wheeler changed it, they needed to re-look at it and write objections to whatever Wheeler's crony buddies slipped in. By law, they had 30 days to prepare their new objections, but it only took them half that time. That pretty well disproves the unnecessary delay stuff, no?
Do you know WHY the Republican commissioners didn't have their dissents completed when the vote was taken? After the Republican Commissioners were given the "final draft" of the rule, lobbyists for Google (who donated heavily to Obama and the Democrats) were shown a draft of the rule by the Democrats (before you, I, or the general public got to see it) and the lobbyists were allowed to make changes to it. These changes weren't revealed to the Republican Commissioners until the morning of the vote. Thus, the Republicans needed to read the text of the ACTUAL TEXT that had been approved again to make sure their dissents covered everything.
By law, the Republican Commissioners could have waited 30 days to submit their dissents, but they got them submitted in less than half that time. Your Vice article was dishonest when it was written, but now that it is provably factually inaccurate, I'd advise against posting that in the future.
Finalizing the rules doesn't mean ANYTHING AT ALL if the people voting don't get to study the rule (remember, this thing is 400 pages) before voting on it. The two Commissioners who voted no were provided a copy of the rules 3 weeks beforehand, per FCC procedure... Then, lobbyists represnting companies who donated heavily to the President's campaign made a bunch of "suggestions" to the Commissioners who wound up voting for the rule. This is apparently the norm in the Wheeler/Obama FCC, and it stinks to high heaven.
Slashdot Mirror
Title II is intended to perpetuate monopolies.
No. Title II is intended to regulate monopolies. Not the same thing.
A monopoly is not a competitive market. That's why we have antitrust laws. In the case of broadband, we already have a de facto oligopoly. It therefore has to be either broken up, so there can be actual competition, or regulated, to ensure some semblance of fairness to the consumer.
Those are the only 2 options in a free market system: either ensure there is a free market by breaking up the monopolies and oligopolies into smaller competitive companies, or regulating them because there isn't a free market. There is no third option.
I don't think you know what an oligopoly is. Cable companies don't compete with each other because of exclusive municipal franchise agreements, which make it illegal for another company to run cable. Companies don't price fix with other companies because they're not competing with anyone. (In areas where they compete with fiber optics, they compete with the fiber company and you'll see lower prices.)
If you had two options for cable companies, and they both raised their rates at the same time while keeping service the same, that would be an oligopoly. What you have with cable companies are a bunch of small monopolies.
Generally speaking, a monopoly gets that way because the government grants them a monopoly. This is certainly the case with your cable company. The municipal franchise agreement is a law that enshrines you cable company in a monopoly status forever. Title II's price fixing* does that too. Both laws perpetuate monopolies. They also regulate the monopoly, sure, but they guarantee that the the company has monopoly status forever.
Banning exclusive municipal franchise agreements would remove the ability of local governments to grant monopolies. That would break up the monopolies, and that would be an actual pro-consumer move. Title II was undertaken because of a pressure campaign sponsored by guys who give a lot of money to one party, and that party answered the bell. But don't forget for a second that Title II hurts your cable company's monopoly status.
Yes, that's a better answer. But that's not within the FCC's powers.
Imposing Title II isn't within the FCC's powers either.
Title II got implemented because of a huge special interest pressure campaign, because Obama is deified by a certain demographic (the press) and because Wheeler hates the cable companies.
If the pressure campaign had been directed towards state and municipal governments (or towards Congress directly, who could make this law at a national level), exclusive franchise agreements could be banned and then there would be actual monopolies. Republicans in Congress were ready to pass an anti-traffic shaping law (Net Neutrality without Title II) in February, but Democrats refused to go along with it.because they wanted Title II.
Title II was implemented because it helps a whole bunch of tech companies who back Obama and the Democrats (the guys who appointed Wheeler) cut costs. Not out of some kind of concern for fairness or whatever. They spun up the pressure campaign to get exactly the result they wanted. For you and me, that just means that the Comcast monopoly gets deeper entrenched.
I've got a clue for you.
The idea that people can know what the laws are and the what the penalties are is a myth. Nobody, *NODOBY* knows all the laws that cover their behavior. Not only are there too many, the're all subject to judicial interpretation.
(You can often make a good guess whether some particular law applies, but that's a very different argument.)
I don't know what I'm supposed to take from your comment.
If laws are too complex to follow, we should demand that the laws are changed to be made simpler and more easily followed.
You're right, that argument is WILDLY different from "The government should not be deciding whether something is illegal retroactively." That's what the FCC is doing here, giving itself the ability to make ex post facto rules if they don't like your traffic shaping practices.
If you ISPs had been customer-friendly and not huge arrogant dicks, then the FCC wouldn't need to police you.
It's not the FCC's job to police customer service.
The fucking republican party is bought and paid for by Comcast
Do me a favor. Turn on MSNBC.
Comcast owns that.
In fact, there was a bill in Congress that just implemented Net Neutrality (but not the rest of Title II), but Congressional Democrats wouldn't support the bill because they would rather enact Title II and bring the Internet under the thumb of their party.
So, what you are saying is that the market was stagnant for a century until Ma Bell was broken up. See, isn't it fun to draw vague generalities without an ounce of consideration for any greater context?
I don't think you know what you're saying. Yes, there was lots more innovation after the government broke up Ma Bell's monopoly.
Here's the thing though. Ma Bell got that monopoly from the government in the first place, through Title II legislation. Title II is essentially a deal between the government and the company. The government will protect the company's monopoly, but in exchange, the government can impose otherwise illegal rate controls. (Wheeler has said that the FCC will practice "forbearance" on rate controls and not implement them. If you are paying attention, it is IMPOSSIBLE to trust him on this.) Title II is intended to perpetuate monopolies.
If you want to expose Comcast to competition, what you need to do is regulate municipal franchise agreements, where a provider gets an exclusive right from a town to wire it for broadband. Enacting that would be a strike against broadband monopolies, but Wheeler and Obama just moved the ball in the other direction.
I don't get why any supporter of Title II would want to bring up the end of Ma Bell's monopoly.
Maybe they don't deserve the benefit of the doubt. But they DO deserve to know what the rules are up front, and not have the FCC be able to swoop in and declare something illegal retroactively. We write the laws down up front and let people see them (hey, wait a minute..) EXACTLY BECAUSE WE WANT PEOPLE TO FOLLOW THEM
Microsoft has outright said that "free for a year" means "you have one year to redeem the offer. If you redeem it, it's a full copy, not a subscription." The subscription stuff was just dopey clickbait by a couple of disreputable sites.
The Constitution doesn't require that states cast electoral votes in a winner take all fashion. The rules you are talking about are state laws, which individual states can change. In fact, two states DO cast proportional EVs.
DICE is the company that makes the Battlefield series of games. Slashdot's Dice is different.
The real problem is countries getting too greedy about profits all over the world, though. America wants to tax Apple for iTunes sales in Europe, and whines when Apple opens a European subsidiary that gets contracts and sells its iTunes tracks and thus doesn't have American income. Well, that's a European company operating in a European market making European profits; do you also want to tax Mercedes-Benz for their profits in Germany?
That's the problem. Of course $GOVERNMENT wants to tax someone they're not already taxing.
One wonders if this clause might also explain some of the blatantly unconstitutional legislation that's occasionally introduced (since it's been suggested elsewhere that such an action should be punishable by law).
That's exactly what the clause is for. It protects legislators from being arrested for advocating for things (or proposing laws) that the executive dislikes. Even if the executive dislikes a bill because it's unconstitutional, he can't have the sponsor arrested.
At the beginning of the ACA, they define a bunch of words as used in the Act. For ACA purposes, "The word "state" means one of the 50 states or the District of Columbia."
"Constutionally protected from being punished"
you are misinformed in more than just your spelling, sir... Where does it say in the constitution that our legislative branch is immune from the laws that they themselves make?
Sorry about the poor spelling, I was on a cell phone at the time. Anyway, you're looking for the Speech or Debate Clause, which is in Article 1 Section 6 of the Constitution.
The Senators and Representatives shall... in all Cases, except Treason, Felony and Breach of the Peace, be privileged from Arrest during their Attendance at the Session of their respective Houses, and in going to and returning from the same; and for any Speech or Debate in either House, they shall not be questioned in any other Place
The Wikipedia article on the clause has a couple of good examples of elected representatives getting off for things.(they don't mention the dirtbags who got off for DUIs by claiming they were en route to the Capitol.) They even have an example of a Senator reading a classified document into the Congressional Record.
Like all members of the federal Legislature (the House and the Senate), Wyden is Constutionally protected from being punished for any action taken in the course of his official duties. (Dipshits from both parties have gotten out of drunk driving tickets by saying they were on their way to the Capitol, so this is a pretty broad protection.) If Wyden obtained a classified document about surveillance programs and ordered it read into the Congressional Record, which is a routine thing that Senators and Representatives do, he couldn't be punished for it. (The Pentagon Papers were read into the Congressional Record this way, for example.)
In any case, the first page of the search results from the string "Google lobbyist net neutrality" (without quotes) brings up this Politico story on the first page of the mobile search results returned by Bing, Google, and DuckDuckGo.
"Basic edits" is propaganda, by the way, just like the rest of the Vice piece. The Republicans couldn't edit it (because by that point, it had ALREADY BEEN VOTED ON.) What they were submitting was their objections to the document. Whoever gave Vice that quote wanted to whip people up, and in your case, it looks like they succeeded.
The Republicans submitted 100 pages of objections to a rule that Democrat-sponsoring lobbyists ordered changed after the Republicans were provided the supposedly final copy.
The law gives them 30 days to submit their edits, and they took less than 14. Occam's Razor, man. They had to redo their edits because the Democrats and their lobbyist friends/puppetmasters changed the document in violation of the rules.
The Vice article was written by a shill, based on a quote by another shill, and you fell for it. That happens, man. But the article is dishonest, and in the future, I advise you to refrain from posting it.
By the way, the reason the article doesn't detail Google's changes is because at the time the article was written, the rule was still under seal to the common man. (Not to Google, of course.
And finally, getting back to the actual assertion, Google had the changes that weren't presented to the Republican Commissioners until the morning of the vote. Get out of here with that "around the 20th" bullshit. The article, and several contemporary articles, make it clear that the changes were made on the evening of the 25th after Google's consultation with the Democrats, and the Republicans couldn't see them until the morning of the vote on the 26th.
That's what the reason for the delay is. The Republican Commissioners had to read THE NEW RULE and make objections to the new stuff. They did so in a timely fashion (within 14 days, when the law says the have up to 30.)
Here you go. Politico is a source in your Obama shill only bubble, right? As you can see, they changed the rules being voted on right before the vote. It then follows that the commissioners would need to re-read the thing so they can object to whatever cronyist bullshit Google had added. Hence, the delay, which, again the Republicans could have stretched to 30 days and still be within the rules.
The proof is math. By law, unless there are extenuating circumstances, the Republican commissioners had 30 days to submit their objections. That clock started on February 26th, when the vote was taken. The Republicans submitted their objections in time for the order to be published on March 12th, 14 days later. (Keep in mind, there's a lag between Republicans submitting the objections and the order being published.) If the Republicans wanted to cause a delay, they could have caused one twice as long while staying within the letter of the law. Given that they decided not to cause the 30 delay, it doesn't make sense that they set out to cause a 14 day delay.
The Republican Commissioners objected to things in the justification and background section, moron. It doesn't matter what Wheeler's pretend page count is. The Republicans weren't given the document that were voted on before the morning of the vote. (They were given a different document which was alleged to them to be the final document.) When Wheeler changed it, they needed to re-look at it and write objections to whatever Wheeler's crony buddies slipped in. By law, they had 30 days to prepare their new objections, but it only took them half that time. That pretty well disproves the unnecessary delay stuff, no?
By law, the Republican Commissioners could have waited 30 days to submit their dissents, but they got them submitted in less than half that time. Your Vice article was dishonest when it was written, but now that it is provably factually inaccurate, I'd advise against posting that in the future.
Finalizing the rules doesn't mean ANYTHING AT ALL if the people voting don't get to study the rule (remember, this thing is 400 pages) before voting on it. The two Commissioners who voted no were provided a copy of the rules 3 weeks beforehand, per FCC procedure... Then, lobbyists represnting companies who donated heavily to the President's campaign made a bunch of "suggestions" to the Commissioners who wound up voting for the rule. This is apparently the norm in the Wheeler/Obama FCC, and it stinks to high heaven.
If they wanted you to read it, they would have published it before they voted on it.