One is "Telecommunications service" and one is "Information service". But I removed the actual term from the definition, and randomized the order at the flip of a coin.
So which one describes the Internet?
...
`($A) $ABC - The term `$ABC' means the offering of
telecommunications for a fee directly to the public, or to such
classes of users as to be effectively available directly to the
public, regardless of the facilities used.'.
`($D) $DEF - The term `$DEF'
means the offering of a capability for generating, acquiring,
storing, transforming, processing, retrieving, utilizing, or
making available information via telecommunications, and
includes electronic publishing, but does not include any use of
any such capability for the management, control, or operation
of a telecommunications system or the management of a
telecommunications service.
So does the Internet fall under section $A, or section $D?
Is it the Court's job to make you happy, or is it the court's job to uphold the law, including the constitution, which has a pretty strongly worded provision against laws about speech?
And how in the world is giving money to someone, or paying for an advertisement, "corruption"?
What part of no law have I not made sufficiently clear? Individual, corporation, union, robot, it doesn't matter who's affected. If it chills speech, it's unconstitutional, period, end of discussion.
Newsflash: Those particular protectionist laws were repealed. The authority is still there, and Title II still tends to protect big corporations over the general welfare. Including the FCC's actions on the ISPs.
`(a) Whoever--
`(1) in interstate or foreign communications--
`(A) by means of a telecommunications device knowingly--
`(i) makes, creates, or solicits, and
`(ii) initiates the transmission of,
any comment, request, suggestion, proposal, image, or other
communication which is obscene, lewd, lascivious, filthy,
or indecent, with intent to annoy, abuse, threaten, or
harass another person;
[...]
shall be fined under title 18, United States Code, or imprisoned
not more than two years, or both.';
If that were the case, then Congress wouldn't have a law that says "Here's a description of one type of commerce, you get $amount_of_authority over it. And here's a description of another type of commerce, and you get $substantially_more_amount_of_authority over it."
If they can just always pick the latter, why even bother describing the former, and the subset of authority that goes with it? The FCC has zero self-interest in regulating its power.
The Act makes a significant distinction between providers of telecommunications services and information services. The term 'telecommunications service' means the offering of telecommunications for a fee directly to the public, or to such classes of users as to be effectively available directly to the public, regardless of the facilities used.' On the other hand, the term 'information service' means the offering of a capability for generating, acquiring, storing, transforming, processing, retrieving, utilizing, or making available information via telecommunications, and includes electronic publishing, but does not include any use of any such capability for the management, control, or operation of a telecommunications system or the management of a telecommunications service. The distinction comes into play when a carrier provides information services. A carrier providing information services is not a 'telecommunications carrier' under the act. For example, a carrier is not a 'telecommunications carrier' when it is selling broadband Internet access. This distinction becomes particularly important because the act enforces specific regulations against 'telecommunications carriers' but not against carriers providing information services. With the convergence of telephone, cable, and internet providers, this distinction has created much controversy.
If the FCC successfully claims that the Internet is a Title II service (it's not), then besides being blatantly dishonest, they also get the authority to censor the Internet and impose draconian rules like they did on the PSTN.
e.g. did you know it was illegal to plug your own phone into the PSTN? Welcome to Title II.
With Title II Internet, the FCC has done nothing and opened the door to great harm in the future, all at once.
If I want an Internet connection, it doesn't matter who I am or what content I'm serving, I have to pay for it. Period.
Sometimes it's money, sometimes it's a symmetrical peering arrangement. Netflix can't do the latter, since they kind of take up a majority of traffic. Any network with them is necessarily going to be asymmetrical.
Netflix and Comcast aren't innocent little kindergarteners, they're big boys. They can handle their network pricing disputes on their own.
Corporations are people under US law and "people" can spend as much as they want on election campaigns.
Corporations are persons so they can be be a party to contracts and be legally held to them. I mean, you want corporations to be accountable, right?
Also, what part of "Congress shall make no law... abridging the freedom of speech" don't you understand?
Not "Congress shall make no law against individuals", not "Congress shall make no law against unions". NO law. Any law restricting the movement of speech, including political contributions, is unconstitutional. You don't need to bring "person" into it.
Funny, the Internet doesn't look like the PSTN to me. And I had no clue it was invented in 1934, Al Gore looks pretty young! But I'm a VoIP professional, what do I know?
The FCC Title II rules might get overturned?! The Internet might be the Wild West that it was one whole month ago! Oh the humanity, we can't possibly have that!
Wait, what was so bad about the Internet one month ago, again? I'm pretty sure Net Neutrality was still the de facto standard.
What problem? The FCC named zero problems. Only hypotheticals that could possibly happen sometime in the future.
Is that a good reason to let them expand their authority? What if they try to reinstate Broadcast Flag, or shut down sex services like they did with phones using Title II? The ends don't justify the means.
You probably have one ISP to choose from. What if they dislike Slashdot and charged you extra for visiting Slashdot?
Then that's not Internet access. If I pay for Internet access, I expect Internet access.
Second, why does a hypothetical situation that's never happened justify giving the FCC, home of the nipple-protection-squad, more authority over our Internet?
Comcast is doing that right now to Netflix. You the customer who pays an ISP has to pay three times for the same bandwidth because your ISP doesn't like the content of what you are viewing. That is the only reason.
Netflix's traffic isn't being routed any differently than any other company's traffic. Therefore, there can be no Net Neutrality violation.
Nope, the FCC specifically declined to intervene in peering agreements like Netflix-Cogent-Comcast:
As discussed, Internet traffic exchange agreements have historically been and will continue to be commercially negotiated. We do not believe that it is appropriate or necessary to subject arrangements for Internet traffic exchange (which are subsumed within broadband Internet access service) to the rules we adopt today.
You were saying?
Unregulated? Without any act of Congress? You do know that "Title II" refers specifically to a law, passed by Congress, as updated to cover modern telecommunications, right? And you do know that they tried doing stuff before, and the Courts told them "you have to use Title II classification to do this," right?
Last time I checked, the Internet was an Information Service. That designation was created by Congress for some reason... You can't have it both ways.
I'm not even going to start on the fact that you think sending data is somehow not "information service."
It prevents Comcast, who effectively has monopoly power in most of the markets it serves
I wouldn't single out Comcast in this manner, they're not uniquely a monopoly any more than other ISPs (and they're not, most people have multiple options for Internet access, virtually everyone if you include wireless options).
charging Netflix extra simply to route packets from their servers to their subscribers
Netflix represents the majority of Internet traffic. Not just the biggest, but the majority. Mathematically, making a "swap" peering agreement while carrying Netflix traffic is going to be impossible because the exchange will be asymmetrical.
Every content provider who wants a fat uplink pipe needs to pay for it, and Netflix is no exception.
The ruling also prevents service providers from rerouting web requests to competitors' servers.
This is called fraud. It was always illegal.
It also prevents outright denying access to competitors.
Always been illegal. Not the FCC's jurisdiction, anyways.
In fact, the ruling states quite clearly that ISPs are to act as common carriers and no censorship of content is to take place at all. You would know this if you actually read the ruling and stopped reading propaganda coming from right wing "news" sources.
[Citation Needed] I've read the thing cover to cover.
There's no law saying you have to "represent the interests" of "their own constituency". How would you even prosecute that? If we have an objective way of determining everyone's best interest, we wouldn't need lawmakers.
Second, the House of Representatives is citizen-elected, the FCC is an unelected bureaucracy. I'm not so naive to think Congress is acting in my best interest, but the fact that they're opposing the unelected bureaucracy should raise some red flags. Specifically, they're probably unhappy that the FCC, all by itself, asserted its authority over the Internet, which they have no statutory authority over.
That is, if the FCC gets away with this, Congress becomes irrelevant, and my vote becomes even more meaningless than it was before.
Net Neutrality is a routing rule that has been with the Internet since the beginning. You don't "overturn" it with an act of congress. How the Internet is designed is a job for engineers and no one else.
What's at issue is if the FCC's unconstitutional, unregulated expansion of power. Without identifying any previous violations, without even utilizing the courts, and without any act of Congress, they single-handedly declared their authority over one of the most free realms of commerce we have today. This wasn't OK when it was the Broadcast Flag, and it's not OK even if they call it "light touch".
Just because you can send copyrighted material over p2p protocols, doesn't make them illegal. And just because you can send VoIP over the Internet doesn't make it a telecommunications service.
Currencies backed ultimately by gold by some bank are most definitely NOT backed by "trust".
Apparently we're misunderstanding the meaning of "trust". Trust is never something you can literally "back" a currency by. You can't walk up to a teller, hand them a note, and say "I'd like to redeem my 4 utils of trust, please."
Trust is one of the components that determines the value of a money - all money. It can be measured as a probability. Especially money backed by a commodity, since it's effectively an IOU: the value of the note is going to be roughly the same as the value of the debt listed on the note (e.g. "one ounce of silver"), times the amount of trust in the issuer (i.e. the probability they they will fill their obligation).
This is no different than buying/selling debt. I might have an IOU for $100, and I sell it for $80 because there's a small risk that the debtor will default.
Even if it was gold or silver coin, you have to "trust" that the precious metal content in the coin is actually the amount marked on the coin. Historically, mints have been known for debasing their currency, by reducing the precious metal content below its marked value (the origin of the term "inflation"), or shaving off the edges of the coin (why most coins now have ridged edges, even today).
Since the invention of coinage there has never ever, not even once, been a currency based on trust.
This is absolutely not the case.
As little as 200 years ago, there were many competing currencies, typically backed in gold. There was even merchant's associations and regular publications on how much you should discount certain bank's currency because the redeeming bank was far away, or not as trustworthy. Wikipedia has a whole catalog of these notes.
All further words you may utter are now invalid by virtue of your rank stupidity.
Logical fallacy, but thanks for playing.
-you ignore that net neutrality is how the internet -already- largely operates
I don't need to explicitly lay out everything, do I?
-you ignore that it ISNT a "hypothetical that hasnt happened"; it HAS happened, repeatedly
I'll make this abundantly clear: The FCC has not been able to identify any "Net Neutrality" violations (for their definition of Net Neutrality).
-you dont know the definitions of words or what the FCCs mandate is
You're stuffing words in my mouth.
-and you keep speaking of the FCC as this big scary apparatus with a dark and sordid history...without ever giving any examples...largely because there are none (i already schooled you on the fairness doctrine once, dont make me do it again)
Um, Broadcast Flag, nipple hysteria, the Fairness Doctrine? The FCC, at least until the NSA, has been Enemy of Technological Freedom #1.
Slashdot Mirror
Let's play a game.
One is "Telecommunications service" and one is "Information service". But I removed the actual term from the definition, and randomized the order at the flip of a coin.
So which one describes the Internet?
So does the Internet fall under section $A, or section $D?
Is it the Court's job to make you happy, or is it the court's job to uphold the law, including the constitution, which has a pretty strongly worded provision against laws about speech?
And how in the world is giving money to someone, or paying for an advertisement, "corruption"?
What part of no law have I not made sufficiently clear? Individual, corporation, union, robot, it doesn't matter who's affected. If it chills speech, it's unconstitutional, period, end of discussion.
Newsflash: Those particular protectionist laws were repealed. The authority is still there, and Title II still tends to protect big corporations over the general welfare. Including the FCC's actions on the ISPs.
Are you seriously trying to tell me the government has never tried to censor anything, nothing on the Internet?
And you're trying to tell me they've never tried to censor any part of a telecommunications service?
Well sorry to burst your bubble, the Telecommunications Act of 1996 has an entire section on censorship of sexually explicit materials:
You were saying?
If that were the case, then Congress wouldn't have a law that says "Here's a description of one type of commerce, you get $amount_of_authority over it. And here's a description of another type of commerce, and you get $substantially_more_amount_of_authority over it."
If they can just always pick the latter, why even bother describing the former, and the subset of authority that goes with it? The FCC has zero self-interest in regulating its power.
You'll need to provide a citation, but in any event, the FCC would have been incorrect, as it is now.
Wikipedia provides a nice write-up of the state of affairs since the Telecommunications Act of 1996:
The Act makes a significant distinction between providers of telecommunications services and information services. The term 'telecommunications service' means the offering of telecommunications for a fee directly to the public, or to such classes of users as to be effectively available directly to the public, regardless of the facilities used.' On the other hand, the term 'information service' means the offering of a capability for generating, acquiring, storing, transforming, processing, retrieving, utilizing, or making available information via telecommunications, and includes electronic publishing, but does not include any use of any such capability for the management, control, or operation of a telecommunications system or the management of a telecommunications service. The distinction comes into play when a carrier provides information services. A carrier providing information services is not a 'telecommunications carrier' under the act. For example, a carrier is not a 'telecommunications carrier' when it is selling broadband Internet access. This distinction becomes particularly important because the act enforces specific regulations against 'telecommunications carriers' but not against carriers providing information services. With the convergence of telephone, cable, and internet providers, this distinction has created much controversy.
If the FCC successfully claims that the Internet is a Title II service (it's not), then besides being blatantly dishonest, they also get the authority to censor the Internet and impose draconian rules like they did on the PSTN.
e.g. did you know it was illegal to plug your own phone into the PSTN? Welcome to Title II.
With Title II Internet, the FCC has done nothing and opened the door to great harm in the future, all at once.
GP said the FCC doesn't censor, I called them out. Case closed.
If you want to argue the FCC won't censor the Internet, well the FCC just answered that:
lawful content? I don't remember any such stipulation before. How about saying goodbye to Wikileaks? The Pirate Bay?
What double-charging?
If I want an Internet connection, it doesn't matter who I am or what content I'm serving, I have to pay for it. Period.
Sometimes it's money, sometimes it's a symmetrical peering arrangement. Netflix can't do the latter, since they kind of take up a majority of traffic. Any network with them is necessarily going to be asymmetrical.
Netflix and Comcast aren't innocent little kindergarteners, they're big boys. They can handle their network pricing disputes on their own.
Corporations are people under US law and "people" can spend as much as they want on election campaigns.
Corporations are persons so they can be be a party to contracts and be legally held to them. I mean, you want corporations to be accountable, right?
Also, what part of "Congress shall make no law... abridging the freedom of speech" don't you understand?
Not "Congress shall make no law against individuals", not "Congress shall make no law against unions". NO law. Any law restricting the movement of speech, including political contributions, is unconstitutional. You don't need to bring "person" into it.
Funny, the Internet doesn't look like the PSTN to me. And I had no clue it was invented in 1934, Al Gore looks pretty young! But I'm a VoIP professional, what do I know?
The FCC Title II rules might get overturned?! The Internet might be the Wild West that it was one whole month ago! Oh the humanity, we can't possibly have that!
Wait, what was so bad about the Internet one month ago, again? I'm pretty sure Net Neutrality was still the de facto standard.
And don't even bother with the "illegal" content nonsense. The FCC does not decide what is legal and illegal.
Two words: Wardrobe malfunction.
What problem? The FCC named zero problems. Only hypotheticals that could possibly happen sometime in the future.
Is that a good reason to let them expand their authority? What if they try to reinstate Broadcast Flag, or shut down sex services like they did with phones using Title II? The ends don't justify the means.
You probably have one ISP to choose from. What if they dislike Slashdot and charged you extra for visiting Slashdot?
Then that's not Internet access. If I pay for Internet access, I expect Internet access.
Second, why does a hypothetical situation that's never happened justify giving the FCC, home of the nipple-protection-squad, more authority over our Internet?
Comcast is doing that right now to Netflix. You the customer who pays an ISP has to pay three times for the same bandwidth because your ISP doesn't like the content of what you are viewing. That is the only reason.
Netflix's traffic isn't being routed any differently than any other company's traffic. Therefore, there can be no Net Neutrality violation.
Nope, the FCC specifically declined to intervene in peering agreements like Netflix-Cogent-Comcast:
You were saying?
Unregulated? Without any act of Congress? You do know that "Title II" refers specifically to a law, passed by Congress, as updated to cover modern telecommunications, right? And you do know that they tried doing stuff before, and the Courts told them "you have to use Title II classification to do this," right?
Last time I checked, the Internet was an Information Service. That designation was created by Congress for some reason... You can't have it both ways.
I'm not even going to start on the fact that you think sending data is somehow not "information service."
It prevents Comcast, who effectively has monopoly power in most of the markets it serves
I wouldn't single out Comcast in this manner, they're not uniquely a monopoly any more than other ISPs (and they're not, most people have multiple options for Internet access, virtually everyone if you include wireless options).
charging Netflix extra simply to route packets from their servers to their subscribers
Netflix represents the majority of Internet traffic. Not just the biggest, but the majority. Mathematically, making a "swap" peering agreement while carrying Netflix traffic is going to be impossible because the exchange will be asymmetrical.
Every content provider who wants a fat uplink pipe needs to pay for it, and Netflix is no exception.
The ruling also prevents service providers from rerouting web requests to competitors' servers.
This is called fraud. It was always illegal.
It also prevents outright denying access to competitors.
Always been illegal. Not the FCC's jurisdiction, anyways.
In fact, the ruling states quite clearly that ISPs are to act as common carriers and no censorship of content is to take place at all. You would know this if you actually read the ruling and stopped reading propaganda coming from right wing "news" sources.
[Citation Needed]
I've read the thing cover to cover.
There's no law saying you have to "represent the interests" of "their own constituency". How would you even prosecute that? If we have an objective way of determining everyone's best interest, we wouldn't need lawmakers.
Second, the House of Representatives is citizen-elected, the FCC is an unelected bureaucracy. I'm not so naive to think Congress is acting in my best interest, but the fact that they're opposing the unelected bureaucracy should raise some red flags. Specifically, they're probably unhappy that the FCC, all by itself, asserted its authority over the Internet, which they have no statutory authority over.
That is, if the FCC gets away with this, Congress becomes irrelevant, and my vote becomes even more meaningless than it was before.
No one is arguing how to route packets. We're arguing if there should be a Packet Police.
That is, we're arguing if it should be dictated by the same agency that fines you for saying "fuck" on broadcast television, or trying to record it.
Net Neutrality is a routing rule that has been with the Internet since the beginning. You don't "overturn" it with an act of congress. How the Internet is designed is a job for engineers and no one else.
What's at issue is if the FCC's unconstitutional, unregulated expansion of power. Without identifying any previous violations, without even utilizing the courts, and without any act of Congress, they single-handedly declared their authority over one of the most free realms of commerce we have today. This wasn't OK when it was the Broadcast Flag, and it's not OK even if they call it "light touch".
Just because you can send copyrighted material over p2p protocols, doesn't make them illegal. And just because you can send VoIP over the Internet doesn't make it a telecommunications service.
Currencies backed ultimately by gold by some bank are most definitely NOT backed by "trust".
Apparently we're misunderstanding the meaning of "trust". Trust is never something you can literally "back" a currency by. You can't walk up to a teller, hand them a note, and say "I'd like to redeem my 4 utils of trust, please."
Trust is one of the components that determines the value of a money - all money. It can be measured as a probability. Especially money backed by a commodity, since it's effectively an IOU: the value of the note is going to be roughly the same as the value of the debt listed on the note (e.g. "one ounce of silver"), times the amount of trust in the issuer (i.e. the probability they they will fill their obligation).
This is no different than buying/selling debt. I might have an IOU for $100, and I sell it for $80 because there's a small risk that the debtor will default.
Even if it was gold or silver coin, you have to "trust" that the precious metal content in the coin is actually the amount marked on the coin. Historically, mints have been known for debasing their currency, by reducing the precious metal content below its marked value (the origin of the term "inflation"), or shaving off the edges of the coin (why most coins now have ridged edges, even today).
There's a chance that the bank wouldn't be able to redeem the note, because of fractional reserve banking.
Besides other reasons for discounting notes at purchase time, like fake notes, or loss, or the bank being very far away.
Since the invention of coinage there has never ever, not even once, been a currency based on trust.
This is absolutely not the case.
As little as 200 years ago, there were many competing currencies, typically backed in gold. There was even merchant's associations and regular publications on how much you should discount certain bank's currency because the redeeming bank was far away, or not as trustworthy. Wikipedia has a whole catalog of these notes.
All further words you may utter are now invalid by virtue of your rank stupidity.
Logical fallacy, but thanks for playing.
-you ignore that net neutrality is how the internet -already- largely operates
I don't need to explicitly lay out everything, do I?
-you ignore that it ISNT a "hypothetical that hasnt happened"; it HAS happened, repeatedly
I'll make this abundantly clear: The FCC has not been able to identify any "Net Neutrality" violations (for their definition of Net Neutrality).
-you dont know the definitions of words or what the FCCs mandate is
You're stuffing words in my mouth.
-and you keep speaking of the FCC as this big scary apparatus with a dark and sordid history...without ever giving any examples...largely because there are none (i already schooled you on the fairness doctrine once, dont make me do it again)
Um, Broadcast Flag, nipple hysteria, the Fairness Doctrine? The FCC, at least until the NSA, has been Enemy of Technological Freedom #1.