the agency plans to impose more regulations on Web-access providers after a court stripped the agency of its powers last month.
What does that mean? Which powers were stripped? How can they impose more regulations if they have less power?
What does that mean? Which powers were stripped? How can they impose more regulations if they have less power?
IMHO this is probably huge for net neutrality, but I wonder where their (generally accepted) efforts at traffic shaping will end up in all of this? I'm not sure anyone wants broadband that can't throttle its bittorrent users a little.
Why would your 24MBit/s work slower for bit-torrent than other uses? The whole point of this net neutrality debate is that ISPs have no business deciding which traffic they prefer, much like your phone company has no business deciding which one of your friends you're allowed to call.
I comment in agreement with the need to maintain QoS for reasons of network health, especially if you need to maintain minimum guaranteed bandwidth in the presence of misbehaving clients (e.g. botnets, ping floods, not just abusive torrenters).
However, the carriers in questions have often not been using QoS for reasons of improving service, but rather to penalize the percentage of broadband users who actually use a large portion of the bandwidth they're paying for.
For example, say you buy 1.5Mbit DSL and then carefully set up your torrent client to use a consistent 1.0Mbit during nighttime. A month later you get a disconnect notice from your ISP claiming that you were hogging bandwidth, probably leaving you SOL since that's the only viable ISP in your area.
This is the sort of business practice the FCC is trying to address.
Those 1.5Mbit DSL is "maximum capacity." Not what you should try to consume. Ultimately, all the customers go through one pipe, or a shared few pipes, so those hogging the lines negatively affect others.
In my opinion, it's the users of the bandwidth that are greedy. Do they really need 1,000 movies on their hard drives? Many bit torrenters have more content than they could ever watch in their entire lives...
If they don't want people to use the bandwith they pay to get, they should say so by advertising their monthly cap or whatever.
The idea that I can only transfer the particular types of bits across the wire that my ISP thinks I should is exactly the point of net neutrality rules. If that's not an infringement of free speech, I don't know what is.
Limiting the ability to share movies online is not an infringement of free speech.
I'm pretty sure the telcos don't have enough lines for everyone to place a call at the same time. Are you also going to argue that running a call center should be prohibited, too, because you are excessively using shared resources?
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/04...
The real issue question is whether or not enforcing net neutrality would introduce a new level of federal regulation that would scare off investment.
The open question is whether the courts will accept this reclassification. This question will likely take several years to wind its way through the courts, but no matter how it turns out it will be a huge headache for the cable providers.
The fundamental issue here is whether net neutrality can be imposed on the cable providers. The standard meme is that net neutrality is a basic right. I am one of the few people who actually don't want net neutrality. Not because I trust ISPs to behave in a reasonable fashion, but because I think that the only real solution to bot nets is to make ISPs liable for the traffic that they let onto the Internet, and any such rule would be incompatible with net neutrality.
Have a sense of proportions...
Just because people aren't aware of how big a problem it is doesn't mean that it isn't a big problem.
So the providers started screwing people over depending on what kind of bits they wanted to get over the net -- the beginning of some god-awful 74-thousand tiered pricing structure.
Lots of fuss about that. FCC tries to step in. Court says nope, in that bucket you don't have the authority to act.
So the FCC puts them in new bucket. Huge part of the economy now regulated and nobody had to elect anybody, there was no bill, no debate, no nothing (And I support this, but damn it's a freaking Faustian bargain if I ever saw one)
Apologies if I seemed to mislead anyone. There is nothing unconstitutional going on.
But that doesn't take away from the fact that the regulatory agencies have immense power in our society -- granted to them by Congress. For instance, the DEA can classify new drugs as dangerous, including setting what the jail time will be for possession -- and Congress has virtually no role[1]. Used to be it took an entire constitutional amendment to outlaw alcohol, but now a commission does the same work and there's little publicity.
[1] Ok, so they have "oversight", but as somebody who has seen oversight behind the scenes, and watched a lot of it on C-SPAN, color me unimpressed.
EDIT: Another good one is the EPA classifying CO2 -- the air we breathe -- as being under it's regulatory guidance. Now they made provision so that it only covers large producers of CO2, but that was their decision as an agency. There was no public debate or vote in Congress. Just a bunch of guys sitting around a conference table.
Once again, I support the outcome in this case. I'm not trying to argue that it's a bad outcome. Just not crazy about the way we got here, or the implications for broadband 20 years from now.
Legislative branch sets out what should happen (but misses details)
Executive branch fills in the details via implementation
Judicial branch tells them when they screwed up the details or the legislative branch did something that conflicts with higher law.
Yes, you are correct.
"Oversight" committees are set up by Congress to manage the authority they were given. These are -- well, start watching some if you'd like to know what they are. And don't let the Congressmen tell you their staff is on top of it. Managing Congressional staff is something the various agencies have learned a long, long time ago.
The agency itself is a part of the executive branch. So theoretically they report to the president. In practice, however, the government is a huge thing. It is highly unusual to be within 3 people of reporting to the executive. The president makes political appointments, and the top people at each agency are those who manage those guys. Usually contractors are brought in to create a lot of presentations and such so that staff can show to the political hack how great the agency is. Over time agencies get very, very good at managing the hacks and resisting change. After all, the agency is full of people there for life. These guys are just passing through. It's not unusual for the president to bring in activists or ex-corporate types as their political hacks. After all, these guys are contributors and they are interested and qualified (but also have many hidden agendas)
The courts technically oversee whether or not the agencies act in a constitutional manner -- the idea being that although Congress can delegate huge swaths of its power to agencies, it can't delegate something it never had. Appellate courts step in when federal agencies overstep, but historically in an ad-hoc manner. http://www.jstor.org/pss/2647783 The worst abuses with the most political imapct are caught. Lots of little guys get trampled.
Also, as in this FCC case, there is the matter of whether or not Congress gave them the power to do X in the first place.
What you are painting as a demon I think of as giving regulators flexibility to adapt to a changing world. It couldn't work otherwise, if everything had to be spelled out exactly by Congress do you really think it would work better?