U.S. FCC chairman plans fast-track repeal of net neutrality: sources
reuters.com
reuters.com
If it had been branded 'internet freedom' then we wouldn't even be having this discussion because it would be toxic for politicians to mess with something called 'internet freedom.'
Source: Sat through way too many focus groups testing communications concepts in my life...
Sticking to "net neutrality" seemingly resulted in ISP's treating the phrase like courts treat jury nullification and the FCC making this an across-the-isle issue about corporate investment and infrastructure costs rather than regional monopolies, tiered access, slow lanes, etc.
I'm not naive enough to blame this on the name alone, but I'm also curious to see how net neutrality might fair when pushed onto ISP's and mobile carriers alike as "internet freedom."
"Net Neutrality" isn't even the name the name the pro-neutrality group at the FCC used: that was Open Internet.
Which, honestly, would be a better name for advocates to use, as well, though "net neutrality" is perhaps more precise.
It would get a lot more attention with headlines of "FCC chairman plans fast track repeal of Open Internet."
When things are just rules or policies, they can be enacted and removed with a stroke of a pen or by a handful of people voting. When it's the law, they at least have some external pressure to enforce it..
.. sometimes.
It doesn't matter at all in this particular instance because the people who want to remove NN own both branches and can do it just as easily no matter where the rules come from. The only things that can persist in the face of a 1 party lockstep government like this is a constitutional amendment, or something that is so widely popular and easily understandable that repealing it is political suicide, like health care.
Also, if it didn't make a difference if you used a bill or not, why wouldn't the conservative FCC commissioners just strike down the privacy rules at the FCC and be done with it? My guess is because they want to make it harder to bring privacy rules back if a democrat president were elected.
You are still correct that regulation is more flexible. It's a double edged sword. Without the FCC to regulate would we have even gotten net neutrality in the first place? Would we be able to adapt to changing conditions easily?
FCC commissioners go through presidential appointment and senate confirmation, and almost always has as a 2-1 or 3-2 party split. This DOES make the Commission's direction subject to different political winds than just the executive, or just the Congress. But that doesn't make them under the executive any more than that confirmation process makes the judiciary part of the executive.
While this is generally an important distinction, I'm not sure it really matters in this case. The point is we have a new president and thus new FCC chairman and commissioners, and thus a new FCC policy. If Obama and the democratic congress he had had passed a law mandating net neutrality, Ajit Pai would have a much harder time "fast-tracking" a repeal of net neutrality.
I don't understand the hand-wringing[1], why don't the well-paid technologists use their money to influence politicians too? Where is the copyleft-equivalent judo move to Citizens United? Are techies so savvy that getting involved in politics is beneath us? Or is Slacktivism enough 'engagement'? Black site banners can only take you so far.
1. Disclaimer: not american
Make no tool you wouldn't want to be on the receiving end of.
EDIT: Worth mentioning Pai was directly as chairman by Trump.
The only system I know of that avoids these problems is to hold randomized lotteries for government positions and skip the election process entirely.
The changes are not mutually exclusive, either. Let's reform voting and reduce influence by money in elections.
Simples steps, clearly communicable steps, and one step at a time.
Start by Reducing the impact of money on elections. Politicians themselves will thank you.
The ability to flog oneself on the airwaves, to call and reach out to people and keep targeting newer and newer potential voters. These abilities force politicians into a monetary arms race.
The easiest thing here is funding, and curtailing it.
The issues are creative ways to get on the air without resorting to using money.
But one step at a time.
They do whatever they want, and the people have little recourse. Call and complain all you want, they'll still do whatever they want for the next three and a half years. Start a riot and you'll get zip-tied up into jail, blasted with a water cannon, get on watchlists and have trouble flying + re-entering the country, and they'll still do whatever they want.
I've never accepted that idiotic premise. If your ultimate trump card is armed mobs ousting a 'regime' if it occurs, you're just inviting your ruling class to start acquiescing to draconian measures in the name of 'national security' for their own safety.
You already see this with "freedom spaces" or whatever the hell you americans call them. If the 'right to petition' is a basic right, you'll just start seeing courts "define" and restrict when and how you can petition in the name of public safety - because when is a court ever going to rule that a potentially violent mob is the correct solution to a problem?
"Real democracy" is a laughable term to use while you're shrugging your shoulders and looking around to see who has the biggest rocks. If 'might makes right' is your only remaining fallback, you might need to stop lying to yourself about your 'democracy' first.
One and a half years. There are congressional elections every other year. There are local elections every single year. Don't forget this! Vote every year!
In principle, you can not corrupt something that doesn't exist.
If the FCC would get dismantled, it wouldn't be possible to corrupt it anymore.
If the FCC were dismantled, the knock on effects would be worse than the disease. No radio frequency regulation (bye bye wifi and cell phones, let alone amateur radio). No enforcement of TV content. Prepare for all the "fucks" and breasts your prime time show can fit in. Say good bye mandatory landline coverage (and the emergency capabilities thereof) for rural America (about 98% of the country, land wise).
This is, for better or worse, a very minor aspect of what the FCC provides.
You can work to promote the issue and elect people supportive of it in the next Congressional and Presidential elections in 2018 and 2020. With enough promotion of the issue, you might get Congress to do something now in principle, but that seems unlikely; this isn't a matter of a corrupt individual at the FCC, it's the clear and long-standing policy of the party that now has a majority in Congress and control of the Presidency, and also, largely a consequence of holding the Presidency, a majority on the FCC.
No facebook/google/netflix/amazon/youtube. 2 days if necessary. Show a video explaining what net neutrality is and why many of the arguments it are so dumb.
Look at Denmark; they top the global ITU ITC ranking for internet service, and how do they do it? By totally deregulating ISPs while setting government policy to allow for competition (instead of trying to force ISPs to follow some arbitrary notion of good behavior in the abject lack of competition). They removed many ISP regulations (nominally antitrust regs) back in 2006 and it worked so well that they completely dissolved their rough FCC equivalent (NITA) in 2011.
We don't need the FCC ham-fist to improve or preserve the quality of our internet services. All we need is to set local and regional line lease policy to encourage actual ISP competition. Every X years, have an open auction to sell shared cable leases to Y different ISPs or something. Now instead of having to force net neutrality, some of the Z different ISPs that now service your house will use privacy guarantees as a cheap competitive advantage.
I don't know about you but in my town ISP competition is practically nonexistent. Usually it's a choice between Comcast and maybe one other local ISP. It's practically a monopoly right now, which is why treating internet as a utility and treating huge ISPs like Comcast as a "government regulated monopoly" makes sense.
This would be just like what we already have with our local power companies. It's technically a monopoly, but it's heavily regulated so that they can't raise prices on your electricity for no reason. It's also very easy to argue that internet is every bit as much of a necessity as power or water is these days.
BTW, reading some other comments of yours on this submission indicates you believe this action has something to do with a law and/or legislators; it does not.
There are multiple good competitive ISPs in small, dense, wealthy areas of the US like San Francisco. That isn't true elsewhere, even including much of Silicon Valley which isnt that far away.
Snark aside, it looks like the current government is interested in repealing net neutrality, but not in increasing competition. So, at the end of the day, instead of a leaky roof we're going to end up with no roof at all. I doubt AT&T and friends would have supported the repeal of net neutrality if they thought it would lead to meaningful new competition.
I have read nothing and have no idea what the consequences will be for privacy. E.g., maybe the FTC will, net, give us better regulation of privacy or maybe worse.
Gee, again we could use better written news.
Hacker channels will be free. Most of the people who would be upset by this will be mollified, or sidelined.
No one has really broken net neutrality principles yet. But there are ideas out there and innovation out there, where this net neutrality is turning out to be a hindrance to it all.
Why cannot cable company provide cable TV over cable Internet? Because of net neutrality! Why cannot T-mobile provide TV experience on its network for everyone without breaking its network? Because of net neutrality. Why cannot Verizon offer free stuff for its customers over its network? Because of net neutrality.
Net neutrality was not supposed to prevent ISPs from doing great stuff. It was supposed to prevent ISPs from making alliances with certain companies and enemies with other companies. It was supposed to prevent ISPs from harming innovation. It was supposed to prevent ISPs from hurting content providers and content types.
Yet, now it is preventing ISPs from offering better services.
Whew. It's good to know that mobile carriers aren't charging more for access to video providers than their own offerings. I knew that was all heresay.
Or limiting Netflix bandwidth (while promoting their own pay-2-view channels) while blaming it on Level3.
It's great to know such rules are not necessary.
The first Open Internet (the then-majority at FCC's term for net neutrality) Report and Order was drafted and issued after the FCC's use of "ancillary authority" action against Comcast for blocking use of peer-to-peer file sharing software was struck down in FCC v. Comcast [0]. People were breaking the rules that became the FCCs Open Internet rules before they were adopted, so the "Don't make rules people aren't breaking" line, however valid it might be as a general principle [1], is inapplicable.
> But there are ideas out there and innovation out there, where this net neutrality is turning out to be a hindrance to it all.
No, it's not.
> Why cannot cable company provide cable TV over cable Internet? Because of net neutrality!
False. Open Internet rules don't prevent this. They so prevent the cable company from blocking access to third-party video services also provided over the internet, though.
> Why cannot T-mobile provide TV experience on its network for everyone without breaking its network? Because of net neutrality.
Again false, of something is really necessary to prevent breaking the network, it falls under the ambit of the reasonable network management exception in the Open Internet Order.
> Why cannot Verizon offer free stuff for its customers over its network? Because of net neutrality.
The Open Internet Order does not prevent ISPs, mobile or fixed, from providing free stuff to subscribers. So, again, this is false.
[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comcast_Corp._v._FCC
[1] Itself a debatable point when there are foreseeable and preventable problems.
Good point! I was only vaguely familiar with the event.
At some point we need to solve this with technology in a similar way that E2E encryption is a step toward solving chat privacy. Maybe the selling of browser histories and then end of net neutrality will be the kick that finally gets us moving.
Net neutrality isn't about consumer surveillance (which is a problem too, just a different one). It's about access to markets and the ability to choose the services you use on the internet.
Why is policy first flawed? An analogy:
Imagine if your county sold the rights to build and maintain (or not maintain) all the roads, highways, and public transportation in your county to Car Company X. Vehicles from competitors Y and Z were then forced to pay tolls.
If government policy isn't the solution this, what is? "The free market" is not the answer.
Bad car analogies aside, "lets just build our own internet, with WiFi meshes and encryption or something" isn't the answer to internet service either.
While this is a popular belief, it represents a fundamental misunderstanding of how politics works. Ignoring policy doesn't mean it won't happen; you're simply allowing other people to define policy without your input. In this case, congress should have acted to preserve neutrality and privacy by passing the necessary laws or regulations.
Unfortunately the people that should have been educating congress and pressuring them to act were more interested in complaining about congress's lack of education in technical areas and/or working on technical workarounds. Without any real competition, Comcast et al bought politicians easily and cheaply.
Yes, politicians will pass imperfect laws even when they have the best intentions. You fix that by participating in politics and applying an opposing force to corruption. Ignoring the problem isn't neutral; it's announcing that you aren't going to stand in the way of corruption.
Once mesh networks threaten the profits of telecom companies, How quickly do you think the laws to make mesh networks illegal (or onerous to set up) will be enacted? You can't solve political/legislative problems with technology, unless you are prepared to go to jail.
Squeezing is much less likely to incite riots from their customers. Cut off access to the latest season of "Orange is the new Black", and people will riot. Degrade the connection, and people will blame Netflix and move on.
When was the last time you heard someone gripe at Verizon for YouTube slowness, and not YouTube/Google?
So, yes, we need to solve this with technology -- policy itself, technology for improving the creation of policy and the selection of those who turn it into legislation, technology for combating disinformation and educating the public on protecting their rights, technology for detecting and disseminating information on relationships between entrenched interests and policy makers. Networking technology of the kind you mention may be part of that, but on its own it can never be a panacea. Policy will always necessarily exist, and it will never be solved -- it's a dynamic system.