“Restoring Internet Freedom” Notice of Proposed Rulemaking [pdf]

> Following the 2014 Notice and in the lead up to the Title II Order, Internet service providers stated that the increased regulatory burdens of Title II classification would lead to depressed investment.

To support this notion, they cite two reports that purport to show that capital expenditure by ISPs went down as a result of common carrier regulation.

The first [1] has data only from 2014 on, so has hardly any "before" data; and shows wild enough variability in the "after" data that it seems unreasonable to draw any conclusions from the average value over such a short time frame.

The second [2] is a convoluted enough statistical analysis that I'm not really able to evaluate it -- though it does appear to show that telecom investment in infrastructure appears to have grown at roughly the same rate as it had since the 1980s (save for some wild up and down swings prior to 2010) -- just not as fast as an invented "control group" of imaginary telecoms that never heard they might be classified as common carriers (see figure 3.)

That's shady, right? It sure seems shady.

[1] https://haljsinger.wordpress.com/2017/03/01/2016-broadband-c...

[2] http://www.phoenix-center.org/perspectives/Perspective17-02F...

At the very least, it will provide an easy way to share links to specific pages of the documents (of course, you can add notes and annotations to the pages, and there's been some rudimentary fact extraction done already).

I just loaded the document a moment ago, so I haven't had a chance to scan through and make sure all the details are correct, but wanted to share it so folks can scan through it now.

Feedback is definitely welcome, and I'll hold off on doing non-critical deploys today so it stays up while people read it. I've only been working on it for a few weeks so there's still quite a lot to do :)

The draft seeks comment on the analysis in Paragraph 27. This analysis purports to show that broadband Internet service is an information service because it provides users the "capability for generating, acquiring, storing, transforming, processing, retrieving, utilizing, or making available information via telecommunications." The argument given is that broadband Internet service allows users to do all these things. However, this is not the same as providing the capability to do these things. To see why, consider that providing users Internet services over dialup phone lines also allows users to do all these things; but the phone lines themselves are telecommunications services, not information services. Why? Because providing the user dialup Internet, by itself, does not provide them the capability to do all these things. That capability is provided by the endpoints: the users' computers, and the computers hosting the Internet services that the users connect to.

Exactly the same is true of broadband Internet services provided by ISPs: by themselves, they do not provide users the capability to do all these things. They only provide connections between computers at the endpoints that provide those capabilities. It is the services provided by the Internet hosts that users connect to that are "information services". The broadband Internet services that allow users to connect to those hosts are telecommunications services, and should be regulated as such.

ISPs object to analyses like the one above because they claim that they also provide the actual information services--in other words, they also provide Internet hosts that function as email servers, web servers, etc. But it is obvious that those services are separate from the broadband connection services provided by those same ISPs, because users can make use of the latter without making use of the former at all. I am such a user: I use the broadband Internet connection provided by my ISP, but I do not use any of the information services they provide; I do not use their email, their web hosting, etc. I use other Internet hosts provided by other companies for those services. The fact that ISPs offer information services as well as telecommunications services does not make their telecommunications services into information services; an ISP's choice of business model cannot change the nature of a particular service it provides. Broadband Internet connections are obviously a telecommunications service, and should be regulated as such, regardless of what other services ISPs would like to bundle with them. The FCC should continue to regulate broadband Internet service as a telecommunications service.

They repeat "open internet" 43 times (disregarding the fact that the proposal is for quite the opposite) and copy-paste whole sections around the document, over and over again.

What do I need to do to have a concrete affect on the outcome of this instead of just commenting here or in some other thread?

...the order has weakened Americans’ online privacy by stripping the Federal Trade Commission — the nation’s premier consumer protection agency — of its jurisdiction over ISPs’ privacy and data security practices.

That's pretty rich, coming from the government that just overturned an Obama-era privacy ruling.

    $99/month Family Freedom package: 
     - 200GB "Streaming Gigs" for up to four authorized devices
     - 100GB "Gaming Gigs" (with Super-Ping technology!)
     - 25GB "Other"
     - Unlimited email, Facebook and Snapchat!

The idea seems to be: if the rules themselves (no throttling, no paid prioritization etc) are not necessary (i.e. voluntary), neither is a legal framework to support them.

So statements that net neutrality is not under fire here, only the current legal basis for it, sound pretty hollow in my opinion. By failing to provide an alternative authority to support the existing rules, they're sentencing them to unenforceability and effective repeal. (edit: grammar)

Since I'm a nice, law-abiding citizen, I can only suggest further unearthing and bringing into the light of day all the sleaze in these people's backgrounds and getting them disqualified and removed from office.

The 2008 financial crisis should have ended a lot of sleazy careers. Instead, here we are.

There are good people on both the "liberal/progressive/whatever" side of the arbitrary political fence, and on the "small-c-conservative/values/whatever" side.

It's the sleaze. On whatever side.

Arrogant sleaze. Slime-y sleaze. Delusional sleaze. Psycho-/Socio-pathic sleaze.

Time for the War on Sleaze.

Only, we don't want war. We want reasonably rational and emotionally mature discussion and the ability to get along and get things done. And enough trust in good intentions to invest in a variety of plans and figure out and measure what actually works.

And... it'd be nice to have an open network left to do this on. For a reasonable price.

P.S. Sorry for my "outburst." Just, exhausted with this whack-a-mole against moneyed self-interests that can afford to just keep trying again and again and again until they get their way.

Because, they aren't about creating the most (absolute) value. Just capturing the most (relative) value, for themselves.

Just click "New Filing" or "New Express" depending on what kind of comment you want to leave.

We just submitted comments here in case you need ideas: https://ecfsapi.fcc.gov/file/DOC-56ec3d08ba000000-A.pdf

War is Peace

Freedom is Slavery

Ignorance is Strength

> In contrast, Internet service providers do not appear to offer “telecommunications,” i.e., “the transmission, between or among points specified by the user, of information of the user’s choosing, without change in the form or content of the information as sent and received,” to their users. For one, broadband Internet users do not typically specify the “points” between and among which information is sent online. Instead, routing decisions are based on the architecture of the network, not on consumers’ instructions, and consumers are often unaware of where online content is stored. Domain names must be translated into IP addresses (and there is no one-to-one correspondence between the two). Even IP addresses may not specify where information is transmitted to or from because caching servers store and serve popular information to reduce network loads.

This is absurd. Under this logic, telephones "do not offer 'telecommunications'":

* Telephone users never specify the 'specify the “points” between and among which information is sent'. When I call a particular phone number, I can't choose which cell towers are used, or what internal routing is used to connect my call.

* Users are often unaware of 'where [content] is stored'. When I place a call, I don't know if I'm calling a SIP phone, landline, cell phone, or something else entirely.

* If the existence of DNS means that the ISPs don't provide 'telecommunications', then the existence of phone directory services (e.g. Version 411) should mean that telephone companies also don't provide 'telecommunications'.

* IP addresses are logical address, not physical addresses. Neither phone numbers nor IP dresses specify exactly where information will end up - a call could be handled by a phone company-provided voicemail service, or redirected to another phone entirely.

It gets worse. From the same page:

> For another, Internet service providers routinely change the form or content of the information sent over their networks—for example, by using firewalls to block harmful content or using protocol processing to interweave IPv4 networks with IPv6 networks

Again, all of those items are analagous (no pun intended) to similar parts of telephone networks. Phone companies can block calls by scammers (e.g. http://fortune.com/2017/03/24/how-t-mobile-plans-to-block-ph...), and can change the encoding and encapsulation of the call audio as many times as they want to.

It's a disgustingly disingenuous billboard near the FCC headquarters that is being seen by many FCC employees on their commute to work.

Hypocrites.

Also, I thought this was how it already worked, but it was just called home cable? Don't most homes in the US got a decent hookup to their home for "cable", that usually includes an internet package?

There has been a decline in innovation since 2015? How did they determine that? I must be missing something...

Propose to reinstate the determination that mobile broadband Internet access service is not a commercial mobile service...

Really! Commercial must have a special meaning here.

Somehow I feel that their "decades of experience and expertise" is not the kind appropriate for dealing with privacy on the modern internet.

Re: Notice of Proposed Rulemaking – WC Docket No. 17-108

The subject notice seeks comment on the analysis provided. The following comments are hereby submitted.

Paragraph 27 purports to show that broadband Internet service is an information service because it provides users the "capability for generating, acquiring, storing, transforming, processing, retrieving, utilizing, or making available information via telecommunications." The argument given is that broadband Internet service allows users to do all these things. However, this is not the same as providing the capability to do these things. To see why, consider that providing users Internet services over dialup phone lines also allows users to do all these things; but the phone lines themselves are telecommunications services, not information services. Why? Because providing the user dialup Internet, by itself, does not provide them the capability to do all these things. That capability is provided by the endpoints: the users' computers, and the computers hosting the Internet services that the users connect to.

Exactly the same is true of broadband Internet services provided by ISPs: by themselves, they do not provide users the capability to do all these things. They only provide connections between computers at the endpoints that provide those capabilities. It is the services provided by the Internet hosts that users connect to that are "information services". The broadband Internet services that allow users to connect to those hosts are telecommunications services, and should be regulated as such.

ISPs object to analyses like the one above because they claim that they also provide the actual information services--in other words, they also provide Internet hosts that function as email servers, web servers, etc. But it is obvious that those services are separate from the broadband connection services provided by those same ISPs, because users can make use of the latter without making use of the former at all. I am such a user: I use the broadband Internet connection provided by my ISP, but I do not use any of the information services they provide; I do not use their email, their web hosting, etc. I use other Internet hosts provided by other companies for those services. The fact that ISPs offer information services as well as telecommunications services does not make their telecommunications services into information services; an ISP's choice of business model cannot change the nature of a particular service it provides. Broadband Internet connections are obviously a telecommunications service, and should be regulated as such, regardless of what other services ISPs would like to bundle with them.

Paragraph 28 asks whether "offering Internet access is precisely what makes the service capable of 'generating, acquiring, storing, transforming, processing, retrieving, utilizing, or making available information' to consumers?" The answer to this question, as noted above, is no, because all of those capabilities are not provided by the mere fact of Internet access; they are provided by the endpoint computers that implement those capabilities. The question of how those computers are connected to each other, which is the relevant question for the purpose of determining whether broadband Internet service is a telecommunications service, is a separate question from the question of what capabilities the endpoint computers provide.

Paragraph 28 also asks whether consumers could "access these online services using traditional telecommunications services like telephone service or point-to-point special access?" Obviously the answer to this question will depend on what connectivity the providers of such telecommunications services choose to provide. But that is a different question from the question of what the nature of a particular service is. Again, the question of how computers are connected to each other is separate from the question of what capabilities the endpoint computers provide.

Paragraph 29 attempts to argue, in effect, that if most Internet users rely on their ISPs for any additional service beyond the bare fact of Internet connectivity--for example, DNS--then broadband Internet service must be an information service. Paragraph 29 also claims that the ISP, not the user, "specifies the points between and among which information will be transmitted", because, first, users only specify domain names, not IP addresses, and second, users do not make the routing decisions that determine the specific path information packets take through the network. Neither of these considerations affects the proper classification of broadband Internet service as a telecommunications service. Users might only specify domain names, but the service of translating domain names into IP addresses is provided by an endpoint--a DNS server--not by the bare provision of an Internet connection. (And even if the ISP typically provides this endpoint, that is still a separate service from the service of providing an Internet connection, and, as above, bundling the two together cannot change the nature of the latter.) Once the DNS service has provided an IP address corresponding to a domain name to the user's computer, the user's computer, not the network, specifies that IP address as the target of information packets, so once again, it is an endpoint, not the network itself, that determines where the information goes. And routing information packets, in and of itself, is not an information service, because it does not change the information being routed; it just accomplishes the information transmission specified by the user, from one endpoint to another. The intermediate routers that pass on information packets are not endpoints: they are not specified by the user as the targets of any information, and they do not provide any of the capabilities that make an endpoint a provider of an information service.

The analysis of Paragraph 29 also fails to take into account that, if it were valid, it would apply equally well to traditional phone service, which is admitted to be a telecommunications service. Users specify phone numbers to dial, but that does not require knowledge of the physical location of the target phone (and the user will often not have such knowledge), nor does it specify the route that will be taken by the information transmitted by the call. Also, traditional phone service includes directory service (411) and other "add-ons" that go beyond the basic provision of a connection. What makes those "add-ons" telecommunications services rather than information services is that they are for the purpose of facilitating the connection (or facilitating the refusal of connections which are not desired), rather than acting on the information exchanged between the users at the endpoints.

Paragraph 30 attempts to argue that network management activities such as firewalling and IPV4 - IPV6 translation constitute changing the information being transmitted. This analysis fails in two ways. First, refusing to transmit information (e.g., a firewall blocking content deemed to be harmful) is not the same as changing it. Refusing to provide a connection to a user is not the same as changing the information transmitted by the user. Second, the "information" which is changed by such activities as IPV4 - IPV6 translation is not the information sent by the user; it is network management information which is added to the information packets specified by the user, outside the user's control and indeed without the knowledge of most users (since most users are not familiar with the technical details of IP networking). These network management activities are no different from the activities routinely performed by phone networks to route calls--indeed, today the same physical infrastructure is often used to perform both functions, since the phone service backbone and the Internet backbone are in many cases the same networks. Similar remarks apply to services such as filtering by firewalls: phone networks can block calls from certain numbers, for example. Again, the key distinction which the analysis in Paragraph 30 fails to make is between "add-on" services that are for the purpose of facilitating connections, and services that are for the purpose of manipulating the information exchanged by the users at the endpoints. Only the latter are information services; the former are part of the telecommunications service that provides the connection.

In the light of all of the above considerations, the FCC should continue to regulate broadband Internet service as a telecommunications service.

The draft also seeks comment in Paragraph 28 on whether "offering Internet access is precisely what makes the service capable of 'generating, acquiring, storing, transforming, processing, retrieving, utilizing, or making available information' to consumers?" The answer to this question, as noted above, is no, because all of those capabilities are not provided by the mere fact of Internet access; they are provided by the endpoint computers that implement those capabilities. The question of how those computers are connected to each other is a separate question from the question of what capabilities they provide.

Paragraph 28 also asks whether consumers could "access these online services using traditional telecommunications services like telephone service or point-to-point special access?" Obviously the answer to this question will depend on what connectivity the providers of such telecommunications services choose to provide. But that is a different question from the question of what the nature of a particular service is.

Paragraph 29 attempts to argue, in effect, that if most Internet users rely on their ISPs for any additional service beyond the bare fact of Internet connectivity--for example, DNS--then broadband Internet service must be an information service. Paragraph 29 also claims that ISPs, not users, "specifies the points between and among which information will be transmitted", because, first, users only specify domain names, not IP addresses, and second, users do not make the routing decisions that determine the specific path information packets take through the network. Neither of these considerations affects the proper classification of broadband Internet service as a telecommunications service. Users might only specify domain names, but the service of translating domain names into IP addresses is provided by an endpoint--a DNS server--somewhere, not by the bare provision of an Internet connection. (And even if the ISP typically provides this endpoint, that is still a separate service from the service of providing an Internet connection, and, as above, bundling the two together cannot change the nature of the latter.) Once the DNS service has provided an IP address to the user's computer, corresponding to a domain name, the user's computer, not the network, specifies that IP address as the target of information packets, so once again, it is an endpoint, not the network itself, that determines where the information goes. And routing information packets, in and of itself, is not an information service, because it does not change the information being routed; it just realizes the information transmission specified by the user, from one endpoint to another. The intermediate routers that pass on information packets are not endpoints.

Paragraph 30 attempts to argue that network management activities such as firewalling and IPV4 - IPV6 translation constitute changing the information. This analysis fails in two ways. First, refusing to transmit information (e.g., a firewall blocking content deemed to be harmful) is not changing it. Refusing to provide a connection to a user is not the same as changing the information transmitted by the user. Second, more generally, the "information" which is changed by such activities as IPV4 - IPV6 translation is not the information sent by the user; it is network management information which is added to the information packets specified by the user, outside the user's control and indeed without the knowledge of most users (since most users are not familiar with the technical details of IP networking). These network management activities are no different from the activities routinely performed by phone networks to route calls--indeed, today the same physical infrastructure is often used to perform both functions, since the phone service backbone and the Internet backbone are in many cases the same networks.

This one works: https://apps.fcc.gov/edocs_public/attachmatch/DOC-344614A1.p...

This must have been the promise during S. J. Res 34.

As smart as everyone here is when it comes to building internet endpoints, most of these comments betray an utter lack of understanding of what goes on in the ISP level.