An Open Letter to the FCC
medium.com
medium.com
I already contacted all of my representatives to investigate this, but with the approaching FCC vote and now this AG Open Letter, I fear that nothing will happen until it's too late. What is a citizen to do when they try to do everything in their power and play by the rules - vote, submit comments, call representatives, contact press for help, and repeat - results in nothing?
The FCC has effectively ignored the rules and stalled their way to victory. I'm not even sure how to describe our government anymore...
Nawh, they are following the power delegation given to them by congress. They dont have to do fuck all for public comments, other then recieve them, document them, and say "we got feedback but fuck yall we going forward"
That's not true. As a nonpartisan federal agency, the must show how they accounted for public comment and why the choice they made is either in line with the public comments or why it is justified to not be in line.
They have to do more than just accept the comments.
But by allowing all the fake comments, they were able to say "see everyone wants this, what we are doing is in line with the public comments".
Or what?
There's no one enforcing rules in this administration.
They have to pass the crappy rules first so that someone who was harmed can sue them.
Congress can stop them now, and the judicial can stop them after the fact. Congress is corrupt, but thus far the judicial is not.
Still, the courts might help in this case.
Likewise, the executive branch is the one that decides to go after offenders based on profitability over public good (although you could also lay that on the legislative branch for allowing the executive to fund itself using fines in the first place).
http://www.emprata.com/reports/fcc-restoring-internet-freedo...
Not sure how much good it would do though.
May be a long shot but the more people know about what's actually happening then the more pressure they can put on their congress critter to do something.
I mean why in the world in 2017 are we so apathetic about something so important? We were up in arms about in 2013 and stopped SOPA then!!!
It would ensure who you say you are on the Internet. YOu could still comment anonymously, but what you say anonymously wouldn't hold as much weight vs. when you use your real verified identity!
The reason it's not working this time around is because you have an FCC chair whose not really interested in what the public thinks - you're not his constituents, and you're not the constituents of the people who put him in power.
Note that the constituents of Republicans are honestly mostly wealthy donors by this point - I doubt they care too much what their voters think beyond ensuring that they don't screw them over directly (e.g. via increased taxes or decreased entitlements)
Glad to hear Reddit isnt being passive!
This effectively drowns out the opposition. Proponents of Net Neutrality already flooded the FCC with fake comments as the guy above noted they stole his identity. What makes you think they don’t have an army of an army fake social media commenters to shape the conversation in their favor? Especially on influential tech sites like this!
Also, I think people are so emotionally worn out by the mass distraction machine that is the Trump presidency, the over-saturation of outrage in the media, and the fact that so many democratic and political institutions are under attack that people either can't keep track of each one, feel hopeless, or have just tuned it all out for their own sanity.
it is not that people do not care; it is that they do not understand how to use force to achieve their goals. they do not understand how to contest the government's exclusive claim to rights like management of the internet, etc.
or they must show up for work and don't have the time to make physical appearances in places that create inconvenience-- fundamentally refusing to accept that their duty as citizens to contest government overreach is more important than their own personal life running smoothly.
You say we should be up in arms, but realistically, what can we do? I'm pretty sure I've literally done everything I can do given my personal and financial situation. I've read through all the comments and while potentially helpful for my situation, none actually address what can be done for Net Neutrality. So I'm just going to repeat, what can I/we even do anymore?
Playing by the rules is not always the best way to serve the public interest.
In the last year, regulatory decisions at the FCC, EPA, and DOE are being made by fiat, without any of the typical study and justification that typically goes into them. In particular, DOE suggestions to FERC have been denounced by nearly everybody in the energy industry, by nearly every interested outsider, and in a bipartisan fashion from lots of prior FERC commissioners. The general whims of a single person are taking precedence over having market principles, or really any other principle at all. The only parties in favor of the regulations at all are those who directly benefit by guaranteed payments, and they only justify their favor of the regulations through a massive and legally questionable expansion of regulatory power of the regulatory agency, something that these particular partisans are usually against.
With the FCC, we see something similar, an impulse to make regulations without much reasoning behind those regulations except that they favor a small group.
This type of regulation, where particular parties are favored, rather than particular principles, is madness.
The cartel practices of the ISP oligopoly is a separate issue. They bought the state legislatures. The people of each state that is under the influence of the ISP cartels should demand an open internet for their state.
Taxing the hell out of non neutral ISPs at the state level may be viable, though? IANAL... It may be a case where a successful state level action in (say) New York and California covers enough people that national ISPs won't want to build a whole second system for all the other states; this is how many California environmental protection laws become de facto national.
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2016/08/in-blow-to-muni-...
It's plutocracy (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plutocracy), plain and simple. Some have been pointing out things like this and calling it plutocracy for a long time, but until now it wasn't so blatantly obvious.
There are 5 FCC commissioners but only 3 may be of the same party. Ajit Pai, Brendan Carr and Michael O'Rielly are locks to vote in favor, so it will pass, 3-2.
At this point the best thing people can do is prepare to vote in 2018 and 2020, whether that's registering voters or forming groups to get lazy liberals or independents to vote to send better people to Washington.
One side aspect that I think hasn't been covered: FCC Chairman Ajit Pai is a former Verizon lawyer and probably plans to parley his government experience into a lucrative gig at one of the big telcos once the Republicans are inevitably thrown out of office, so he stands to personally profit from this decision.
As Donald Trump would say, SAD.
He worked in their legal department for 2-3 years 15 years ago. All of his other time has been spent has a public servant. People need to stop bringing this up, because it only muddies the actual policy debate.
ugh. No one ever bothers to bring up this document either, which isnt going away... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FCC_Open_Internet_Order_2010
The telecoms have many sophisticated strategies they pursue; one is alternating between "states rights" and FCC-friendly arguments to create a ratchet locking out competitors. If you break one side of the ratchet, at least some folks can have first-world bandwidth.
We need to get the corruption out of congress.
Serving 5 years in a government position when you could be an exec at a Telecom company is a gigantic opportunity cost so the point here is that he's not getting paid off, unless fraudulently, which can't be completely ruled out.
https://www.politico.com/story/2017/01/trump-lobbying-ban-we...
I seem to recall one of the arguments of Pai is that the FCC shouldn't be responsible for regulation of the internet, it should fall under the FTC.
So as head of the FCC he can effectively strip it of all power, the governance shifting to the FTC. Once his commission is up he takes a job at Verizon/At&T/etc, lobbying the FTC.
Or, as burkaman noted, they will just issue a waiver.
but you cant be a lobbyist
so what do you work for? other goverment jobs, or back to the private sector.
what if we had a google exec become some internet government position, then went back to google? would there be this public outcry?
If I were telecom lawyer, I'd rather Title II to be honest. Creates more work.
> The Office of Government Ethics (OGE) is reportedly set to release copies of roughly two dozen ethics waivers for federal officials next week, showing which officials are focusing on issues that they worked on in their private sector jobs.
> The waivers are in addition to the ones the Trump administration released this week, The Wall Street Journal reports. The White House released those ethics pledge waivers Wednesday, exempting at least a dozen White House officials.
My biggest fear in our current situation is the threat of voter suppression and election fraud. Any suggestions on shining a light on these issues, and combating them?
I don’t care if he was a professional kitten killer, it has little relevance to actions currently being taken. I say this for two reasons: Pai has spent more time in public service than he did at Verizon, by multiples. And second, who cares what his motivation is? Does that amplify or mitigate the circumstances in some way? No? Then it’s just a distraction from the issue at hand, which is bad enough that we best not derail the conversation worrying about where someone worked twenty years ago.
Knowing his motivations (is he simply misinformed? is he corrupt? does he believe in strict libertarianism?) has a big impact in shaping a winning strategy to oppose him.
But that doesn’t mean I can’t upvote a reasonable POV with which I just happen to disagree.
If the FCC is cooperating with criminals to cover up fraud, can they be RICO'd?
If Ajit Pai continues to obstruct investigations, I would consider it obstruction of justice. That's something that an Attorney General should seriously consider in the current light.
Well, relating to the identity misappropriation itself. Should there be litigation over the final regulation (as is near certain) and should the content of public comment and the FCC’s handling of it be an issue (as is also near certain), then things become a lot more interesting.
My recurring thought as I read the fine article: "you're an attorney general, a lawyer who has asked politely, multiple times and been ignored; why TF haven't you filed for a subpoena yet?"
However, being from Verizon is noticeable.
There should be some effort to get more moderate Republicans involved. There are plenty of Republicans who support net neutrality, but do not consider that as important an issue as other issues on which Republicans and Democrats differ, such as immigration, taxes, gun rights, abortion, and many others.
I think that most of the less moderate Republican voters who oppose net neutrality mostly do so because their representatives and party officials tell them to. It's not like, say, their opposition to abortion which they came to on their own and then used that to help choose their party.
If that is true, it should be possible to move the GOP to a place where net neutrality is something that a Republican candidate can either support or oppose and still have a chance of winning a GOP primary or caucus.
Surely Ajit & co travel to NY from time to time... why isn’t there an arrest warrant? Why are the states being so toothless in responding to rampant criminal behavior?
I’d like to see how I would fare if I participated in mass scale identity theft and refused to participate in the subsequent investigation.
Further, withholding cooperation from an investigation is not obstruction of justice, it is your God-given right as an American. You generally only have the obligation to cooperate when you are presented with a court order. And even then, you have the right to challenge the validity of that court order.
It's nice to see them coming around.
at the federal level, both parties only care about state rights when it suits them.
On healthcare policy in particular the state specific policies continue to be enforced by the GOP. These aren’t positions I agree with btw I’m just pointing out recent examples.
I think it’s fair to say Democrats would rather have centralized healthcare, gun laws, lgbt policies, and abortion access, rather than leaving it to the states to decide.
Nope, they aren't. They are all areas where the GOP has pushed at both the federal and state level in the same direction, caring about policy (excluding transgendered persons from general society, blocking abortion, and protecting individual firearms rights) not the relative balance of state/federal power.
* Republicans vigorously oppose gun control and the state level, even suing state governments in federal court to overturn regulations.
* Republicans fight for LGBT discrimination in law and regulation at all levels, not for freedom of states to set inclusive or exclusive policies.
* And, abortion, well:
https://www.google.com/amp/thehill.com/policy/healthcare/353...
Obviously both parties are going to fight at all levels but in recent history GOP controls far more of state governments than Democrats so they strategically favor states rights. My original point is still that they haven't shifted away from that strategic view of states rights since the election because they still hold those advantages.
When Democrats dominate at state level I'd expect the poles to shift but that has not happened yet.
No, they tactically see success on certain issues operating at the state level; they don't, strategically or otherwise support states rights (that is, any consistent protected domains where states are free to act as they will without federal interference.)
They do like, since the adoption of the Southern Strategy, to use the phrase “States Rights”, but that's a 150+-year-old American political code for “we support and demand systematic oppression of blacks”, not a position on the relative distribution of power between the federal and state government.
The idea being, taking a principled stance on the aspects of those issues on which there is consensus, while not taking a stance on the part which does not have agreement, would expose the other parties as frauds and give you a rhetorical advantage over them.
I wonder if states rights is one of those issues.
The parties don't purport to disagree on the issue; one party paints it as a point of disagreement, but even that is just using the term as a coded reference to a real disagreement on race policy, not a reference to a disagreement on the policy suggested by what the words otherwise seem to mean.
> I wonder if states rights is one of those issues.
“States rights” isn't, because it's not an actual issue, it's a slogan for an issue people don't like to directly describe.
Now, you could come up with a model of a coherent set of protected zones of state authority and try to organize a movement around them, but that's not an existing ideology that is getting lip service but no actual support, it would be a whole new issue.
All things they brought up before the current administration took office. All things that they've decided now to defer to the Federal government to, now.
"I think it’s fair to say Democrats would rather have centralized healthcare, gun laws, lgbt policies, and abortion access, rather than leaving it to the states to decide."
To be perfectly honest, it makes absolutely zero sense for some of those, abortion and LGBT policies in particular, to change your basic human rights just because you moved 5 miles.
If US Senators pass bill that explicitly delegates something to the states to decide, that's an example of states rights. If US Senators back a bill that explicitly overrides state laws, that's an example of federal regulation.
(It's actually interesting that you bring up the bathroom bill, because it actually is an example of centralizing power. The bill explicitly prevented local and city governments from adopting a different policy. Just an interesting aside.)
> I think it’s fair to say Democrats would rather have centralized healthcare
Obamacare specifically allows individual states to choose whether or not to participate in Medicaid expansion, and gives the money for Medicaid directly to the states to use as they see fit. That's a pretty clear example of states rights in action.
Well, no. Pre-existing law allows states to choose whether or not to participate in Medicaid. The ACA made the expansion a core and integral part of Medicaid; the ability to stay in Medicaid but opt out of the expansion was a (rather bizarre) result of a lawsuit by States against the expansion.
> and gives the money for Medicaid directly to the states to use as they see fit.
No, the expansion isn't a block grant, it's an expansion to include a new population with a set federal-share reimbursement rate attached to that population.
No, they weren't. Neither Democrats nor Republicans, on the whole, have a strong general position one way or the other on the balance of federal vs. state power. Republicans like to invoke the phrase “states rights” around issues where they disagree with the current federal policy and project a strong centralizing position onto Democrats on those issues, but both tend to act more on issues that state/federal preference, acting at whatever level they have the present influence to act, and Democrats aren't even particularly prone to pretending a strong preference either way. (They'll often cite a practical need to act at one level because of a failure at the other level, but that's different than even a for-show ideological preference.)
No they weren't. This is a total lie. I'd call it a mis-characterization but it's been beaten down so much that you have to be purposefully lying at this point to keep repeating it.
If you want someone to argue with you, you need to present an argument first.
the US has long been subject to many centrifugal forces, one of which was the tension between state and federal bodies of government. trump has accelerated the centrifuge's rate of rotation past safely sustainable speeds.
Thankfully TTIP was thrown under the bus - for now, tomorrow who can tell? - so it won’t be easy but I’m not feeling that safe. The same greedy multinational corporations sponsoring this public spoliation in the USA are massively present in EU and I don’t think Chinese Walls are a meaningful property of their structures...
ALREADY LOST - to pick a internet plan of their choice which is affordable and reliable to them.
ALREADY LOST - to have privacy.
LOOSING - what people will watch in their internet, so basically you will be target fed specific info and some info you will never come across leading to people will be kept in dark like the sugar news forever.
if we were celebrating July 4th for the freedom over internet then we can stop celebrating it from 2018 but luckily its not that. May be american citizens will stop being submissive and not take whatever is thrown at them and start to make their power and presence felt and be an example to other country citizens.
I hope other nations can begin exerting pressure on this country so that we are forced to begin considering substantial reforms (apparently a long-lived fiscal crisis isn't enough); otherwise these issues may worsen and spread elsewhere as they have already begun doing.
(Divest away from U.S. securities, for example. Challenge the status of U.S. dollar.)
That sort of ignores the fact that Trump is undoing work done under the Obama administration. Clearly it matters who is in office.
Now, if it was foreign actors though, I don't think much can be done. Maybe Congress could enact more sanctions. But if it was a domestic operation, carried out by one of the big telecos... wow this will be huge.
Yes, if they have support of the President or a veto-proof supermajority in both houses.
> If that's the case, it might be possible to pass such a law when(if) dems take over the House/Senate next year right?
Unlikely, for the reasons stated above, though tying it to something the President isn't willing to veto might work. Or, I guess, if after taking both houses of Congress (and, critically, electing a new Speaker) they also impeach, convict, and remove the Vice President and President, and the Democratic Speaker succeeds to the Presidency, then it would be doable.
Not necessarily; under utility pricing your bill might be $49 for maintenance of the network and $1 for usage.
Yes.
> Like water, we will need to pay more the more we consume.
We already do, though it's more noticeable for mobile broadband. Also, not all public utilities are metered—I’ve lived in places with unmetered public water, for instance, so the connection you draw between metering and public utilities is false.
> You and I can pay but what about poor people?
Public utilities are often subsidized for the poor (that's actually one way that broadband is already treated like a public utility).
With any luck the next generation will look at bandwidth caps the same way young people today are shocked anyone was so stupid as to allow companies to charge per SMS message.
This is a pretty common situation in many areas. The marginal cost of putting a package on a truck is nearly zero (there's a very, very small amount of extra fuel burned) until the truck is full, then the marginal cost of the next package is the cost of sending another truck. The marginal cost of putting another passenger on an airliner is nearly zero (again, there's a small amount of added fuel consumption) until you hit capacity, then it's suddenly huge.
In these other areas, we generally look at the cost as being the marginal cost of the whole truck or plane divided by the number of things it carries, rather than assigning the entire cost to the one thing that requires a new truck or plane. I don't see why internet access shouldn't be like this too.
Data costs should be pretty low, and should be much cheaper at off-peak hours, but I don't see why they should be zero.
Net neutrality means ISPs can’t favor some traffic over other traffic.
I would love to reach the point where I can take these bloated, horrible web sites and make them have to publicly embarrass themselves by publishing their relative Internet consumption.
I thought I remembered seeing somewhere that the big ISP's use the legal system to essentially drive up entrance costs for smaller players. Would the EFF be able to help with something like that?
The only real long term solution to stuff like this is more competition, because without it you never have the option to "vote with your wallet."
The major internet providers would be forced to resell to other internet providers access at the costs to the company, including labor, maintenance, etc. Resellers then compete with the company to produce the lowest overhead.
There is no incentive for investment if they have to resell at (or near) cost.
And we've seen this in action. DSL service was covered by Title II originally, which meant it had to be unbundled and resold. But cable internet had no requirement. Investment flooded to cable rather than telecom. Why would Verizon invest billions in a network that benefits third parties? Well they didn't.
It was only after Title II repeal that Verizon went forward with Fios. Because it didn't have to resell.
It's possible to do this sort of thing, but you have to build in a fat profit margin. But even then, the companies wouldn't have any incentive to provide good service.
http://reason.com/blog/2017/11/21/ajit-pai-net-neutrality-po...
He claims that 80% of smaller ISPs have said that they delayed investment in infrastructure due to the costs associated with the net neutrality regs, and also that there was a reduction in overall broadband investment in the last two years and that has never happened before, outside of a recession. He thinks that this has hurt efforts to bring connectivity to rural and underserved areas.
Personally, I think the argument for net neutrality is strong in the present situation where we have less competition, but he believes that the FTC governance previous to title 2 puting ISPs under the purview of th FCC was already protecting consumers adequately. The new proposal also enforces a transparency requirement on any traffic shaping, or filtering.
I imagine an ISP that focuses on serving low-latency gaming traffic at the expense of other application's bandwidth. Or perhaps an ISP that rents bandwidth from a larger one and provides its customers with better bandwidth guarantees on weekends and nights (or balanced out with better business-day bandwidth for commercial customers). And in some ways it makes sense from a market perspective (that's generally how smaller companies can innovate and create advantages).
What all that ignores is the immense locality of ISPs in general. Unless things fundamentally change in regards to how the internet is delivered in the US, most people are never going to have meaningful consumer choice in the one place they live. Giving ISPs more control over bandwidth just gives them more control over consumers.
It's like gerrymandering. The most negative consequences aren't that it gives partisan advantage, it's that it gives representatives the power to choose their constituents.
Title II is a pretty harsh regulatory environment. The FCC had to suspend most of the rules for the ISPs. Otherwise, the FCC would have to set price control rules, etc.
I'm not sure I buy that as I think it under-estimates the barrier to entry.
http://wethefifth.com/ https://play.radiopublic.com/the-fifth-column-analysis-comme...
Since the internet is instead a broadcast medium, it is much easier for big players to saturate the lines. ISPs naturally believe that _someone_ should be paying for what they interpret as the "extra load" from these big players, and that's not entirely unreasonable when you consider that some households will use 30Mbit/s streaming content to 4 devices for 10 hours per day, and the next household, which pays the same monthly internet bill, uses 5Mbit/s or less to read predominantly-text based sites for 2 hours per day.
Net neutrality is fundamentally large internet companies looking to keep their costs down by using government force to prevent ISPs from charging them usage-based "carriage fees" or similar.
Ultimately I don't know if that's good or bad, but I think it's important we recognize the fight over net neutrality for what it is: an arm wrestling match between industrial juggernauts to decide who is going to pick up the tab for the infrastructure that makes the net tick. The consumer is virtually a non-entity and just watching from the bleachers.
>Since the internet is instead a broadcast medium, it is much easier for big players to saturate the lines
The Internet is _not_ a broadcast medium. Data transfer over the Internet is by nature peer-to-peer.
>ISPs naturally believe that _someone_ should be paying for what they interpret as the "extra load" from these big players
Someone _is_ paying for the load for big players: the consumers who are accessing their sites.
>some households will use 30Mbit/s streaming content to 4 devices for 10 hours per day, and the next household, which pays the same monthly internet bill, uses 5Mbit/s or less to read predominantly-text based sites for 2 hours per day
30 Mb/s residential service already costs more than 5 Mb/s residential service.
>Net neutrality is fundamentally large internet companies looking to keep their costs down by using government force to prevent ISPs from charging them usage-based "carriage fees" or similar.
Net neutrality is fundamentally a consumer protection preventing ISPs from leveraging their natural monopolies on last-mile service to enact rent-seeking policies. Whether ISPs charge consumers directly for access to, say, competing content providers ("Watch Turner Classic Movies for free with Spectrum Basic 10 Mb/s, or upgrade to Spectrum Premium 10 Mb/s for only $19.99 per month to access Netflix, Hulu, and HBO!"), or they charge those content providers extra to peer their traffic and those content providers fold that into subscription fees, we're the ones getting bent over the barrel.
Only in the indirect sense that all expenses ultimately filter down to the customer/buyer. The common trope that businesses never take a loss and always find some creative way to pass each expense onto the consumer is total nonsense, except insofar as it's just a simple tautology that states the obvious fact that a business's revenue must cover its own expenses.
And as sjolsen pointed out, the consumer is the one who will end up paying the tab, either to the ISP directly, or indirectly via an increase in streaming subscription costs.
He's echoing the industry on this, the industry that has (succesfully, so far, though the full 9th Circuit will be rehearing the issue) also argued that the FTC is barred by law from regulating them.
Here's the position.
To the FCC: “You shouldn't regulate anti-competitive behavior in our industry, even as a means to serve the clear and precise purposes the FCC is given in statute, because competition in general is the FTC’s job.”
To the FTC: “You can't regulate anti-competitive behavior in our industry, because most major participants are common carriers whether or not broadband is a Title II service, and you are prohibited from regulating common carriers even in their non-common-carrier activities, and any regulation you adopted that only applied to non-common-carrier participants would just concentrate more power in the common carriers.”
Really just google WISP and Netflix or YouTube.
It's funny to see how trustful we are in America that the rules will save us all from people not playing by the same rules. Changing the referee is the real solution right? Impeachment should be the focus.
Do we really believe key people at FCC are persuaded to support the people with this decision? That is just a matter of showing the truth about those comments? I think it is just a farce and we are wasting our time and energy opposing the FCC. The bigger problem is the constant attack against our democratic process.
They hate 330 page document.
Ive gotten alot of feedback saying they'd support a 2 page version that promised dumb pipes and not the other 328 pages of nonsense.
Are there no additional avenues to escalate to compel compliance from FCC, other than writing this type of public letter?
Also, an analysis done by the Knight Foundation for the 2014 proceeding showed that the highest number of unique comment where pro Net Neutrality while the only comments against NN where from templated answers [2]
[1] http://www.zdnet.com/article/a-bot-is-flooding-the-fccs-webs...
Why can't the FTC regulate or prosecute monoplies, which is its job, instead a bunch arbitrary rules by the FCC?
Basically the FTC doesn't have regulation authority over telcos because they are common carriers and thus statutorily exempted from regulation by the FTC.
2020 should be the most awesome year of humanity ever.
And he was piling up many good things for 2020.
But then he felt like there can be more good things for 2020.
So some angel suggested he will create some bad thing in few years before it and then solve those bad things in 2020 that way the awesomeness of 2020 will increase.
And God was like great idea, lets go for it.