Democrats Unveil New Bill to Fully Restore Net Neutrality
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Having a comprehensive revisiting that directly addresses the needs and requirements for large-scale packet-switched networks rather than bolting it on to legislation aimed at switched networks would make it a lot clearer. The original rule that the FCC removed had a ton of exceptions, "ignore this because it doesn't apply" and had to shoehorn a lot of other definitions.
It would be good for Congress to explicitly lay out what the FCC's responsibilities in this area are (or to allow the FTC to enforce instead, since that was largely okay except for the regulatory scope problems).
And as both of you stated, its shouldn't just be "Do this from the 1934 Act!" but a complete review and a proper implementation.
This biggest problem I saw with the 2015 FCC order is it just said "while we could have this power over the internet, we promise we will never use it!" for a couple different things. If we are going to do something about "Net Neutrality", I'd much rather Congress just remove that power completely and permanently than letting it up to an administration who decides they no longer want to keep that promise.
1. https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/trust-us-politicians-ke...
For Republicans, it is just the opposite: they voted unanimously against an amendment proposal to overturn citizens united (all Democrats in favor)[1], unanimously against a bill requiring fincial disclosures of campaign finance (all Democrats in favor)[2], twice[3], against a ban on dark money campaign ads[4], unanimously in favor of a repeal of the existing pittance of public campaign money (all Democrats against)[5], and against a bill to require auditable paper trails of elections (all Democrats in favor)[6]
Money in politics is absolutely NOT a "both sides" issue.
1. https://votesmart.org/bill/votes/49906
2. https://votesmart.org/bill/votes/32154
3. https://votesmart.org/bill/votes/41152
4. http://clerk.house.gov/evs/2002/roll034.xml
Look at the votes. Republicans vote to defend money in politics, Democrats vote to abolish it. The pattern has been very consistent for over a decade.
TBH it amazes me that Congress has as much power as they do over campaign finance. Ads, etc. are form of political speech. And restricting political speech is nigh unto violating the 1st Amendment.
[1] https://www.heritage.org/election-integrity/report/national-...
[2] https://thehill.com/blogs/floor-action/senate/208395-senate-...
A perpetual representative, who wields 1/535th of America's executive power is not going to cause much harm, certainly not enough to justify overriding the will of the people who would keep them in office if they could.
Consider also, term limits would speed up the revolving door between lobbyists and congress, by forcing people out before they're ready to leave, and replacing them with legislators who are less experienced and easier to manipulate.
If they weren't always re-campaigning, they might be less easy to manipulate.
it was one of Hillary Clinton's chief campaign promises
Any party is only as effective as the numbers of people they have in office.
That's not true. People voted them out in 2016 but their votes were not counted, or their registrations were falsely and illegally cancelled, etc. There is a lot more at play here than people's choices; and given that people's ability to choose with correct information and free will has been significantly hampered by Republican-led efforts to reduce the quantity of real factual information in the hands of voters, replaced with lies designed to steal votes.
Now I know that Donald Trump lies a lot, like a lot but sometimes he tells the truth. He has stated at least 5 times that neither he nor his supporters would accept any election results where he did not win.
The current President threatens the nation regularly with his active plans to cancel the next elections and stay in power.
Be careful assuming that the popularity of politicians or their party has anything at all to do with them being in power. It doesn't.
I have no special interest in American politics as I just watch from the other side of the border, but I'm pretty sure my understanding of the political system down there is full enough that I'm right in saying that a sitting president can't legally follow through on threats like that without getting evicted from office.
Aren't there failsafes and backup plans and laws and a justice department to prevent presidential overreach?
This is the whole purpose of the three branches of government.
For example, the chief architects of the Constitution, James Madison and Alexander Hamilton, tried several times to eliminate the Electoral College with amendments once they saw how it behaved. They wrote extensively about how their intention had been subverted and the language they chose was a mistake, but other politicians rebuffed their efforts to fix the mistake, and decided instead to exploit it: presidential candidates can ignore most of the voters.
- Not if they can strip the powers of positions that they have lost: https://www.apnews.com/62c976c13a574fa7a8cbb2aa4de425da
- Not if they have a propaganda media outlet that misinforms voters: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/03/11/the-making-of-...
The cronysm and party-before-country behavior of the republican party is a threat to the democracy of the nation.
Meanwhile, the Senate and the Presidency are controlled by Republicans, and gerrymandering is utterly irrelevant to those outcomes.
In any event, the House sits beside the Senate and the Executive. As another commenter pointed out, this case at best explains ~2% of the dynamics of one out of three legislative bodies offices. And sure, other states might contribute a bit more. Fine, maybe it clears my 1% threshold; but just barely.
I'm not here to defend Republicans (I think they're pretty bad) or the practices you described (I also think those are bad). But that doesn't change the fact that gerrymandering and power grabs and Fox News are nearly completely inconsequential in explaining the world in front of us. Quit with the liberal wishcasting. People don't vote Republican because they've been misled by some sinister conspiracy. They just don't want what you're selling.
You're correct that at the first order gerrymandering is irrelevant to the Senate and Presidency. Gerrymandering comes into play as a second-order effect, though; when used at the state level, it can cause state legislatures to effectively lock to a party. These state legislatures can then make changes to the way voting is organized in their state, enfranchising and disenfranchising voters in ways that support their party, and funding/defunding polling districts per the same. This has an effect that can be plenty large enough to swing statewide elections: see the last election's shenanigans in South Carolina, Georgia, and Florida if you're in doubt.
You said "explain your reasoning", and that's what I did.
No need to get defensive over it and try to pretend like it's irrelevant to the discussion. This is literally the discussion you explicitly asked for. If you don't like the fact that the Republican party has acted in a decades-long effort to guarantee their own power in perpetuity with or without public support, don't get mad at me, get mad at them.
I never disputed Republicans’ attempt to give themselves an electoral advantage. I just disagree that this is consequential, much less decisive. As you yourself argued elsewhere in the thread, NC Republicans’ chicanery could mean a 2% swing in the House. Not to put too fine a point on it, but you’re telling me that by attributing 100% of R success to trickery, in a state that’s the worst of the worst in this regard and so yields the biggest effect size, you can create a counterfactual where Democrats have 2% more seats in just one half of Congress?
Your smoking gun is a rounding error. So I’m asking again: how do these sorts of numbers lead you to believe what you apparently believe?
Regardless. The biggest obstacle to NN is currently the Senate and the Presidency. Two out of your three points are completely irrelevant to those offices. Is it all just Fox News? The Russians?
I don't exactly understand why you would vote Republican if you did not like abortions.
And even if it were true (and it's not), the national legislatures is often the opposite party as the executive, and they're the ones that actually make the laws. (The real reality though is that the states are far more relevant in this area.)
[1] https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/abortion-rates-presidencie...
You claimed "fewer abortions happen under Democrat presidents than under Republican presidents", but that's still not really true. Two of the top four years for abortions per live birth (1979, 1980, 1981, 1984) had a Democratic administration. Three if you look at the previous year's President. [1]
[1] According to CDC https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abortion_statistics_in_the_Uni...
That my fellow Dems so often paint this position as plainly stupid or obviously wrong is a frequent source of frustration for me, and why I usually just avoid engaging in discussion of the topic (whoops). Not accusing you of having done that, mind you, I just see it a lot.
I think you've confused abortions with deficits, in terms of things Republicans rhetorically oppose but in practice increase while in office.
[EDIT] wrote "pro-net-neutrality" rather than "anti" by mistake; fixed.
Do you have sources? I personally believe in the free market, and think fast lanes are beneficial for customers.
One of the more compelling sources that I've seen is an analysis of the comments that the FCC received, which showed that 66% of verifiably legitimate comments favored Net Neutrality. See: https://medium.com/ragtag-notes/bot-or-not-verifying-public-...
An easy way to picture it is common carrier. The postal service does not ask what you are sending. It asks you how big it is. It charges you based on when it needs to arrive. There is no mention of the contents - a dimensional pound of feathers and a dimensional pound of lead cost the same to ship Express Post. Net Neutrality is the expansion of the same idea to the internet - that Spotify, Netflix, my cat blog, and Hacker News cost the same, and are charged the same, per "standard reliability" kilobyte.
https://github.com/ryanpcmcquen/ryanpcmcquen.github.io/blob/...
There are two major parts/ideologies in Net Neutrality centered around the idea that traffic should be treated equal no matter what it is, and that traffic should be treated equal no matter where it is from or two. Both of these stances lead to interesting and nuanced technical discussion or at least used to before they became a broader public platform.
A byte from Netflix takes exactly the same number of packets on the wire as a byte from Hulu or a byte from fcc.gov. Charging more for transferring one of these over the others is pure rent seeking.
This may be true, but its irrelevant unless the COGs for an ISP is measured in packets. It's almost certainly not.
Also you have the issue that sparked the large public prominence of Network Neutrality. Netflix was renegotiating their peering agreements and the ISPs were trying to soak them on the last mile costs. ISPs felt Netflix should bear the cost of network expansion since their service was generating all the traffic that they needed to upgrade to accommodate. Netflix felt the cost should be primarily carried by the ISPs. This has almost nothing to do with you as a consumer, but Netflix successfully branded it that way to garner public support. N.N. complicates adds a lot of uncertainty to what is legal to negotiate in a peering agreement between companies. L3 is probably going to be the big loser here, not Comcast.
And finally, because I see a lot of posts on this chain that don't understand what Power Factor is, it probably needs to be pointed out. A refrigerator has an inductive motor in it's compressor that it uses to chill the air. A toaster is a simple resistor. The inductive nature of that motor degrades the power network by transforming some real power into imaginary power (mathematical terms) and basically messing up the phase relationship on the distribution network itself. This ratio of real(useful) and imaginary(useless) power is called Power Factor and the power company measures it and asses a fee based on how much you screw it up. A typical household does not run enough of anything to noticeably impact the networks power factor so most consumers don't know about it but if you were running a hundred refrigerators you would absolutely be charged more than running a thousand toasters.
What does that have to do with packet networks? Well, when the traffic (electrical load) impacts the function of the distribution network, the cost is passed on to the user that generates that load. Not all Kilowatts of power consumed are equal.
Netflix was already paying for an uplink connection of sufficient bandwidth. The customers were already paying for a downlink connection of sufficient bandwidth. The assertion that it's necessary to hold one party hostage in order to get more money from the other is absurd.
UPS doesn't demand that Amazon pay for its new trucks, and it certainly doesn't hold Amazon packages hostage until they do so. They're supposed to buy their infrastructure with the profit that they're already generating. And ISPs are seeing record profits right now.
What I am saying here is that your analogies are poor because you are uneducated about the topics you are analogizing from. Which sadly, has become a good analogy for the broader Net Neutrality debate.
You might also notice that I am not advocating for the ISPs in my last post. I feel that their demands on Netflix were excessive and unrealistic. That's why I described it as the ISPs trying to soak Netflix.
IP packets aren't at risk of blowing up in ISP employee hands, and even if they were, it wouldn't justify allowing ISPs to charge more for Netflix than NBC streaming.
Another question you might ask. Is it OK to prioritize data that is destined for the 911 network over data that is heading to Pornhub? What about a university? What about Khan Academy? What do you do with encrypted data where you can't tell the type or destination? What if the encrypted data is malformed such that it is causing detrimental performance to the broader network?
Management of a modern network like the internet is an amazing challenge that requires all kinds of work to find optimal solutions. We need real technically nuanced discussion and consideration to craft legislation that actually solves problems and doesn't create significant new ones. We don't need badly flawed analogies designed to garner public support that only apply if you don't know about the topic.
These are fringe use cases that still don't justify an ISP charging more for Netflix streaming over NBC.
The analogy for the net would be that domains that require more kilobytes would begin to pay more per kilobyte to have it delivered. I'm not saying I agree with this at all but the electricity analogy can be applied very easily to anti-net neutrality advocates' point of view.
1. What does any of that have to do with domains?
2. What does any of that have to do with network neutrality, i.e., discrimination based on content?
Net neutrality says that the ISPs can't throttle Netflix's speed while giving priority to another streaming platform. It's okay if users are charged by usage (even, perhaps, non-linearly) -- but it's not okay in the eyes pro-NN people if the ISP charges more for Netflix than, say, their own streaming platform. A byte should cost the same regardless of its use (much like a kW of electricity costs the same for a toaster as it does your refrigerator or another brand of toaster).
Given two loads of equivalent kwh most power companies will charge you a different price based on the power-factor of the load.
Or in other words: They will bill you based on the amount of kWh they are actually transporting for you ... which is precisely what network neutrality is about?
The matching analogy to power-factor of the load is bandwidth, not traffic source.
Thus charging more for higher bandwidth during high traffic periods is both reasonable and allowed under NN.
Charging more for higher bandwidth or data usage because of the application is not allowed under NN.
ISPs would never charge customers depending on the product because measuring that is practically impossible. They never even wanted to do that nor advocated doing so (this was a major source of misinformation put out by the pro-net neutrality camp). What they do want to do is bill the service, namely very large companies that use tons of data, for example earlier Netflix, for the cost of the infrastructure build out they need to do. They're not interested in small companies that produce small amounts of data, nor the end users. They're interested in recouping infrastructure costs from those that drive it upward, which isn't end customers.
This is how a good market should work. Why should the internet be any different? I think the only reason why net neutrality is a thing people support is because of the monopolies the service providers have in many parts of the country. If there was healthy competition in the space, I don't think anyone would be talking about net neutrality.
As such, I think we should be focusing our efforts on deregulation and creating some real competition in the space instead of net neutrality.
It's not network fixedness, it's network neutrality.
Also we have different tax rates for different things. You don't pay the same tax for eggs than for electronics. I don't know if the US has that. Applying the same to electricity sounds good. Hard to implement though.
An ISP doesn't bill you for how many bits you download because data traffic is extremely peaky, way more peaky than water or electricity. If they build their network assuming a certain amount of peakiness and then everyone suddenly massively blows out those estimates because some new company comes along that massively uses more data, someone needs to get charged for that. That cost should fall on the company causing that so they can properly set the price of their product to how much data traffic they drive.
Anyone who is arguing that eliminating NN is reprehensible and not "I understand the positions of the stakeholders and the current FCC administration's policy goals but disagree that the bill will have the desired effect because..." isn't really helping anything.
Please, we can do better than this. Read the actual text and disagree with it on its merit, not because the people involved are evil.
Policymaker regularly delegate the understanding of specific pieces of technology/etc to professionals they trust and have worked with over their tenure.
Strongly disagree; people can also disagree with the desirability of the effect, not just whether the bill will have the effect that the stakeholders and FCC administration desire. Note that I have not stated any opinion on NN in this comment, just the meta-discussion on what is an acceptable point of disagreement
For example, as much as I've read, I'm not sure exactly what part of net neutrality has overwhelming public support. Among people willing to comment on the matter, they seem to stand with the organizations that support it, but the public also doesn't seem to want their network to be neutral.
Outside the specific laws implemented, the general principle of net neutrality is that all data should be treated equally in transit, but all data is not equally prioritized by people. T-Mobile's plan to throttle online video in exchange for unlimited streaming was so popular that everyone else copied it. People are excited for unlimited Netflix, and don't mind 480p on a tiny screen. If most people were given a choice, they would want their most used services to have a fast lane with unlimited data caps and wouldn't mind if the website they check once every few months was a little slower or their video was compressed to fit their device.
Of course, people don't want the nightmare situation presented where they need to pay their ISP a subscription fee for access to each siloed section of the Internet, but so far nobody has proposed that outside of plans like Facebook had in India where base access was free. I would even guess that if people were offered a free unlimited data plan with access to services owned only by Facebook, Google, and Netflix and the option to buy unilmited web access, it would be extremely popular.
So I think we have to acknowledge that many of the things that net neutrality is meant to prevent are actually very popular with many people, while also examining the negative consequences.
How is the Senate forced to vote on it? McConnell seems to be fond of blocking votes that go against the Republican agenda. See: the shutdown. Also the anti-corruption and voting rights bill that passed the House will not be brought up for a vote in the Senate. Is there something about this bill that forces the Senate to vote on it?
just how reprehensible they are
I thought that while the FCC under Obama did consider lifting NN, the Obama administration and the FCC under Obama ended up coming down strongly on the side of NN. Are you arguing that if the FCC hadn't looked into the possibility of dropping NN under Obama then the Trump administration never would have gotten the idea to follow through on it?
But you are right that it was president Bush and a Republican FCC chair that first adopted the principle of NN.