House tells FCC to drop net neutrality | Hacker News Reader

House tells FCC to drop net neutrality

boston.com

127 pointsknodi93 comments

The FCC's claim of authority in this instance to impose rules from on high is problematic.

Here is what EFF says:

"We’re wholly in favor of net neutrality in practice, but a finding of ancillary jurisdiction here would give the FCC pretty much boundless authority to regulate the Internet for whatever it sees fit. And that kind of unrestrained authority makes us nervous about follow-on initiatives like broadcast flags and indecency campaigns. In general, we think arguments that regulating the Internet is 'ancillary' to some other regulatory authority that the FCC has been granted just don’t have sufficient limitations to stop bad FCC behavior in the future and create the 'Trojan horse' risk we have long warned about." (https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2011/02/part-i-fcc-ancillary-a...)

I have chimed in on this in a previous HN thread:

"The FCC is way out of its league on this one. Basically, it is a creature of statute. It can do whatever Congress has authorized it to and no more. Nothing in its authorizing statute expressly permits it to impose the rules now known as net neutrality. Therefore, it sought to justify its ability to do so under the doctrine of so-called 'ancillary jurisdiction,' meaning that it had an implied power to do so in aid of its expressly granted powers. Unfortunately, a definitive federal appeals court ruling held that no such ancillary jurisdiction existed, leaving the matter for Congress to decide. Rather than deferring to Congress, the FCC chose to adopt a new rationale for its assertion of this authority. Congress overwhelmingly balked at the idea of any broad assertion of such authority and, in the back and forth, the FCC came up with the toe-in-the water approach just adopted to the satisfaction of almost no one. Even this assertion of jurisdiction will certainly be challenged in the courts in cases that will take years to decide, leaving this whole issue in a pathetic state of uncertainty for all concerned. Nothing good will come of this except for lots of employment for the lawyers who will be litigating whether this or that action is 'reasonable' and whether the internet is really like a public utility or not. All in all, a royal mess." (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2033261)

A short-hand way of summing up the issue: do you want, in the name of a short-term goal such as net neutrality, to cede to unaccountable government regulators a broad, unchecked power to control what happens on the internet? I think this should give pause to all of us, no matter what we think of the net-neutrality issue.

It certainly does give me pause, but we also know how the Republicans will come down on net neutrality regardless of whether an overreaching regulatory body is advocating (some version of) it. That, to me, is the bigger story.

As you said, the FCC can only do what Congress has authorized it to do, so we're not in any real danger of the FCC having a "broad, unchecked power to control what happens on the internet". What we are in danger of is having a Congress that kills net neutrality, period.

Edit: Not that I care about karma, but I'm curious as to why I'm being downvoted. I'm not disagreeing with grellas' point.

I didn't downvote, first of all. I upvoted! I am also disappointed to see it downvoted. There is some contention that downvoting is a valid way to express disagreement; I don't really agree. Downvotes should be reserved only for poor decorum or other disruptive behavior.

The point Grellas is making is that if we let the FCC slide on net neutrality by accepting their arguments of ancillary jurisdiction and implied authority over the internet, then it would give the FCC free reign to do whatever they wanted with the internet unless Congress came in and expressly forbade or altered their authority. Right now, we have the opposite situation, where the FCC is not allowed to exercise authority over the internet without an express dispensation from Congress allowing them to do so.

The latter is better because it's much easier to hold elected representatives accountable than it is to hold appointed bureaucrats accountable. If Congress gives the FCC authority to regulate the internet that way, they can use the FCC as a proxy for all their unpopular regulatory actions and redirect the flak.

Thanks for the explanation, cookiecaper. I guess I should clarify that I agree with grellas' analysis, but that I think the larger issue is how net neutrality plays out in Congress, whether it involves an overreaching FCC or not.

You probably got downvoted because you show a lack of understanding of what grellas was saying. What he was saying was that if the FCC had been allowed by the courts to use 'ancillary jurisdiction' to impose new rules, the FCC would indeed be in the very situation which you say is impossible, a situation of broad, unchecked power.

Upvoted for noting that simply not paying attention to what's been said good cause for downvoting.

You're mistaken on this point. The courts already rejected the ancillary jurisdiction rationale, and rather than wait for Congress to make a decision on net neutrality, the FCC adopted a new rationale (which, as I recall, hinged upon reclassifying broadband traffic) to justify imposing their net neutrality rules. All of this is in grellas' post. The issue grellas is raising is whether it's acceptable to let a regulatory body like the FCC make such broad assertions of authority at all. The matter of ancillary jurisdiction is already done and settled.

When I said we're not in any real danger of the FCC having a "broad, unchecked power to control what happens on the internet," my point was that irrespective of whether Congress denies the FCC this authority right now, it always has the power to do so. And though it's irrelevant to my point, if the courts had upheld the ancillary jurisdiction rationale, Congress could always strike that down, too. This situation isn't like the executive branch jockeying with the legislative branch for power: the FCC is not a peer of Congress.

In the next few years, it's looking like the vast majority of telecommunications will move over to the Internet. If the FCC doesn't have the authority to regulate the Internet, they will have no regulatory authority whatsoever over land-based telecom. I don't see how that is reasonable, and I don't see how the initial decision to classify Internet as something other than a wire communications service was justifiable.

It's disingenuous to say the FCC is claiming any authority they don't have under the law.

"unaccountable government regulators"?

Just wondering about this. If you think a popularly elected government is "unaccountable", can you give an example of something that is accountable?

Perhaps better stated as not directly accountable to voters. Thanks for pointing out the overstatement (lawyers are inclined to this, especially after they start to warm up and become enamored of the sound of their own words).

China also has a popularly elected government ... The fact that there are two parties in US and one in China does not make any difference IHMO.

Switzerland referendum system would be my example of accountable government.

Are you kidding me? China censored internet during middle east crisis, they do not want their people to know how government of Egypt was toppled and what is happening in Libya. Even though current democratic government is much like Islamist who wants to drive this country in ground, but it is better than China government.

Are you kidding me? US media is as censored as Chinese.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ae-p5822Yew

Australia, where metered access (XX GBs per month) rules, may provide some insight into how net non-neutrality plays out on practise. Here, it's not about speed limiting to "non-favoured" sites, but about whether consumption from those sites consume your allocated bandwidth allowance. It is routine for companies to do deals with ISPs to provide "unmetered" access to their services for customers. For example, with my ISP, anything I buy from Apple is unmetered. Other ISPs might, for example, offer free Steam traffic. This is most noticeable, I think, on mobile data plans, which often feature "unlimited Facebook" or "all you can Tweet" or similar.

I can see how this has the potential to entrench existing players but subjectively the effect seems weak at best and does not figure too much in people's purchasing decisions. Personally, I would prefer more general solutions to the problem of "corporate cliques" gaining oligopoly powers. Restrictions on cross-media ownership would seem to be the weapon of choice.

What about the "what is in a name" path?

What if, instead of regulating what ISPs can do with their network, there were a movement (read, "lawsuits") (using some new or perhaps just existing law) to stop anything past some previously normal level of traffic management from being called "internet service". So a teleco could give preference to their own, or affiliate, traffic, but that could not be referred to by them, or sold to customers, as "the internet". The position here is this: the term "the internet" has come to mean, through intent and common use, something that does not include, by definition, those kind of practices. Thus, selling a package with those practices and calling it internet service is deceit.

If I sold a "car" to someone and, when they went to pick up their new car, they found what anyone besides my team of salesmen would call a golf cart, that wouldn't be legal. Same idea.

I'm sure I'm being naïve, how?

This is a good path to consider. It's not "food" if it doesn't contain the right amount of edible/digestible ingredients. It's not "octane X" if it hasn't been refined in the right method. That car isn't "safe" unless it adheres to regulatory guidelines.

It's not "Internet access" if it doesn't allow me to access resources on the Internet at my leisure and at the "broadband" speed advertised. (OK, I know that my 6Mbps connection doesn't get me 6Mbps all the way from Netflix, but you can see my point.)

One concern is that 99% percent of users wouldn't care if they got Internet service or "Value-Added Broadband (tm)" from their local cable monopoly, especially if the latter cost $0.01 less per month.

Net neutrality strikes me as one of those cases where those who are aware of the stakes have to adopt a paternalistic attitude toward consumer protection.

Sounds like an elegant solution. Similar to a recent suggestion on the whole Honeycomb thing (open the code, but assert control of the Android trademark).

http://monogatari.doukut.su/2011/04/openness-and-reputation....

Getting the FCC to make carriers play fair is a slow road to improvement and it's filled with potholes. I'd be more inclined to support regulation changes intended to make starting a new carrier easier.

Mark my words: Any net neutrality bill will benefit the existing carriers, and stifle telecom startups.

If I am not mistaken, setting up a working telecom startup is quite capital intensive, and has high running costs on top of it, just in terms of handling Marketing and competitive pressures.

How would a new startup survive and scale by any change in rules? The market would still serve the incumbents more than the startups - since their scale would make them stronger bets.

I'm curious to know what type of regulation would help circumvent the high startup cost and create genuine competition.

Edit: I am genuinely interested to know what regulation the original poster had in mind, or any other regulation that would help achieve his stated goal.

So is starting an airline, but deregulation still got us Southwest and Jetblue.

So you are saying LESS regulation is the change in regulation you would like to see?

So what regulations would you remove?

I'm saying that despite the fact that airlines are a textbook example of an industry with high capital requirements for entry, deregulation did not hand the industry over to a cartel of incumbents. In fact, air carriage is regularly shaken up by new entrants and new market forces.

Deregulation is such a blanket term encompassing so many things (especially the things regulated right now) that it by itself can't be judged a cure-all. Imagine deregulating the food industry by disbanding the FDA.

Loss of net neutrality will hurt small players in the web space(imagine a startup competitor to Netflix which can't afford deals with so many ISPs).

I'm not in favor of blanket deregulation. Quite the contrary: I'm a Democrat! Message boards tend to take everyone to extremes. I simply want to make the point that deregulation in and of itself doesn't inevitably lead to megacorporate cartels.

Where is the startup competitor to Netflix that will be hurt? Can you send me a link or something?

Franchise agreements and rights of way prevent new ISPs from entering the market. If you want to deregulate, you could start there. I don't think it would help due to the incumbents' economy of scale, though.

Cable franchises and rights of way are scarce goods that were quickly priced according to the markets. Regulations are, in part, an attempt to limit the value of those goods and reprice those goods. This doesn't sound like a good plan to me; the government is good at a good many things, but price discovery is not one of them.

The next wave of connectivity providers hopefully will not depend on rights of way. If you want to talk about things the government should do to balance out Internet access, let's reevaluate how we're handling the RF spectrum.

Yes! And believe it or not, Southwest is now the largest carrier in the US! What a success story.

Airlines are very different from carriers. The market for air travel is dominated by frequent one-off transactions (with consumers often using multiple airlines for a single trip), and boasts several good ways to compare availability and cost. A new entrant can start off with a few routes, build a good reputation, and grow out from there.

New entrants in the telecom market are considerably disadvantaged by comparison. Consumers in this market make long-term purchasing decisions, often driven by contract pricing,and there remain no good, well known ways of comparing providers. The situation is even worse if you're a new wireless carrier, since coverage is crucial and the market is pointlessly segmented by phone tech.

I'm not saying we couldn't benefit from deregulation in some aspects of this market, but the devil is very much in the details, and simply pointing out that "deregulation" helped improve a market with high capital requirements for entry isn't saying much.

Here is one alternative path. The State of Florida, under the auspices of the North Florida Broadband Authority, is setting up a "middle mile" quasi-government carrier. They will connect to a tier-1 provider (Level3 in this case) and distribute the broadband feed to small rural counties and cities, in an area which is economically disadvantaged (when compared to larger cities in Florida).

While this is capital intensive, they're trying to accomplish something that no private carriers seem to have interest in.

http://www.nfba-fl.org/

I doubt a highly skilled/motivated telecom team would have trouble finding capital in todays market. Millions are being handed out to teams whose infrastructure consists RoR app running on AWS.

I don't have anything specific in mind regulation wise. I have no agenda, merely that net neutrality is trying to cure a symptom not a cause.

>Mark my words: Any net neutrality bill will benefit the existing carriers, and stifle telecom startups.

Why or how?

By creating rules making it harder to create new companies with novel business models for providing Internet service, because those business models might in theory allow an incumbent to unlevel the playing field.

So, is your position that we shouldn't pass any laws or regulations because they may have unintended side-effects on companies that may exist in the future ? That sounds like pretty weak tea to me.

What on earth is wrong with the FCC stating that no company can give precedence to any specific source/destination's traffic over another source/destination's traffic ? All it does is codify the basic principle that the Internet was founded on, and the same principle that allowed it to become what it is today. More importantly, it doesn't involve any changes for any company unless they're already breaking the rule, in which case isn't it a good thing that we make them stop doing so ?

Listen to yourself. Where did you get the idea that I think we shouldn't pass laws or regulations at all? This is a message board political flame war rattling its cage trying to escape. Kill it.

I don't particularly support this regulation (I'm not totally against it, either). Many other things, I do think we should regulate.

What's wrong here is that I think it's too early in the connectivity industry to say that the incumbents we have now are so powerful that we should freeze them into place with regulations. And even if it isn't, it's not the place of an unelected and unaccountable FCC commissioner to pass a law that couldn't get passed through Congress, where the Constitution says new laws should come from.

Every time you say the FCC should be able to make up a new rule, you're in effect saying that the executive branch should be able to make rules there by fiat. I don't recall any us being so psyched about that prospect when Cheney was President.

I did not say that you were against passing laws or regulations at all. I was asking you if you were against passing laws or regulations if they might result in unintended consequences, which is what your position seemed to be, based upon your prior statement.

As for the rest, it's nothing more than a reflection upon the sorry state of affairs in Congress that we cannot get a law passed that re-affirms one of the fundamental principles that established the Internet, especially when it is clear that the major players in regional markets are already trying to prioritize traffic for their own content. My issue with your post was that it seemed to be offering another excuse for inaction, and the problem with our Congress is not that it does too much, but rather that it does too little.

A real democracy isn't about pulling a lever for some guys every few years, then going home and letting them run wild. If citizens want their FCC to pursue certain policies, they have every right to organize against the decisionmaking of the professional politicians. They don't have to remain apathetic non-participants in politics.

People who are effective in politics, participate in it.

"But critics of net neutrality rules argue that free-market competition would prevent such abuses"

Is consumer internet really a free market? To my knowledge, most of the Bay Area only has a choice between Comcast and AT&T. If you only have 2 or 3 companies competing, it's relatively easy for them all to decide independently that traffic shaping is in their own best interest, which leaves the consumer with no real choice.

I'd really like someone to take politicians to task with this.

"Mr. Congresscritter, where is the free market alternative to ISP One in Somecity, seeing as ISP One bought up all its competitors?"

Is there a free-market for the right-of-way the isp lines travel through?

Is there a free-market for spectrum?

In both cases, no. There are very heavily regulated markets. So if they benefit from very heavy regulation, and they do, then they should be subject to some regulation as well.

Free market does not necessarily mean perfect competition, or 10+ competitors to choose from. I don't know where you got that idea.

While this is true, it was essentially mandated that there be two competitors. The choice was to have many resellers of DSL competing against cable, or an entrenched duopoly. Chairman Michael Powell chose the duopoly, even using that word to describe it.

I'm nearly 2K miles from the Bay Area but I've heard of more than 3 ISPs that serve the area.

What about Unwired, Cruzio, and Sonic?

> If you only have 2 or 3 companies competing ...

If there were truly only 2 companies that provided internet in the Bay Area (this would be extremely surprising to me), collusion might be possible.

With 3, you now have a nice unstable equilibrium in game theory terms.

But what do you want to bet there are even more, and you've only heard about the name brand ones?

We haven't considered wireless broadband providers. How many of those are there?

Okay, so maybe the Bay Area's okay, but what about the rest of America? Turns out that, according to the FCC's own data, 98% of zipcodes have 2 or more landline providers, and 88% of zipcodes have 4 or more. Again, this is not counting 3g or 4g.

http://hraunfoss.fcc.gov/edocs_public/attachmatch/DOC-292191...

From the outside it looks like the US political scene is a complete and ridiculous mess right now, led by the Republican Congress.

Which begs the question, WTF does it look like from the inside?

Like a functioning government, why do you ask?

Are you implying that the workers in sausage factory think they are making filet mignon?

What does this mean? Seriously. Sausage is delicious. The point of the sausage factory isn't that sausage is disgusting. It's that a delicious product sometimes requires production steps that appear repulsive to outsiders.

I love sausage, I'm going to go have some right now at a picnic.

The point of a sausage factory is to make sausage, disgusting or not. "sausage factory" is a reference to how it is made, independent of if it's delicious or not. See Upton Sinclair's The Jungle. I apologize if I offended sausage. Sausage, and the people who make it and eat it, will have to come to terms with the fact that it is not filet mignon.

Do government workers and public servants, who have a view from the inside, think that it looks like a functioning government? Because from the outside, according to the past entries on this thread, it doesn't.

I'm a liberal Democrat and I'm queasy about enforced net neutrality; these are rules that govern what companies can do with their own infrastructure, and rules that could unintentionally retard progress instead of protecting it.

Further, Congress has a legitimate gripe here. We don't elect FCC commissioners. They're appointed. We should be particularly concerned about them overstepping their bounds. Which a reasonable case can be made for here.

I'm not sure I see what your comment adds to the discussion, other than "the duly elected Republican congress is doing something I disagree with!".

Wasn't that infrastructure paid for by taxes?

No? Not really? Pretty sure AT&T and Comcast spend way way more of their own money forklifting in CRS1's and terminating circuits? From where do you get the idea that the major carriers are heavily subsidized? I'm sure they get breaks, but no, I don't think your taxes fund AT&T, Comcast, L3, &c.

Land and subsidies to lay fiber?

I think we're at a point where Internet access needs to be classified as a utility, like electricity and water.

We are indeed in a situation where many companies have invested in their own infrastructure and maybe that requires consideration. I'm absolutely certain that jimktrains2 has a point: the U.S. taxpayers coughed up tremendous amounts of money to invest in infrastructure which makes those lines ours. (Sure, 'legally' AT&T et al own title and deed, but you and I still provided the money.)

Ultimately the point is that it's time to classify access to the Internet as a utility and regulate it as such: separating ownership from operation, mandatory line sharing, various and sundry other mechanisms to make sure the consumer has choice amongst competitors. Then we can say net neutrality is not needed.

There is no company I have to deal with on a regular basis that is worse than the electrical company.

This Internet stuff is not really a voting issue for me (health care and education are the big things that make me a Dem and not a Lib), but the candidate that tells me he wants to turn AT&T into Commonwealth Edison has secured a donation from me to his opponent.

Be careful what you wish for.

If they would've built the entire infrastructure without public money sure, but that's not the case. Also, when dealing with limited resources, like spectrum, regulation is necessary. We put in money to build the infrastructure, we should have a saying in how it's utilized. And, by the way, I wish dealing with most companies would be as smooth as the power company -- ymmv.

There is no company I have to deal with on a regular basis that is worse than the electrical company.

Care to elaborate? Regarding electric co. service, mine has been reliable (far more than my cable internet service). Regarding customer service and price, can't really complain about these either and I've had a fair amount of experience on both a commercial and personal level.

Full Disclosure: Personally, I'm an advocate of regulations that would treat the net more like a utility. By diminishing the profit motive for maintaining the infrastructure, I believe that we can better ensure equal access and adequate service quality (e.g. South Korea: http://articles.cnn.com/2010-03-31/tech/broadband.south.kore...).

At least power companies don't try and tell me what to do with the energy I buy from them - they don't tell me I have to pay more to use / can't use brands of toasters unless the manufacturer paid them money.

I think the ideal solution would be an act specifically about net neutrality - but where existing laws allow net neutrality to be regulated, I think that using those measures in the interim is not necessarily a bad thing.

Prosecuting companies that aren't using net neutrality in the interim might be more of an FTC role than an FCC role in terms of current US government structures - especially if they can get a court to agree that non-net neutrality violates one of the anti-trust or consumer protection laws.

While I agree that Congress has a legitimate gripe with overstepping unelected officials, I really think that's a separate issue that should be treated independently.

Regarding rules that could unintentionally retard progress - that's not necessarily a bad thing. In the same sense, the FDA retards progress of the pharmaceutical industry. We should be able to decide that some things are harmful enough to individuals and their rights that companies shouldn't be allowed to compete on them, at least beyond a certain level. At the very least, they should be required to make those things as visible to consumers as price, because consumers can only vote with their wallets on things they're aware of.

All this is reasonable. Having said that, on an issue where reasonable people can so clearly have reasonable disagreements, and where so much is at stake, it is simply not unreasonable for Congress to demand that rulemaking occur the legislative process.

The EFF is right about this. Whether you like net neutrality or not, you should hope the GOP wins this one. I don't want to imagine what stupid shit President Romney could come up with for the FCC to do to the Internet.

As far as slowing down progress, there is a danger of this happening without net neutrality as well.

Consider the current state in Australia: you have ISPs that charge you based on GB of bandwidth used per month. For example, lets say your ISP signs a deal with Hulu so that traffic from them is free for you. Most people would probably not give any consideration to competing services because they will have to pay for bandwidth while using them. This is a huge advantage to already established online tv services that have resources to make these kinds of offers with ISPs. Meanwhile, new services that can't afford them get ignored by users despite perhaps having better feature sets.

It's been a mess for a long time. And it's not just the Republicans. Anyone with a brain can look back over the past 20-30 years and see the fingerprints of both parties all over the collective disaster that is the current situation politically, financially and militarily.

Every time someone says this I think back to the politics of the 19th century, or the early 20th. It's probably true that we're at a depressing ebb of productivity and good faith in national politics, but politics 'twas ever thus. You think Fox News is bad? Try Hearst's papers in the 1890s.

There are 307 million people in the United States. That the three million? people of in the original colonies managed to agree on a system of government that scaled this far and this well over so many diverse interests and conflicting worldviews is astonishing.

So, is it possible that the system is starting to show cracks where it might no longer scale very well at 307 million people. Maybe giving more powers to states could potentially work. I don't know if I like that more or less.

If it's showing cracks now, it's amazing we've held up for 100 years after the cracks we had when Teddy Roosevelt was President. I'm trying to advocate for perspective; I'm not saying things are great or don't need fixing, but remember that things have been much worse in the past.

I feel a lot of the cracks are due to misuse of the system and misallocations in the system.

You think things were used more carefully during the Teapot Dome era? :)

I wouldn't say that the politics of the early 20th century exactly got us to very good places. We got a Depression and then a massive War.

There's other perspectives, such as "The political scene is a complete and ridiculous mess as the bill for decades of feckless spending and promises is coming due and only one faction in one party is even capable of admitting that, and for that they are being burned at the stake." (Which I consider a plain-and-simple case of shooting the messenger.) The mess we have right now is politicians trying to follow the time-honored bi-partisan tradition of kicking the can down the road and discovering there's not all that much road left.

The fact that you feel like you have to make a comment about spending on a thread about net neutrality is an indication that the thread has developed at least some ambient toxicity. Notice how little it takes for that to happen! Just a couple seed comments about "Republicans" and we're off to the races.

(I'm not criticizing you).

It seems that way if you think every bill is law before it reaches the Senate.

From this time last year:

http://thehill.com/homenews/house/83059-senate-sitting-on-29...

Maybe the sky isn't really falling?

I don't believe such blatant partisanship belongs on Hacker News.

“Today, Republicans first want to shut down the Internet, then they want to shut down the government,’’ said US Representative Edward J. Markey, a Malden Democrat...

“We look forward to forever prohibiting the overreach of the Federal Communications Commission,’’ Blackburn said.

Funny how politicians hotly debate the FCCs authority, but when it comes to DHS seizing domain names nobody says shit.

Funny? No, just boring. "DHS" siezes domain names because DHS was hurriedly created, as a reaction to 9/11, by jamming agencies together like so many insects in the transporter from The Fly. One of those agencies happened to be Immigration and Customs, which has always had IPR enforcement in its portfolio.

Every time people make these conspiracy-theoretic comments about how "Homeland Security" is doing antipiracy raids, they betray either a lack of understanding of how their government is actually structured, or an easygoing willingness to buy into Internet drama, or both. At least, that's what it looks like to me.

It does have an interesting psychological effect, though, possibly on both the recipients of orders, and on the general public. Reminds me a bit of the similar accident of jurisdiction that led to 1980s teenage hax0rz being raided by the Secret Service, rather than by more normal-sounding police.

Is there some controversy about the Secret Service involvement during Sun Devil? Those were interstate crimes, not to mention the fact that no local police force was in any way equipped to deal with the problem.

Not political controversy, just the psychological aspect that it was The Secret Service, the dramatic earpiece-wearing folks in movies who keep the president from being shot, not to mention a police agency with the conspiracy-driving word "secret" in their name. If we instead had the U.S. Government Computer Crime Agency, it'd be a lot more pedestrian.

It probably has more to do with how few people understood that the Secret Service is was really more like the Treasury Police, and protecting the President was only a small part of what they did. The protective details are the only thing interesting enough to make movies about, hence the mystique.

i'm not familiar with the rules proposed in december, was this in reference to the proposal that google and verizon drew up?

I believe it was this: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2028807

Another freedom lost in the land of the free.

Recorded for posterity that somebody voted this non-sequitor comment up.

Do you have the internet? How would you like it if the FCC required you to pay an extra $20 a month to get movie downloads, whether you want them not, or to allow your kids to access violent video games or adult content, whether you want them to or not, just so everyone would get what the government considers to be “the full Internet experience?” What if you’re low income, and you’d rather spend that $20 on books? Or warm clothes? Or food?

Correct me if I'm wrong, but it sounds like advocates of net neutrality want low income people to have that choice.

(note words above are not mine)

Republicans Mess!!

I know on HN this is the part we focus on (the net) but based on the republican plans for the future of the federal government (which do have a real chance of happening) this would be the least you have to worry about. It's pretty much going to be every person for themselves because government is going to be a fraction of what it was and states, therefore residents will receive a fraction of the funding you are used to.

Not just the net, everything from roads, education, healthcare, prisons is going to become radically privatized.

Is there any possible response to this comment that will produce a thread we'd be happy to have on HN?

Net neutrality is politics. I'm just saying this is the least of our political worries right now. When the president and half the democrats are also anti-net neutrality, basically it's gone.

I thought I read that if the current bill passes the president would veto it. Is it because he's pro-net-neutrality or anti-anything-republican? The last question isn't partisan, it's a perfectly valid reason for a democrat president to veto a republican-led bill. Happens the other way, too.

He may not want this bill but he will certainly give into anti-neutrality measures in another format. Remember he listens directly to the riaa and mpaa and other such industry groups.

maybe?

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