Judges suspends FCC net neutrality restoration rule
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Incumbents rejoice!? Disruptors be dammed!?
How will this new regulatory environment affect the disruption-dependent VC sector?
If any environment serves incumbents best, its one where the rules are made up as people come and go, where you only have to cozy up to a small group of people who are already part of your regulatory capture revolving door, and where annoying the wrong person can see your entire business shut down and destroyed.
Instead of buying a lobbying campaign for your employee or sympathizer to be nominated as the head of an agency, is the most efficient move for incumbents now to simply shop around for a cooperative court?
Executive agency interpretations with Chevron intact? Not so much.
Why wouldn't certain parties with a national presence always shop for that forum?
They might, but then the decisions can be appealed to the Supreme Court, which can overrule any decision they make.
More to the point, it isn't the Supreme Court that makes the law, it's Congress. The courts are resolving ambiguities when Congress hasn't been clear. If any court interprets a statute in a way that Congress doesn't like, Congress can pass a new one that removes the ambiguity.
That sounds great in theory, however our Congress is known to be useless and in total gridlock. Our Supreme Court is known to vote along 6/3 partly lines, all precedent be damned.
These are predictable things, and given the known biases, this does not sound favorable towards agility which allows smart disruptive innovation, does it?
It seems like we have given all the power to 6 Supreme Court justices. I hope that they have the budget to hire many more clerks, as they will need them to micromanage the federal government.
From Justice Kagan's dissent on Chevron, page 82:
> This Court has long understood Chevron deference to reflect what Congress would want, and so to be rooted in a presumption of legislative intent. Congress knows that it does not—in fact cannot—write perfectly complete regulatory statutes...
> It knows that those statutes will inevitably contain ambiguities that some other actor will have to resolve, and gaps that some other actor will have to fill. And it would usually prefer that actor to be the responsible agency, not a court...
> Put all that together and deference to the agency is the almost obvious choice, based on an implicit congressional delegation of interpretive authority. We defer, the Court has explained, “because of a presumption that Congress” would have “desired the agency (rather than the courts)” to exercise “whatever degree of discretion” the statute allows. Smiley v. Citibank (South Dakota), N. A., 517 U. S. 735, 740–741 (1996).
> Today, the Court flips the script: It is now “the courts (rather than the agency)” that will wield power when Congress has left an area of interpretive discretion. A rule of judicial humility gives way to a rule of judicial hubris. In recent years, this Court has too often taken for itself decision-making authority Congress assigned to agencies. The Court has substituted its own judgment on workplace health for that of the Occupational Safety and Health Administration; its own judgment on climate change for that of the Environmental Protection Agency; and its own judgment on student loans for that of the Department of Education.
Emphasis above is mine.
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edit after a couple upvotes:
AFAICT, the administrative agencies are the only part of our government that has been functional in recent times.
Look at what the FAA has managed to pull off with a very limited budget. FAA interpreted laws to allow what SpaceX, and the rest of New Space has accomplished. Now what? There weren't omniscient laws passed, so Blue Origin for example, could theoretically tie SpaceX up in court for new launch licenses? And the final call will be made by a law clerk, instead of space industry professionals?
That's what they're supposed to do when there isn't public consensus. You have to convince enough people that you're right to get the votes to pass the bill.
> Our Supreme Court is known to vote along 6/3 partly lines, all precedent be damned.
Here's the list of opinions from last year:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2023_term_opinions_of_the_Supr...
The table does not show predominantly 6/3 party line decisions.
> These are predictable things, and given the known biases, this does not sound favorable towards agility which allows smart disruptive innovation, does it?
The government isn't in the disruptive innovation business. The federal government in particular is supposed to do nothing in response to contentious issues, so the states can do multiple different things as their voters prescribe and then we can see what works the best. You shouldn't have any federal law on a new thing until it shakes out enough for people to reach consensus on what the federal law should be. And if that never happens then you let the different states have different laws.
> Congress knows that it does not—in fact cannot—write perfectly complete regulatory statutes...
Of course not, but it can certainly read a Supreme Court opinion and amend the law if there is consensus that the result was wrong.
> And it would usually prefer that actor to be the responsible agency, not a court...
We can dispatch with this with a simple question: Do you think agency determinations should be bound by stare decisis?
Saying yes is obviously going to result in a rush to publish a rule resolving every ambiguity in the favor of whatever party is currently in power when the law passes, because the executive is a political branch, unlike the courts, and has only one elected official. This gives too much power to the executive.
Saying no leads to the law flip flopping every time the Presidency changes parties, which is bad and the thing stare decisis is intended to prevent.
Since both of the options lead to a problem, leaving the determination in the hands of the executive branch is the wrong choice.
> It is now “the courts (rather than the agency)” that will wield power when Congress has left an area of interpretive discretion.
Which is exactly the role of the courts. They can listen to the administrative agency's arguments, as well as the other side's, but deciding how to interpret the law is what courts do.
Now that the courts will have to do some of the work that was previously done by agencies, has the budget for the judicial branch been increased? If not, are we about to hit a major backlog which leads to less progress in the private sector?
Are there any estimates on how many new judges must be sworn in, and new clerks need to be hired?
Which is still problematic because the Supreme Court is almost as partisan (if not as) than the senate. So it will still be able to pick and chose which laws to challenge and when (i.e. they can just wait till the majority changes making any "clarifying" amendments unfeasible politically before making a ruling).
Effectively at this point the Supreme Court just seems to pretty much be an extension of the legislative and executives branches just with a lot more randomness due to its small size and no term limits.
> Saying no leads to the law flip flopping every time the Presidency changes parties, which is bad and the thing stare decisis is intended to prevent.
Unless enough justices die/retire during that president's term then you end up with the same type of flip flopping.
Not even close. Justices have certain leanings but in general they care about their legitimacy.
Legislators regularly enact laws solely because they needed to pick up votes from a particular constituency, or somebody paid them to, even when the laws are transparently pandering, wasteful, absurd or needlessly complicated.
> So it will still be able to pick and chose which laws to challenge and when (i.e. they can just wait till the majority changes making any "clarifying" amendments unfeasible politically before making a ruling).
If that party is already in the majority it could have just passed the law it wants anyway?
> Unless enough justices die/retire during that president's term then you end up with the same type of flip flopping.
They're not supposed to do that. That's what stare decisis is about. It happens occasionally but it's not that often.
Whereas when the party that controls the White House changes, they had been setting about to undo every thing the previous administration did as a matter of course. It's completely different.
Some do. Some (almost completely openly) accept actual bribes.
However you do have a perfectly valid point, having their seats for life their actions are either guided by (presumably honest) conviction (or in a few cases monetary/social gain) which in some ways is certainly an improvement over elected officials.
> If that party is already in the majority it could have just passed the law it wants anyway?
Depends. The cost/friction of passing new laws or amendments is still usually quite high and even if you have a majority in both houses and the president there is only so much you can achieve in 2-4 years. Then even these days both parties are not 100% monolithic and there still might be some splits across party lines on less publicly visible issues (the members of your party who are on the fence might start demanding stuff in return etc.)
> It's completely different.
I wouldn't say it's completely different just not as radical and usually takes a few decades. e.g. Roe v. Wade would be brought back immediately after progressives/liberals had a majority (which is of course unlikely to be anytime soon unless Biden's plan to pack/reform the supreme court somehow went through..)
This is explicitly illegal. If you can actually prove this you can prosecute them for it. If you can't actually prove it, it's just speculation and innuendo.
> The cost/friction of passing new laws or amendments is still usually quite high and even if you have a majority in both houses and the president there is only so much you can achieve in 2-4 years.
When the parties want something the other one doesn't, they write the text when they decide they want it and then put it on the stack of things to pass the next time they're in power. Half of these things don't even get debated, they just get tacked onto the Patriot Act or Inflation Reduction Act or whatever this year's odious omnibus is for the party gets to ram through the things they want.
It's a stupid way to do things, but it's still what happens.
> Then even these days both parties are not 100% monolithic and there still might be some splits across party lines on less publicly visible issues (the members of your party who are on the fence might start demanding stuff in return etc.)
That just means that even your own party doesn't agree they want it, which is exactly the sort of thing you don't want to pass unilaterally -- it's a minority position that can't get 51 votes even when the proponents' party has 55.
> e.g. Roe v. Wade would be brought back immediately after progressives/liberals had a majority
Not necessarily. The problem with Roe v. Wade was always that it was created by activists -- regardless of what you think about it as a matter of policy, the word abortion doesn't appear anywhere in the constitution and the logic of the opinion would constrained the government from interfering with a variety of other personal and healthcare activities, which inconsistently was never applied. People wanted a right to abortion to be in the constitution but it isn't in there and they didn't have the votes to amend it, so they made one up out of thin air. If you want it, the right way to do it is to get the votes.
But the other interesting bit is that the word abortion doesn't appear in the constitution, and the federal government is one of enumerated powers. So there is a much stronger argument that the federal government should have no power to regulate it, i.e. a national abortion ban is arguably unconstitutional because it's beyond the federal government's enumerated powers.
Now you give that case to a Court with a liberal majority, or even one with a few opportunistic liberals and a couple of conservatives who are true to their principles, and you could get something that isn't Roe but is going to shut down the flip flopping by punting it out of federal jurisdiction for the foreseeable future. And if you want to put on your political hat for a second, the Justices have the incentive to do something like that, because they hate politicizing the Court (protesters show up to their houses and threaten to kill them!), so telling everyone "either go bother the state courts or pass the constitutional amendment, we're out of this" could be a sticky equilibrium.
I'm not saying that's going to happen, but it's the sort of thing that could happen and would be a convenient result for the people whose decision it is to make it happen.
How exactly do you think this would work?
> This is explicitly illegal.
Only if the congress agrees. For that you need the house and two-thirds of a senate so it's politically infeasible.
What other realistic pathways to prosecute a supreme court judge besides impeachment are there?
We should really fix this instead of making end runs around congress. The rule of law changing on the whims of which president is in office every 4 years is insanity and we shouldn't be standing for congress abdicating their responsibilities here.
It is precisely because congress has been abdicating their responsibilities that we are here in the first place. The Chevron deference was a patch over an already failing system. The fact that Net Neutrality has both been "law" and not law multiple times all within the span of 16 years is not a sign of a functioning legal system. The fact that the president of the US has arbitrarily instructed an entire law enforcement agency to not enforce a law because a significant number of states are refusing to do so, but at the same time the next president could revert that decision and make thousands of americans criminal overnight, all while we wait and hold our breath that the law enforcement agency decides to change their mind on whether the law is or isn't the law is also insanity, and all of this because congress continues to fail to act. And yet, that is exactly where we are with the status of marijuana in this country. Deferring to the enforcers of a law what their powers under that law are is a terrible idea. If we were talking about deferring to the police about what their powers were when the law was ambiguous, we'd all know that for the terrible idea it is. But replace "police" with the ATF, EPA or FCC and suddenly we don't think it's a bad idea anymore.
Overturning Chevron doesn't mean that agencies don't have regulatory authority or that congress has to write super specific laws. It means that the courts no longer play favorites when it comes to determining the scope of powers when that scope is ambiguous.
> FAA interpreted laws to allow what SpaceX, and the rest of New Space has accomplished. Now what? There weren't omniscient laws passed, so Blue Origin for example, could theoretically tie SpaceX up in court for new launch licenses? And the final call will be made by a law clerk, instead of space industry professionals?
The final call is where it's always been, in the hands of congress. If congress can find the time in their terribly busy schedule to pass a law to rename an outpatient clinic[1], and again [2], and again[3] (and do it another 10 times this session), mandate the all government agencies can only by US made flags [4], or order the US Mint to issue special commemorative coins for the Marine Corps [5], then surely they can find the time to expand and clarify the FAA's scope of authority. Maybe they could do it when they re-authorize the existence of the entire FAA [6]. Don't get me wrong, I'm not specifically calling out congress for having these sorts of minor laws going through their docket. I'm just bothered by this weird idea that somehow we can't expect an entire branch of our government to be functional long enough to clarify its own laws, but still be functional enough to spend its time (and our tax money) on these sorts of minor concerns. And we're so sure we can't expect them to be able to do it, we'd rather allow either of the other two branches to do it for them just so we can get on with things.
This feels like the equivalent of everyone working around the boss' nephew who's constantly spilling his soda in the server racks, and tripping over power cords. And rather than fix that, we just decide to build server rooms that blast hot air at high speeds through everything so soda is dried and whisked away before it does damage, and also by quadruple redundant power supplies and hire a few folks to follow the nephew around plugging the power supplies back in. And everyone knows this is bad, but we're mad at the CFO for not authorizing the installation of a larger AC unit even though servers are overheating because of all the extra heat the power supplies and air blowers are dumping into the room.
[1]: https://www.congress.gov/bill/118th-congress/senate-bill/328...
[2]: https://www.congress.gov/bill/118th-congress/senate-bill/324...
[3]: https://www.congress.gov/bill/118th-congress/house-bill/593/...
[4]: https://www.congress.gov/bill/118th-congress/senate-bill/197...
[5]: https://www.congress.gov/bill/118th-congress/house-bill/1096...
[6]: https://www.congress.gov/bill/118th-congress/house-bill/3935...
[0]: https://ballotpedia.org/SCOTUS_case_reversal_rates_(2007_-_P...
That said, it may be a little harder to shop for a judge than to install a friendly regime at an agency. I am not naive enough to say it can't happen, but it likely would be harder within the confines of the current system.
Congress may be dysfunctional, but that doesn’t magically enumerate more powers to the Supreme Court; the Supreme Court must act within its remit. And as I mentioned in another thread, the federal judiciary is the least defined branch of the three, which given the enumerated nature of the Constitution should mean the federal judiciary should be the most restrained. Except that the Supreme Court has arguably become the most powerful branch due to their self-proclaimed stewardship of the Constitution that neither of the other branches can check or balance.
If the law isn't clear whether a given policy is within the scope of authority granted by congress, determining whether or not it is within the scope is an issue of law.
What's happened is that the Supreme Court is citing a precedent that gave itself extra-constitutional powers to declare things unconstitutional, to permanently wedge itself between the executive and legislative. It's no longer a co-equal branch; a check and balance. It's now a veto. The fact the Supreme Court is behaving this way is very concerning and fundamentally undermines its legitimacy.
The Supreme Court recently reversed the Chevron decision, which, obviously could not be "extra-constitutional" in itself -- if you are right that Chevron was a precedent of judicial restraint, then reversing the restraint just means that at worst the SC is (ab)using its constitutional powers "without restraint" to interpret laws, but it isn't assigning itself "extra-constitutional" powers, and the reversal of the Chevron rule definitely isn't related to declaring things unconstitutional. Again, it's about declaring that the executive branch misinterpreted laws passed by Congress.
I get that people are upset that the un-elected Supreme Court is overriding decisions made by democratically elected institutions, but constitutional law (not quite related here) and administrative law (which is what the Chevron rule was about) can be nuanced and there can be implications that aren't obvious to lay people. The political-affinity of such decisions also tend to cloud judgement.
Yes, Chevron was a level of deference given to agencies (like the EPA) to interpret their remit. If a law says "The EPA shall have authority to regulate emissions", then the EPA would be given deference to interpret what an emission is, and what a regulation is. They are the experts, after all. This was brought into sharp relief when a Supreme Court justice recently, and repeatedly, mistook nitrogen oxide (a greenhouse gas) for nitrous oxide (laughing gas). And by recently, I mean less than two weeks ago.
Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo, the case that overturned Chevron, repeatedly cites Marbury v. Madison, the case where the Supreme Court vastly expanded its own power by, in part, giving itself the extra-constitutional power to declare things unconstitutional. Indeed, some of the arguments in the opinions of the Court is that Chevron, or any deference, is unconstitutional because the Courts have sole discretion to interpret the law, "to say what the law is".
The overturning of Chevron was not an abuse of extra-constitutional power, but it was a decision made from a Court hoisted with their own petards. It means every. single. interpretation. no matter how small, no matter how obviously within the scope of the statute, is now up for litigation in a full-scale trial with all the appeals that will follow. It is so massively disruptive that the Supreme Court would've immediately declared a Major Question if it were anyone else other than the Supreme Court doing it. But I guess the Supreme Court can act without limit and that's fine.
> Again, it's about declaring that the executive branch misinterpreted laws passed by Congress.
Not true. The Supreme Court didn't merely say that the National Marine Fisheries Service misinterpreted a law passed by Congress, it said that Chevron deference is overturned. It was the only thing the Supreme Court held in its decision.
And this decision, as with most others, is very clearly the result of corruption and political alignment: if the composition of the Court had been different, the decision would have been different. This is a direct result of the Trump appointments, of having a conservative supermajority who are there to legislate from the bench. This cannot be ignored.
If you're claiming Marbury v. Madison to be wrong... well, that was an unexpected twist and I must say I've totally misread your comment.
I thought the main thrust of the argument in Loper was s706 of the Administrative Procedure Act though.
It's not so much that Marbury v. Madison is wrong, though I do believe that. It's more that it began the transformation of the Supreme Court into being the go-to way of amending the Constitution. It's just that this particular Court is unusually shameless about it. And their decisions are removing rights, as opposed to decisions like Miranda v. Arizona, or Gideon v. Wainwright.
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Judicial Review for Constitutionality has no bearing in the Constitution. And while it can be argued that it's mentioned within the Federalist Papers, those are not law. The Declaration of Independence is also an extremely important document in US history, but that doesn't grant a legal right to secede, much to Texas' chagrin.
The Constitution says shockingly little about the judiciary in general. Using the National Constitution Centre, Article 3 has 377 words, whereas Article 2 (executive) has 1025 words, and Article 1 (Congress) has 2297 words. And since the Constitution was written to only grant as much power as was considered necessary, unless those 377 words grant carte blanche to the judiciary (they don't), then one might expect the judiciary to be the most restrained branch of the three; its enumerated powers are very few indeed.
Instead, the Supreme Court has arguably become the most powerful branch of government due to its self-proclaimed stewardship of the Constitution. What can the other branches do to reign the Supreme Court in? And I mean in real-terms, not theoretical ability with a politically-harmonious Congress. The honest answer is little to nothing, that the only real solution is a Constitutional Convention, which is unprecedented as none of the 27 (or 18 depending on how you choose to count) Amendments were passed that way.
If the Supreme Court never came to believe that they were stewards of the Constitution, this decision would've never happened. Firstly because there'd be little point or interest in making political appointments to a Court with comparatively little power, so you wouldn't have a bunch of Federalist Society minions on the bench. But secondly, such a Court would feel extremely uneasy about overturning Chevron exactly because it upends the legal framework that Congress and the executive have been willingly operating under for the past several decades.
Don’t get me wrong, I honestly have no stake in the discussion since i’m not an American, and I’m well aware of the controversies in Marbury v Madison, I’m just trying to point out that while your objection to USSC’s fundamental role is well taken, the Loper case is more of an administrative law issue regarding the proper application of Section 706 of the Administrative Procedure Act, which reads:
To the extent necessary to decision and when presented, the reviewing court shall decide all relevant questions of law, interpret constitutional and statutory provisions, and determine the meaning or applicability of the terms of an agency action. [……]
What I was saying, and have attempted to clarify multiple times now, is that Marbury v. Madison [and the other cases that have expanded the Supreme Court's power] has set a culture. You said it yourself: "then reversing the restraint just means that at worst the SC is (ab)using its constitutional powers 'without restraint' to interpret laws". Them discarding judicial restraint is a consequence of such a culture.
I feel like I've emphasised this point enough and it doesn't need further clarification. Cya, I guess.
As you note, the problem is with Executive Orders issued by the president. rlRules issued by federal agencies take years to draft, review, and take effect.... after multiple periods of public review.
Which still hasn't stopped Net Neutrality from being not law, then law, then not law, and now law again in a span of less than 2 decades, without any acts of congress or new laws and all because the President and a couple executive administrators have changed their minds.
Otherwise we just create a vacuum where no regulatory decisions can be made at all. Granted, this does seem to be the goal of the GOP: they seem to like the state of things when the federal government is deadlocked and can't accomplish anything.
Unfortunately fixing all this would likely require constitutional amendments, which is even more impossible than fixing Congress.
Transiting services changes things, those are not exactly peering agreements, it more like a company connecting one university to another, and that traffic was interfered with... usually to simply offload the packets/frames off the network as quickly as possibly, or in other cases to not impact other higher paying customers.... and those packets/frames would transit over a crappy legacy network to be dumpped on the other side with little care for quallity beyond the minimum agreement.
This is why it's so weird for consumers to say they get to have Net Neutrality, because consumers are not normally peering with other consumers, or universities, or whatevery industry. Their just end nodes on the network, and there is fundamentally nothing to be neutral about.
When it comes to netflix complaining about some ISP refusing to peer with them for free, it's also very strange, because there is no mandate to freely peer with anybody. And, when a traffic hogs asks to peer with you (as an ISP) that would certainly entail a higher level of network management or infrastructure. So again, these net neutrality crusaders are very strange when looked at in perspeective of the OIG net neutrality.
Should the internet be a common carrier, in my humble opinion probably yes. But that's orthogonal to the meaning of Net Neutrality. The point is it's an overloaded term that means nothing anymore.
In this context, the net is not neutral if traffic-shaping is applied to some packets and not others, which is the same as what you describe.
Perhaps the circumstances for signing agreements are a lot more complicated than it used to be, but at its heart, it is the same problem.
Why wouldn't the ISP refuse to peer with them, then? This is a genuine question, I don't understand the industry as well as you seem to.
To my understanding, net neutrality doesn't mean "every ISP has to peer with anyone who asks". It just means "you can't treat packets differently based on where they came from".
If it's really so terrible to deal with an ISP that dumps tons of Netflix traffic on to your network, then don't peer with them, problem solved, right? Seems like the reality is that ISPs *do* want to peer with Netflix's provider, they just also would like to have the right to demand additional money directly from Netflix for doing so.
Obviously as operators of the network they have the technical ability to do this - the question is whether it's good for society / economy / etc for them to be allowed to.
The sibling comment has the reason, but you might be interested in the details.
In the old days, ISPs were more heterogeneous.
Say you were ISP A in New York. You had residential customers and business customers. Your business customers would host their websites etc. on your service and some of their customers use ISP B, also in New York. Meanwhile some of ISP B's business customers have customers on ISP A. So ISPs A and B peer at an exchange in New York. Neither of them charges the other because they both need connectivity to the other's customers. (The traffic was often bidirectional but that doesn't really matter here, the one receiving more traffic than they send still has to satisfy their own customers' need to link with the system sending the traffic.)
Meanwhile ISPs C and D are in California. They peer with each other, but they both still need to exchange traffic with ISPs A and B, so all four ISPs pay for transit. The transit company runs fiber across the country and connects them together, for a fee.
Then it turns out that last mile ISPs are awful. Their residential customers are stuck with them, because what choice do they have? One other odious bureaucracy, if that. But not their business customers. You can host a server out of anywhere. So new companies like AWS came in and took the bulk of the business customers. Then those companies got big and built their own transit networks so they could peer with all the local ISPs themselves. The ISPs should be all good with this because then they themselves don't have to pay for wider transit links to carry that traffic. All they have to do is carry it over the last mile to their own customers who are paying them for exactly that.
This is all still completely fine, except for one thing. The likes of AWS and Verizon are competitors. The ISPs want business customers to use their (slower, more expensive) service instead of a big cloud provider or CDN. And the ISPs run video services that compete with Netflix. Meanwhile they have a lock on their residential internet customers, many of which have zero other alternatives, or maybe one which can engage in the same behavior. So if they degrade Netflix or refuse to peer with enough capacity to carry the traffic their own customers request from Netflix, their customers can't switch to another ISP, and it allows the ISP to shake down the peer for money because there is no other way to pass traffic to the customers of that ISP.
The ISPs have a monopoly/oligopoly on last mile internet service and are leveraging it against competitors, hence:
> Because the ISP is also a television service that competes with Netflix. It’s anticompetitive behavior.
I would argue different - we need those folks to have 4+ viable ISP options that will compete for them ferociously, rather than making double sure no one else (but another telco megacorp that can afford the compliance) comes and they're stuck with 1-2 greedy ISPs forever.
If TCP/IP followed the ISO model I would phrase it as "the city is responsible for layer 2, the ISP for layer 3 and content providers for layer 4 and up".
Suppose we did as you say 30 years ago. The government would install phone lines and use DSL to carry internet traffic for competing ISPs.
The performance of DSL was fine 30 years ago, but now it's slow, and no ISP is allowed to install anything faster because in your system the government has a monopoly. The government could upgrade it, but that costs money and getting the government to spend money upgrading infrastructure has been a recurring problem. So now you're stuck with DSL.
Whereas if the government just runs conduit, and then Verizon is using DSL from 30 years ago, Sonic can come in at any time and install fiber. Which spurs Verizon to install fiber because now they have competition.
You want the monopoly to be made as narrow as possible. But the natural monopoly isn't layer 2, it's not even the entirety of layer 1. It's the road, and the high cost of digging the trench. Once you have the conduit, the cost of having a hundred ISPs string fiber through it is minor, so doing that should be open to competition.
That's a major point of my analogy -- having the road system being anything but a monopoly is stupid, yet the road system has largely destroyed the railway companies which are not a monopoly.
They do a pretty crappy job of it, in general. The relevant metric here would be congestion, i.e. are they maintaining adequate capacity to prevent people from being stuck in traffic?
There are a lot of arguments people will make for how they should be preventing traffic congestion (e.g. add lanes vs. facilitate more housing construction so people aren't driving as far), but on the question of whether they've succeeded in preventing traffic congestion, the answer is no.
They also spend rather a lot of money on it.
> That's a major point of my analogy -- having the road system being anything but a monopoly is stupid, yet the road system has largely destroyed the railway companies which are not a monopoly.
But the main reason for this is politics. Trucker unions see rail as competition so they lobby for laws that keep people using trucks. Rail has a significantly lower cost per ton but projects to build new rail lines etc. are opposed because they would compete with truck routes.
Something like this, although I'm not sure this is a complete list - I'm not particularly aware about intricacies of starting an ISP in the US so there's probably something I'm missing.
That’s all that’s required to be Neutral. What other kind of expensive “compliance” are you talking about?
I should’ve been more clear, as I mean that NN imposes expensive compliance. I heard that there are various barriers to running an ISP (like exclusivity agreements - TIL FCC had actually prohibited those in 2022, hope this stands unturned), different from Net Neutrality, and that they are the real issue, while NN is less relevant long-term.
As for the NN itself - I can see the need and even argue in favor of it (as a band-aid), but it’s not a solution and it becomes unnecessary (and possibly even harmful) long-term, if that future has a presence of a really good competition. I’m saying “harmful” only because it may theoretically be weaponized at genuinely benign (or at least honestly meant so) QoS situations (which is crappy, but in such cases the choices are typically between working for most and not working at all - nobody does this stuff for fun).
Until one ISP wins, and then we're back at square one.
Seriously, I've seen it myself - if some ISP starts to do shitty things to their customers, if the market is healthy (a competition is possible and anti-monopoly agencies watch out for collusions, etc.) - things get fixed just like that. A contender comes, says "hey folks, we have simply decent service with no BS" and people sign up in droves.
Please don't get me wrong, though. I totally understand the present-day US-specific issues. Net Neutrality seems to be a necessity, but it must be treated as a temporary measure at best, always mentioned with a large footnote to it. It is not a solution - it's a band-aid until the wound is allowed to heal (if it is allowed, and NN by itself _doesn't_ heal anything), so such solutions should really focus on ensuring that they're not hindering any grassroot competition but rather welcome them. And specifically in the US (which is way less dense than most places) some push towards community fiber projects may be a necessity.
Need just one of those for every place, and relaxed zoning laws between such IXes (where ISPs come to play). That assuming that those singleton last-mile networks are ran by the people for the people, in a low corruption environment (which I believe the US is, at least on a smaller-scale levels). If democracy doesn’t fix unfairness I’m not sure what can do.
so, yeah, i'd like to see this notion quashed.
How many of those do you think are going to be profitable?
This fiber should be collectively owned by the property owners, with legally required peering and network policy voting rights for whoever lives on the properties (aka ensuring that landlord can't lock their tenant(s) down to any particular ISPs or impose a crappy network policy on them).
Then careful planning and relaxed permit processes for running lines between IXes, so ISPs can come and build the actual backbones, offer their own services and so on.
The issue, as I remember it being presented decades ago, is that both the ISP and Netflix were using a common carrier or an internet exchange. The ISP is noticing that much of the inbound traffic from this peering point originates from Netflix.
They approach Netflix and say "we are going to actively deprioritize your traffic unless you enter in to an exclusive direct peering agreement with us, where we set the terms, and you will pay extra to have all of this traffic delivered reliably on our network."
Allowing this opens the door for the ISP to do this to anyone it thinks it extract extra fees from. Further, since many of these ISP networks also own content delivery networks and some eventually just became content producers themselves, all on top of a natural infrastructure monopoly, the arrangement were less likely to benefit consumers and more likely to create permanent illegal monopolies.
We've tried to solve this problem in multiple ways. The peering "net neutrality" would be one. The forcing ISPs to act as "common carriers" and allow third parties to operate on top of their networks the way we did with DSL would be another.
> But that's orthogonal to the meaning of Net Neutrality.
Perhaps the original case was always just subset of the overall problem?
An ISP selling Internet access to regular folks sells access to the entire Internet. To do that the ISP connect its network to the rest of the internet via a transit connection.
All your traffic goes through that unless you peer with other networks. When you peer with them you send less through your paid transit connection. So both parties benefit when they interconnect so long as they send a decent amount of traffic back and forth.
There's no such thing as a bandwith hog network. Netflix sends traffic to your network because your users asked for it and they pay you to deliver that traffic.
The notion that traffic ratios have anything to do with whether it makes sense to peer and whether someone should pay as long been debunked in the internet context. Those ideas are just remnants from the phone network which operates on a very different economic model, the one that make phone calls cost dollars per minute.
Here's a very clear presentation from 2005 from a NANOG meeting explaining exactly why you're wrong.
https://drpeering.net/white-papers/The-Folly-Of-Peering-Rati...
And you're also wrong but what neutrality is.
It's simply the principle that the network that you pay to get online doesn't get to interfere with what you do online. That encompasses lots of behaviors including interconnection.
> The notion that traffic ratios have anything to do with whether it makes sense to peer and whether someone should pay as long been debunked in the internet context.
Do note how the comment does not mention peering ratios. An ISP being a "hog" does not need to be determined by the peering ratio.
> https://drpeering.net/white-papers/The-Folly-Of-Peering-Rati...
This is a very good article, but it does not directly address the above. It is very specific to arguments about peering ratio. If you have no opinions on peering ratios, you have to read between the lines to get opinions on the original comment.
In Argument #2 counter argument #1: "This is a valid observation ... This is not however an argument for using Peering traffic ratios to restrict Peering."
> And you're also wrong but what neutrality is.
Just saying they are wrong is not helpful. You provide no evidence that "Net Neutrality" has not shifted in meaning since the 90s.
The first FCC work about it was a speech by then FCC chairman Michael Powell in February 2004 at the The silicon flat irons where he outlined the four freedoms, which included the right to use whatever application you want, access whatever content you want, and use whatever device you want.
In other words net neutrality as a concept that people talked about did not exist in the '90s.
https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=Net+neutrality...
Saying net neutrality shifted in meaning since the 1990s is nonsensical
It still is important, but at this point there are so much more important issues at stake which shouldn't even be issues. Does educating voters about issues like this even matter in 2024 if there won't be a vote any more by 2028?
I'm tired.
So, net neutrality (and other policy) is going to be forever stuck in this loop of constant arguing over law that was written during the time of fax machines. With one court stopping it, another court reversing the stoppage, the next court reversing the reversing of the stoppage, another case happening with more clever lawyers and so the next court reverses the previous reverse, and then on appeal that reverse gets reversed, and then a random judge pulls out some wording from a 1807 law and reverses again, and this is basically going to be what counts as governance for the rest of my life.
EDIT: Mods, feel free to destroy this thread--I can't delete it anymore. I try to talk about the inability to resolve Net Neutrality and it just turns into another unproductive flame war. Sigh.
> Congress has been effectively gridlocked and do-nothing for at least 35 years--all of my adult life.
Gridlock is a design feature. It literally means there isn't consensus on whatever the topic may be. Do you really want a government that rams through unpopular policies constantly, then 4-6 years later whiplashes back again? What people often express as "congress not doing their job" is in reality "they aren't passing the policies I want!".
> The executive branch's powers are being quickly eroded by SCOTUS.
OP means "restored" instead of "eroded". POTUS was never supposed to be as powerful as they have become. Executive Orders are the worst way to run a country, yet we've had several presidents in a row that have abused EO's to get whatever they want done... only for the next person in office to undo it all with the stroke of a pen.
The only take-away one can have here is we need better civics classes in our schools...
It's congress' job to write a budget, and it's the president's job to accept or veto it, after-which it's congresses job to amend or override the veto. The dance you're referring to is all posturing to compel one of the sides of that equation to compromise. In the end, they always compromise.
To be clear - it is not congress' job to write a budget the president will accept. Congress is a separate branch of government and is as-powerful as the president. This process was designed to compel the two branches to compromise with each other - and it works (admittedly after a dog and pony show).
"Shutting down the government" is a stunt designed to get people riled up - and it apparently works.
Reality is there is not consensus for those policies. It's that simple.
I promise you, there aren't any congress critters that are actually trying to destroy the country. They are each doing what they believe is best, and what they were elected to do... even if personally we don't favor those viewpoints.
Even the ones who spend July 4 in Moscow, actively support insurrection, and put their hands on the Constitution while swearing to uphold the Bible?
The system wasn't designed to tolerate an entire party of saboteurs.
> The system wasn't designed to tolerate an entire party of saboteurs.
I'm missing something here, because it seems you are the flame war you speak ill of, and when I asked you to tone down the rhetoric you throw your hands up and say you're not going to participate in said flame war.
You are right though - it is impossible to have a productive conversation when one person is determined to only believe their flavor of propaganda and not find any common ground.
I said it elsewhere in thread: "Sit down with a friend that has the opposite political viewpoints and discuss some hard issues for an hour. There's a 0% chance the two sides don't find common ground..."
But first things first-- one ought to have an overview of the specification for the form of government, why it was designed that way, and how it's been implemented over the past 200 years. The OP who saw gridlock as an unexpected and undesirable attribute of the federal budget process appears to not yet possess this knowledge.
I'd say knowing things is a recommended dependency for questioning them. Otherwise the changes you think you want to see might as well be chosen by a random number generator. (But then at least random() isn't subject to filter bubbles!)
The Constitution provides a process for amending it, and that process has been used twenty-seven times. That is the proper process for "acting for changes" if you think they are needed.
That is the process for amending the Constitution, which neither is, nor should be, the only way to effect change. It is surely a ludicrous claim that our system of government has changed only 27 times. I doubt anyone even believes that the amendments record the 27 most consequential changes!
Further, there is absolutely no way that I, or any individual (including any individual in government), can get a Constitutional amendment passed alone, so either there are steps between individual action and amending the Constitution, or there might as well not be an amendment process.
Sure, if you can "effect change" by following the processes described in the Constitution as it is, you don't have to amend it. But my point is that much, if not most, of what the US government currently does is not following the processes described in the Constitution as it is--those are just being ignored, and nobody even talks about having to amend the Constitution to, for example, allow Congress to delegate legislative power to Executive branch agencies.
Is it really posturing if the government actually shuts down and workers get furloughed as has happened in recent memory?
>To be clear - it is not congress' job to write a budget the president will accept.
Congress could certainly write a budget the president has to accept, but of course everything these days is done along party lines.
One side of the chamber has complete contempt for the idea of an administrative state. Not being able to pass a budget and shutting the whole thing down would be great in their minds.
Well, they think so, at least. My family's got a few of those people who would probably feel differently once the EPA stops being able to regulate the emissions of the coal-fired power plant that's upwind of their $600k+ home. But until that actually happens it gives one side of the chamber a "dysfunctional government entity enforcing job-killing regulations" to rage against.
This current GOP led circus known as the 118th Congress is widely considered one of the most (if not THE most) unproductive, dysfunctional Congresses in history.
And when all they do is sit around and whine about how one side is "weaponizing" the government (ignoring the fact that the side in question is them) or Socialism this or "Biden bad", its really not hard to understand why.
https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2024/apr/03/donna-braz...
Judging a legislature by how many bills it passes is like judging programming productivity by lines of code produced, and has the same issue that Edsger Dijkstra identified with the latter: it should be lines spent, not produced. "The current wisdom is so foolish as to book that count on the wrong side of the ledger."
None of that changes the basic principle that the US government was supposed to uphold, namely, that the role of government is not to solve whatever problem someone thinks should be solved, but to protect everyone's basic rights and make sure there is a level legal playing field, and stopping there.
The problem is that the US government has gone far beyond that, the current regulatory megastate being only one aspect. To the extent the US government is dysfunctional, it's not because it doesn't do enough; it's because it does far, far too much.
Net neutrality is a case in point: it's only necessary in the first place to undo the effects of all the government-granted privileges that ISPs have. In a US that was run according to the way the US was supposed to be run, ISPs would have to compete in a free market and none of them would have monopoly privileges over particular areas, and none of them would have been able to get huge government grants supposedly to build infrastructure and then pocket the money instead. In that US there would be no need for net neutrality because nobody wants to buy Internet service that gets throttled depending on what website you go to. The only reason ISPs can even think of offering such a non-service is that they have monopolies granted by the government.
Where is this said in the constitution ? Or any papers that isn’t the Federalist papers?
> Net neutrality is a case in point: it's only necessary in the first place to undo the effects of all the government-granted privileges that ISPs have. In a US that was run according to the way the US was supposed to be run, ISPs would have to compete in a free market and none of them would have monopoly privileges over particular areas, and none of them would have been able to get huge government grants supposedly to build infrastructure and then pocket the money instead. In that US there would be no need for net neutrality because nobody wants to buy Internet service that gets throttled depending on what website you go to. The only reason ISPs can even think of offering such a non-service is that they have monopolies granted by the government.
The only means in which these infrastructures can be built is either: Companies with enough capital to do so without governmental assistance, the government, or not at all.
The later is at odds with your first point (unless you believe the restriction not to apply to state and local governments) and the first leads to the same issues since competition is impossible for an eventual finite resource
"Protect everyone's basic rights and make sure there is a level playing field" is mainly in the Bill of Rights. (Some aspects of it are in the original Constitution.)
"Stopping there" means the government only doing the things the Constitution specifically says it can do. For example, it would mean Congress only passing laws that are actually within what Article I, Section 8 says Congress can do. And it would mean the other branches of government holding Congress to that. It would also mean Congress not delegating legislative power to Executive branch agencies; Article I says all legislative power is vested in Congress. It doesn't allow Congress to delegate it to any other body.
Of course we have long since stopped holding the US government to such standards. But that just means we've stopped holding the government accountable for actually obeying the Constitution.
> the first leads to the same issues since competition is impossible for an eventual finite resource
Not at all. If a local municipality builds, say, common use fiber optic infrastructure that the municipality owns, sure, that's technically a finite resource, but it's still perfectly possible for the municipality to make companies compete to provide services using that infrastructure. There is nothing forcing them to give monopoly privileges to any one company--except that in the US as it actually is, ISPs sue municipalities into oblivion when they try it, on the grounds that higher levels of government (mainly state although there are Federal fingers in the pie as well) have granted them exclusive access to that particular region.
You know what? No. If a right to privacy doesn't exist because it's not explicitly spelled out, and "secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects" gets shaved so thin you can see through it, then vibes don't count and neither does "some aspects".
I'm not sure how this relates to what I was saying.
From the preamble of the Declaration of Independence:
>We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.—That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, ...
Emphasis mine.
Which country are you referring to? Because it's not the US.
This snide put-down has no place here. Please review the HN guidelines.
We need better civics lessons in schools. The evidence is prevalent right here in this thread. Too few people actually understand government - and that's a serious issue. An issue that enables the masses to be manipulated and controlled by political junkies. People need to be better educated on government in general.
Speaking as a Brit, it's really not as bad as you make it sound.
In the UK system there is basically only one elected body - parliament - and if we elect a party that pledges to X, they have the power to X - meaning they can be held to account if they fail to deliver it.
And generally that means X gets done - that sounds pretty democratic to me. It has the downside that if people vote for Brexit you get Brexit, which ain't great, but I much prefer it to if people vote for Brexit and we don't get Brexit.
Whereas in the US system, as far as I can tell, you can elect a party that pledges to do X, then gridlock blocks them from doing it, then everyone just says "oh yeah that's understandable" and re-elects them?
As a Brit, it seems obvious to me that the legality of abortion is a political question. Isn't the whole point of the political process to have a national conversation, figure out what the public want, then representatives to represent that? The fact that America made this obviously political decision by... just handing the decision to a load of unelected judges? Then spent about 50 years not legislating on the matter, not amending the constitution, but instead giving judges the role of unelected pseudo-politicians who rule for life? And the legality hinges on when these elderly judges die?
To me that doesn't sound like a system that was designed at all.
The US doesn't have the same concepts of coalition building as many other types of governments do (coalitions being a way for many smaller parties to compromise with each other, reach consensus, and pass policy).
In the US, if you don't quite fit into one of the two major parties, then your "say" is effectively nullified. This is why the two parties have a huge range of voices - but are compelled to rally behind a singular set of views (usually their presidential candidate's) in order to gain power and accomplish anything.
For example - Bernie fans have been snuffed a few times, and their voices effectively silenced from the mainstream discussion. Even if you disagree with those viewpoints, they should get representation. Coalition building would force their voices to be heard in a meaningful way via compromises with other similar-but-not-quite-the-same parties.
Another example - Democrats held a primary election and chose their presidential candidate, which later dropped out of the race. Now Democrats are being told who they must vote for otherwise they will lose power. Many Democrats will hold their nose and vote for the new Democrat candidate, despite not liking the candidate or their policies, because they don't really have another choice. The wide range of views held within the Democrat party will be boiled down into whatever the candidate's views are - everyone else loses their "voice". Many smaller, more focused parties would help solve this issue as well.
In short, the US needs more political parties.
The House is a coalition government in everything but name.
For the last 100 years, every elected prime minister has been either Labour or Conservative. Occasionally at the head of a wartime coalition or propped up by a minor party, but far more often not and always from one of the two main parties.
> the party that's been taken over and lobotomized by radical extremist
> won't be needing to hold our noses as we vote for Harris out of a sense of overwhelming conservatism
> I don't agree with the majority of her political views
> at this point in history you can consider me a single issue voter in favor of bureaucracy
You have unintentionally proven every single point I've raised in this entire thread. I could not have imagined a more perfect demonstration of what is wrong with US politics. The worst part - you probably felt vindicated writing this, failing to realize this behavior is exactly the problem.
Gridlock is a design misfeature.
> Do you really want a government that rams through unpopular policies constantly, then 4-6 years later whiplashes back again?
Yes. Because people will realize the next the Other People get in they'll repeal anything that (they think) is truly awful, so there's not much passing it in the first place. Or if there's anything that is (thought to be) 'only' kind of bad it will be tweaked/corrected.
A negative feedback loop tends to increase stability.
Ted Kennedy was dying of cancer at the time and couldn't come in to vote. Then he died and got replaced with a temporary Democratic replacement which didn't have that availability issue, then the special election occurred and a Republican took the seat.
it's a see saw of nobody does anything but blame their systemic rival
either USA party system gets more than two parties because they're on a steady stalemate, like other poster was saying, 35 years of gridlocked congress because of two way ties.
or look at china, my prediction is that soon enough a ballsy european monarchy is gonna go full-blown one-party democracy or something clever like that
It's far easier when your allies are long term. Which functions a lot like a single party even if you don't call it that.
After that they lost one seat, and the Republicans explicitly made it their mission to ensure that not a single thing got passed.
Harry Reid opposed filibuster reform at the time, which I think was a mistake but there might not have been enough votes in the Senate to pass any reforms.
Also, the "blue dog" Democrats were a pretty big block in the House, and would have opposed a lot of things that would be considered mainstream Democratic positions now.
The person with the 60th vote has a ton of policy influence. This is why we don't have a public option, or at least an awfully public example of how "having 60 votes" during that short window didn't get much done.
Not that I want to apologize for the democrats or anything, I just agree that no one has had a meaningful 60-vote majority in my lifetime.
Although, because little kids nowadays have access to smartphones with social media, I suspect that 7 and 9 year olds are now paying more attention to politics than they used to.
There wasn’t (and still isn’t, sadly) political appetite for ending the Senate filibuster, so reform is limited to Byrd rule nonsense.
The ~5 months Democrats had an a functional supermajority under Obama in 2009/10 was used to get the ACA passed as written.
---
People like new interpretations that give the outcome they like (Obergefell vs Hodges) but not the ones that don't.
Funny, I'd say the executive branch has been gaining more and more power, and the Supreme Court has allowed it. Granted, I was born in 2001 so...
I agree with your sentiment, though.
Sure, the executive has a lot of power to exercise military power without needing Congressional approval and minimal oversight. The courts have been happy to help expand and uphold that power. But power to regulate industry and other internal questions has generally been eroded since the 80s, and in accelerated fashion with Trump's further entrenchment of a more extreme right-wing ideology on the court.
And it's going to get worse as the voting populace becomes more filled with non-citizens.
When you register to vote, what does it take to get registered?
Easily stolen documents and drivers licenses that don't require proof of citizenship .
If you haven't noticed the weak security then there isn't any hope for you.
you have no proof besides what scaremongerers tell you
why would anyone risk commiting a crime for voting? there's no personal gain for voting.
From the governor of Virginia himself. This is the tip of the iceberg. Keep telling yourself lies.
The 117th Congress was very productive, particularly taking into account the scale of its acts [1]. The 118th was one of the most bipartisan in memory.
We’ve spent the GDP of medium-sized countries on infrastructure and onshore fabrication initiatives. What is the benchmark for doing something?
[1] https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2024/apr/03/donna-braz...
To say congress hasn’t accomplished anything in your adult life is to be in denial or intentionally uneducated about accomplishments. While the ACA for instance isn’t perfect, it was a major accomplishment.
Legalising gay marriage by statute isn’t significant [1]?
Or massively subsidising the shift to clean energy and EVs?
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Respect_for_Marriage_Act
Hardly. They've passed the least number of laws than any previous congress. Over the past 40 years the number of bills produced every year has fallen from around 600/year to 300/year.
> What is the benchmark for doing something?
What's baffling to me is that instead of holding committees, listening to expert testimony, then passing good laws, they're actually eager to go back to the previous unworkable status quo wherin administrative agencies just make up laws as they go.
I amended my comment between when you read it and posted yours. The number of bills is small. But their scope is massive, particularly across the 117th and 118th.
> instead of holding committees, listening to expert testimony, then passing good laws, they're actually eager to go back to the previous unworkable status quo wherin administrative agencies just make up laws as they go
What are you basing this on? The Capital is buzzing with committees investigating all manner of things.
Are they just upwards wealth transfers disguised as bills or do they actually change administrative law? What's the "massive" part about them, exactly?
> The Capital is buzzing with committees investigating all manner of things.
This is easy to say and nearly impossible to quantify. I can only approach it with the obvious questions: "Then why do they want the Chevron doctrine back?" and "Why would such buzzing activity result in fewer bills?"
Codifying same-sex marriage. Hundreds of billions on re-framing our transport system. (Like every major airport in the country is being renovated and expanded.)
What is your standard for meaningful legislation?
> easy to say and nearly impossible to quantify
It’s trivial to quantify; the minutes are public. The people I know on the Hill are busy as ever. The do-nothing months of total gridlock (or the speakership fight) were exceptions.
> I can only approach it with the obvious questions: "Then why do they want the Chevron doctrine back?
It was the status quo and made their job easier. With the CRA, the Congress never actually ceded any power. Just initiative. In any case, there is no legislative push to reinstate Chevron by statute.
Congress is lazy. But it’s powerful, and holds its own against the Court.
Replacing definitions. Important but not "massive."
> Hundreds of billions on re-framing our transport system.
They spend hundreds of billions most years. It's part of the FY budget, is it not? They included a few billion dollars for additional grant projects.
> (Like every major airport in the country is being renovated and expanded.)
Like ATP. Are you referencing ATP? It's a grant program.
> What is your standard for meaningful legislation?
Look at all the places where the lack of a Chevron doctrine is being decried as a tragedy. Perhaps, start there?
> It’s trivial to quantify; the minutes are public.
That they meet I'm sure is a recorded fact. You said they were "buzzing." Compared to previous years? With more than just reauthorizations?
> With the CRA, the Congress never actually ceded any power. Just initiative.
Once the initiative is taken through a court and precedent some measure of power is lost until congress finds the initiative again. Which is not always a guarantee given it's political structure and lengthy vacations.
> there is no legislative push to reinstate Chevron by statute.
Per the article: "Last week, Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass) introduced a bill in the upper house seeking to codify the Chevron Doctrine under a law duly voted by Congress."
No. This was new spending.
> Look at all the places where the lack of a Chevron doctrine is being decried as a tragedy
You’re comparing talk to appropriations.
> You said they were "buzzing." Compared to previous years?
On par with the last decade.
> Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass) introduced a bill in the upper house seeking to codify the Chevron Doctrine
One, this is talk, not legislation. Two, is your claim that there has been no productive Congress since Chevron?
You're arguing that considering the scale of the bills, they were productive. That's fair; because of increased partisanship, they load more things into huge bills to be voted on. But, your link doesn't support this argument.