The fun tradeoff here is since the courts determined the feds can't regulate it, the states are allowed to instead, with California and New York already taking the lead, and are much more consumer oriented than anything that could be done federally.
If the court had held otherwise, the Federal common carrier requirements would have preempted any common carrier duties imposed by California and New York. Since today the 6th Circuit says the FCC does not have that power (because broadband providers offer information services and not telecommunications services), California and New York are welcome to impose those duties within their state boundaries (as long as they don't step on any other areas of Federal preemption).
This is where I highly disagree with the opinions of this court decision. My ISP is absolutely providing me telecommunications services, not information service.
For practically all the "information" I receive, my ISP is not "generating, acquiring, storing, transforming, processing, retrieving, utilizing, or making available information via telecommunications". That maybe sometimes I might land on some webpage hosted by my ISP is inconsequential to the services I am paying for, that's not the service I'm paying for. In the end I'm paying for them to give me the ability to telecommunicate with a server hosted by someone else which then generates, processes, retrives, that information.
My ISP is not the information service which lets me post here. Hacker News is an information service acquiring, storing, transforming, processing, and retrieving the data I request. My ISP is only used for me to talk to the Hacker News webserver.
https://www.congress.gov/104/plaws/publ104/PLAW-104publ104.p...
I truly don't understand how anyone who can even vaguely understand how ISPs work and reads this law could say ISPs aren't telecommunications providers and are instead information service providers. Other than maybe big bags of cash that makes people's reading comprehension a little loose.
It most certainly does; the statutory definition is that there can be no information service without an underlying telecommunication service. So how could any court rule that ISPs who own the wires coming into my house are providing purely an information service and no part of their business can be regulated as a telecommunication service?
Does it? We have definitions for "information service" that clearly fit running a server, and "telecommunication service" defined in a way that clearly fits carrying data over wires, unmodified, and some potential gray area in between that might include looking up information to figure out how to correctly route other information.
You've repeatedly emphasized the "offering a capability" angle, and so does the court. On the subject of capabilities offered by ISPs, the court says:
> they offer a “feature[] permitting” consumers to stream videos stored on Netflix’s servers, [...] the “ability” to purchase gifts from information stored on Amazon’s servers, [...] the “capacity” to view posts stored on Facebook’s servers, [...] and the “power” to conduct a search using Google’s servers
But the court pretends that this piece of capability (feature/ability/capacity/power) being offered by ISPs (as opposed to Netflix, Amazon, et. al. who actually run the servers) is not exactly the telecommunications service the FCC seeks to regulate as a telecommunications service. The court appears to believe that merely being able to use the word "capability" to describe ISPs (while implicitly lumping together functions performed by ISPs with those performed by Netflix, et. al.) is sufficient to make ISPs not telecommunications services.
This is a whole thread of people over and over and over again saying that the courts should read the 1996 Telecommunications Act in light of what telecommunications looks like in 2025 (or what they, 2025 practitioners, believe a 1996 practitioner should have thought --- as a former 1996 practitioner my response to that is: LOL). That's exactly what the post-Chevron courts are not going to do.
So far as I know, this distinction made it to SCOTUS just once (and: in the 21st century!), and when it did, the court said: the Internet is like Prodigy, CompuServe, and AOL.
But broadband ISPs today occupy the place of the Bell system, plus some of the lower layers of AOL, and broadband ISPs do not occupy the place of the higher layers of AOL (the search engines, content publishing, etc.).
AOL without any means for your modem to reach AOL's modem is roughly similar to the World Wide Web without any ISP to carry your packets to and from somebody else's servers. (And I've long believed we need stronger regulations to make it clear that ISPs are responsible for providing more than just WWW access.)
Do you somehow think that the overturning of Chevron means that courts do not need to figure out where the role of Google Fiber today fits into the categories defined in 1996?
And yet, the court seems to have rendered a decision. They don't seem to have declared that the question is not theirs to answer.
My service agreement with my ISP explicitly says it is a circuit.
And also the argument isn't if it's an Internet service or a telecommunications service, it's if it's an information service or telecommunications service. Quit throwing your own common parlance terminology here and use the language in the law and the courts please!
Now people sign up for their ISPs because they offered the better price/throughput/stability math, or often they were the only one reasonably available. Practically nobody signs up because one provider has better email or better newsgroups.
This was going to happen regardless, T-Mobile basically threw throttling in their face and they had no choice but to pretend it was fine, and they’ll be doing the same with home internet soon enough (followed by CableCos in non-competitive areas).
Unlike terrestrial internet, you can’t just build more capacity with over the air data transmissions. You have to have more agressive network and QOS management for cellular networks.
Besides that, the true argument for net neutrality was not to unfairly help or hurt businesses. T-mobile 0 rated all of the streaming services that participated in the program and were not asking for money for it. Even though they didn’t advertise it, if you dug deep enough, you could find the list including some porn sites.
Someone commented on HN a while back that they were able to get their 50 stream non profit 0 rated.
I don't think anyone can seriously argue that the internet is a "state resource", by any reasonable measure. Stuff like this is exactly why federal steps in and established communication standards. because when communication is fractured by the rules of 50 states, we aren't really "united" anymore.
Nevermind the monopolies with ISPs and that a federal anti-trust would solve 50 problems at once rather than states taking their time to try and clean their backyard.
>T-Mobile basically threw throttling in their face and they had no choice but to pretend it was fine
and you don't see why this is a problem on a national level that needs proper standards, instead of a state free for all?
True, but that was also when riding on a horse was the fastest way over land and a much much greater proportion of stuff was within state-lines.
In some alternate universe where the telegraph had already been invented, all those states may have entered into some sort of special telegram compact, and our "how it's supposed to work in the first place" would be rather different.
Actually, in this universe something similar did happen: The federal government was explicitly authorized to run a nationwide postal service, which stands out in a Constitution that was otherwise mostly about what it couldn't do.