Net neutrality is half-dead: Court strikes down FCC’s anti-blocking rules

Of course, such a decision would itself be challenged, with ISPs arguing that what they do is not "telecommunications" as defined in the Telecommunications Act (I'm not saying this argument would be correct, but its not an uncontroversial position that the conflict between the order and the law can be remedied by simply reframing the order without a change in the law.)

- Allow for consolidation of radio stations (and thus, the meteoric rise of ClearChannel)

- Allow for consolidation of telecommunications companies (and thus, almost the major phone service companies are the progeny of the Baby Bells)

It also did some very good things, like requiring entrants into the data services market to interconnect with incumbents.

But it also allowed telecoms to rip off the USGOV and taxpayers in extraordinary lengths (see previous discussion on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7021057 )

The DC Court handles all of these big, Federal cases that make the top of HN. A President's impact on the DC Court is almost as important as their impact on the Supreme Court.

Note that Silberman's dissent was because Silberman thought the whole Open Internet Order should have been struck down (including the disclosure requirements), while Rogers and Tatel only thought that that the requirements they characterize as "common carrier" requirements (non-discrimination and non-blocking) should be struck down.

So this wasn't "Clinton appointees vote against FCC, Reagan appointee backs FCC".

Of course, I'm not at all surprised to see a News Corp outlet overlook a critical distinction that is inconvenient for the propaganda interests of the Republican Party.

The D.C. Circuit's docket consists very disproportionately of highly complex regulatory appeals, which take much more time than simpler types of cases. These cases are not only often very factually complex, but of a nature that leaves more scope for appellate review. Roughly speaking, when a circuit court reviews the factual findings or discretionary actions of a lower court, it does so deferentially. E.g. an appellate court reviews sentences imposed by a district court only for abuse of discretion. However, a circuit court reviews the legal conclusions of a lower court from scratch (de novo). Regulatory appeals in the D.C. Circuit are much more likely to turn on complex issues of legal interpretation that the appellate court must review from scratch, than on factual disputes that the appellate court need only review for clear error.

As an aside, why do you say that the DC Circuit is "underworked" instead of saying that the 11th Circuit is "overworked"?

So there's one and only one highly regulated cable provider, and one and only one uverse , not sure about the WISP thing...

Let some government cost accountants loose on these incumbents' books. Then let me buy my capacity from a company that isn't trying to screw me vertically nor horizontally and that doesn't e.g. conscript me into a basic cable TV package when all I want is Internet.

Perhaps then, as well, we would be able to actually segregate infrastructure development and maintenance costs and be sure we are getting what we are paying for. E.g. if my cost goes up, it's because I'm actually getting more in return. At a time when wholesale bandwidth costs have been halving year upon year (at least, as of a couple of years ago), the near doubling of my monthly bill over the past few years is sorely in need of some -- independent and measurable and demonstrable -- justification.

Finally, Internet is no longer a luxury. It's a necessity. With often only a single distributor in many locations, they are effectively a common carrier.

After all the bad behaviour on the part of these companies, I have ZERO sympathy left for them. They've abused their positions. It's time for that abuse to end.

P.S. Yeah, I'm pissed. Probably not the best position from which to comment.

This month's Crapcast bill contained another circa 5.5 % increase -- for nothing. It's been well less than a year since their last increase, and inflation is running far under that figure.

As for build-out costs: I notice when my neighbours (that's one family of two adults) are home on weekends, because my one, rather occasional Netflix stream drops from quality 4 to 3 or not infrequently to 2. They aren't doing diddly to improve capacity/delivery in my neighbourhood.

One company maintains and lays cables, other provides connectivity to said cables etc. Which means that you could buy connectivity to internet from various suppliers depending on your needs.

It's still bad, and we still have a relatively high barrier to entry, but it is possible. There exist for instance a number of little non-profit providers (not among the big 4), who make do by sub-leasing part of the big one's network.

There are still problems of the sort you're talking about (like "it's not us, it's the other company your data goes through"), but as people are now able to cut themselves off completely from the historical operator, their actual provider has to (and do) take responsibility, and fix the line.

As an aside, it is somewhat written in our law that to be called an "internet connection", it must provide a public IP address, and the user must be able to do whatever she wants. There are violations (Orange blocks the outgoing SMTP port), but it mostly holds: users are all allowed to host servers —though asymmetric bandwidth makes this impractical. Note that mobile connections are called "data" deals, not "internet" deals.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Paramount_Pic....

Consider a simple ad supported news site. It may run ads hosted on hundreds of sources. When the page loads, the browser requests individual images from different sources. If some are not paying the verizon tax or not paying enough, the page loads slower or with broken content. This is pretty foundational stuff. It really isn't all that different from having different audio quality in a phone call depending if the local exchange operator was paid extra or not.

As the result, it seems to me that classification and the additional regulation is warranted.

The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has nothing to do with this.

The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) does.

> Everybody loses in the short term because the future is uncertain.

The incumbent carriers that had already been instituting practices that violate the at least the non-discrimination provision clearly benefit in the short term.

[1] Though, I think small sites would just engage in collective bargaining of sorts.

The fact that it doesn't work that way already is largely just an accident of history, and I don't know if its necessary to keep that status quo artificially. Small entities are just in a bad leverage position, especially when their "product" depends heavily on someone else's very expensive and hard to reproduce infrastructure. Look at the app market. The people selling the infrastructure (Apple, Samsung) make all the money, because lots of people can write apps but very few can build cell phones. That's the natural state of things.