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> This whole net neutrality debate has been going on long before Obama started his first term of presidency, why wait until you are almost out of the White House to act upon something as important as this?

Appointing pro-neutrality Democrats to the FCC is doing something about it, and the Commission majority has been pro-neutrality and actively seeking pro-neutrality regulations for quite some time.

(I suppose he could have done more to find pro-neutrality non-Democrats to appoint to the other seats given the no-more-than-three-members-from-one-party rule that Congress has imposed on the FCC.)

> Either way, if Obama can get a bill deeming internet to be classified as a utility within the next two years, maybe he will leave behind a legacy that we talk of in the years to come

Title II classification is an FCC decision. Legislation could direct (or prevent) it, but that's not Obama isn't seeking legislative action.

> More interesting is Hillary Clinton's position on net neutrality, since polls make her the most likely winner of the next elections at this point.

2016 polls at this point are meaningless. If you looked at 2008 polls in 2006, they said the same thing -- and Barack Obama won. If you looked at 2004 polls in 2002, Lieberman was certainly not a shoe-in to win the general election, but the most likely to win the Democratic nomination at least, which he still didn't due (even with his Joementum).

In 1998, such polls would have accurately predicted who would get the most votes in the 2000 Presidential election, but still wouldn't have predicted who the next President would be.

About all Presidential polls just after the preceding midterm election are good for telling you is who the media is going to spend disproportionate time talking about for the much of next two years.

> "My question to Obama is: why now?"

My guess? The FCC is probably close to deciding and Obama knows which way they're leaning. So he wants to build some distance between the DNC and the FCC, before the FCC inevitably announces they're going to let the ISPs do what they will.

If Obama says nothing, Net Neutrality will continue to be a sub-headline issue even if/after the FCC allows it to die. Inasmuch as anyone notices, it will reflect poorly on the DNC in 2016.

If he says something now, the reactionary portion of the GOP will take the opposite position as a knee-jerk response. It will become a larger news item and the GOP will have inherited the fallout. Inasmuch as anyone notices, it will reflect poorly on the GOP in 2016.

That he didn't say anything prior is probably either because the FCC only recently notified him of their position, or he wanted to avoid any blowback on those democrats who were already running tough mid-term re-election races in conservative districts.

This is most likely true.

To all who fight to re-open the free internet -- such as Peter Sunde -- your time is now.

> The FCC is probably close to deciding

Given that the FCC Chair, who has repeatedly says he agrees with Obama on the need for neutrality (both before and after the recent statement), and specifically agreed that paid prioritization should be avoided, just announced that the final rules may be delayed into 2015 (he earlier said he wanted to get them out by the end of the year) because of legal work required by the consideration of the hybrid approach (a partial Title II reclassification which would go further than the original proposal and prohibit paid prioritization, which leaked recently as the current preferred approach of the commission) and the full reclassification approach, I suspect both the "the FCC is close to deciding" and "the FCC inevitably announces they're going to let the ISPs do what they will" parts of your prediction are wrong.

If the ISPs were on-board with an acceptable compromise, they'd presumably not lobby strongly against it. The decision would likely stay in the land of wonks and be largely ignored.

So why would Obama turn that -- getting what he wants (or nearly so) -- into a highly-politicized position, essentially guaranteeing that it's strongly fought, blocked and/or legislated away in the next session?

There's no up-side for him or the hypothetical acceptable compromise and a huge down-side risk.

And given how many years the FCC has avoided this issue, and insisted on preserving the farcical distinction between "communications" and "information" networks, I see no reason to be optimistic about the terms or lifespan of any compromise short of Title II, regardless of what has leaked.

Even if something workable were agreed upon, it wouldn't be likely to last any longer than previous compromises -- such as the FCC's last stab at Net Neutrality, or the short-lived DSL open-access rules.

> If he says something now, the reactionary portion of the GOP will take the opposite position as a knee-jerk response. It will become a larger news item and the GOP will have inherited the fallout.

Yeah, exactly. It's a pretty savvy way to drive a wedge through the GOP, and you already see the obstructionist crowd (e.g., Ted Cruz) playing right into it.

I don't think Title II classification requires a vote from congress, just an action by the FCC.

This. Even if these are just words, they are the words of the President of the United States. To most people, words from the Oval Office carry some weight.

You have put your finger on it. Obama is looking for things he can get done without Congress. If he can devalue campaign contributions SPs made to Republicans, that's an even more attractive move.

But if the FCC refuses to act on its own, even with encouragement from the President, a new law is the only way to force the issue.

Hopefully it won't come to that, because I predict the odds of success being very low. Even if a law passes, it won't be before the lobbyists get their fingers all over it.

> But if the FCC refuses to act on its own, even with encouragement from the President, a new law is the only way to force the issue

The FCC has been acting in the direction of neutrality for some time, and the House majority has been talking more about preventing them from doing so than encouraging them (much less legislating to mandate something more than the FCC wants.)

With a bigger Republican majority in the House and Republican control of the Senate, there's almost exactly zero chance of pro-neutrality legislation from the Congress. Its more likely that pro-neutrality FCC will be met with anti-neutrality Congressional action (the only upside of which, from the pro-neutrality POV, is that it might raise the profile of the issue for the 2016 election.)

Republicans have an abysmal approval rating. The recent election was the 2008 wave election self-correcting, with Democrats defending seats in red states that voted for Romney. 2016 will see the same correction but for the 2010 election, with Republicans defending their seats in blue states that voted for Obama, potentially flipping control of the Senate again. The American electoral system is, to put it bluntly, fucked up.

Why is the president doing this now? I have no idea. He put off executive action on immigration until after the elections, and perhaps he was doing the same on this issue. Maybe this is low-hanging fruit to keep the base fighting going into 2016 and tempt corporatist Republicans to make foolish statements (see Ted Cruz's tweet). Maybe he thought it would be pointless to act before in the face of Republican obstructionism, and now he's using it as a challenge.

More interesting is Hillary Clinton's position on net neutrality, since polls make her the most likely winner of the next elections at this point. She has publicly expressed support for it as recently as last month.

Before there are bills, there must be words.

http://www.mediabistro.com/tvnewser/pres-obama-drops-by-mart...

http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/president-obama-hobnobs-frien...

http://articles.latimes.com/2013/aug/17/nation/la-na-obama-v...

But words don't always lead to bills, and Obama's been talking about net neutrality since 2007, before his first election, and before he named a cable lobbyist to lead the FCC[0].

If these words do lead to a bill, then great! But OP's complaint is that he/she believes this to be unlikely, given past precedent.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom_Wheeler

Tom Wheeler was a cable lobbyist from 1977 through 1984. He was a cable lobbyist before the consumer Internet existed, let alone cable Internet. His status as an anti-neutrality lobbyist is a powerful Internet meme based, so far as I can tell, on very few facts.

It's sad how much force a tiny factoid can pick up in a public policy debate on the Internet. Public policy facts are about as reliable on the Internet as Google symptom search results.

agree with your argument--but also important to note that once you start digging into the broader context of the current administration's financial and other relationships with Comcast, the sentiment becomes more understandable, even if it's not accurate or supported by direct evidence.

not exactly correct. The Internet that we know today existed long before 1977. Around 1987, a freshman in college, I could ftp and gopher with other Universities. I was tickled pink when I found out I could query a time server in Japan from my dorm room of a Michigan University!

The advent of the consumer Internet occurred at the point where most major metro areas had a commercial ISP from which you could buy dial-in access. That was not the case in 1984.

That's not exactly correct either. Around 1984 I was in Highschool and you could get "on line" via Compuserve. It was dial up but it used T1 and leased lines with other locations like the Airlines so you could, for example, view flights book a trip via Compuserve. I believe AAA (a travel service in the US) as also linked up this way too. It was not an always-on connection, but then neither was the Internet for many in the early 1990s. I ran a BBS in the 80s on a Commodore computer and I would use a dial-up feature to log into other BBSes to trade data and make it available on my site. One commercial service was called Don Best Sports that offered betting spreads (aka football lines). Don Best Sports, just to pick on one example, is now available with your Web browser but in the 1980s I could get Las Vegas spread data through a coax connection (data connection) from a local telephone or certain participating cable companies. This was all available in the mid to late 80s via an always on connection like the Universities were. Don Best Sports, in particular, would give you a cable modem that had a DB9 connection for serial data and it was a live feed in 1985 when I was involved with it.

I'm in Chicago. I had a BBS in the late 1980s, Compuserve before then, and access through a shared university account in the early 1990s. I did not have access that I could simply write a check for to consistently get access to, say, IRC and Usenet, until MCS started in ~1993.

Obviously people were on the Internet before 1993, but I chose the term "consumer Internet" specifically to avoid this debate. I think it's clear that the Internet wasn't on Group W Cable's mind in 1983.

no but you did write a check to your telephone company which everyone used at the time. And the problems were identical. You either got a busy tone or "all circuits are busy" message. Not trying to split hairs here, I agree on one hand that the technology is different but I am suggesting the problem is the same. We're talking about capacity issues and lobbyist. Although, telephone lines were subsidized where as I have a friend who lives just on the outskirts of local cable service and the cable company told him it would cost $30K just to run some coax down the street and under some railroad tracks. He's still stuck with dial-up as a result. Anyway...

Not to be overly cynical, but now that he's a lame duck president without any support whatsoever from the legislative branch he can try to repair his legacy with grandiose speeches like this and blame the Republican dominated Senate/House for blocking all of the good he had planned for these last two years

Obama already has a legacy that we can talk about... Expanding a police surveillance state, and raining hell-fire down upon our "enemies" like no other president before him.

Someone needs to learn American History...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_of_Censorship

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COINTELPRO

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomic_bombings_of_Hiroshima_an...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fred_Hampton

When the FBI start assassinating American Citizens in their sleep after an agent drugs their food to silence African American Political movements... THEN we can start talking about a "police state".

Remember: Martin Luther King Jr. was spied on by the FBI for years.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_Luther_King,_Jr.#FBI_sur...

Today's laws make such surveillance and wiretapping illegal.

>>When the FBI start assassinating American Citizens in their sleep after an agent drugs their food to silence African American Political movements... THEN we can start talking about a "police state".

You do realize that the USA committed extrajudicial murder of an American citizen during the current president's term, right? Or are you just ignoring it because it's inconvenient to your narrative?

>>Today's laws make such surveillance and wiretapping illegal.

And yet we have the entire population under surveillance. Compared to that, spying on a handful of civil leaders is nothing.

> And yet we have the entire population under surveillance. Compared to that, spying on a handful of civil leaders is nothing.

If the FBI of the 1960's had the technology of today, I guarantee that they would have done the same—and probably more. Not to excuse the intrusion of today, but the government of the 1960's was certainly no better.

There's also a case to be made that it was no worse, and it was, in reality, extremely limited technologically.

Most people today living in industrialized countries are living under surveillance nearly as intense as MLK was under, and people of interest are under a lot more. This comment was probably logged.

>>> And yet we have the entire population under surveillance. Compared to that, spying on a handful of civil leaders is nothing.

You didn't read the Fred Hampton article.

The spying done under COINTELPRO allowed the FBI to assassinate US citizens on US soil extra-judiciously. Fred Hampton's cold dead body is historical proof of that.

King was just spied upon. But other civil rights leaders like Fred Hampton were straight up assassinated.

US Police power is _weaker_ today than it was in the 60s.

>>> You do realize that the USA committed extrajudicial murder of an American citizen during the current president's term, right? Or are you just ignoring it because it's inconvenient to your narrative?

Sorry, I seem to have missed this.

Americans were killed in all wars, extrajudiciously when they leave America and start making propaganda for the other side. Anwar al-Awlaki's death is an extremely common occurrence.

What happened to Fred Hampton makes Anwar al-Awlaki's death look patriotic. First, Fred Hampton's assassination took place in Chicago. Fred Hampton didn't run away from America, he simply went to his Apartment, talked with some "friends" (one of which was a plant who gave him a drugged beverage), and then went to sleep.

Soon afterwards, the FBI raided his home and shot him dead as he slept. Fred Hampton was completely unaware that he was even being tracked by the FBI, as it was all secret.

Anwar Al Awlaki on the other hand, ran away to foreign countries. The US made claims against Anwar Al Awlaki publicly, and ordered him to court. Al Awlaki refused, remained in foreign countries and worked for a terrorist organization. He may have been a US Citizen technically when he was shot by a drone, but his loyalty is most definitely under question.

And at very least, the nature of Anwar Al Awlaki's attack was entirely public the whole time. We all knew he was targeted by Obama for at least a year before they got him.

So when we start shooting hellfire missiles to assassinate US citizens in Chicago... entirely in secret like how we used to do things in 1960s, call me.

But from a historical context, Anwar Al Awlaki has _nothing_ on Fred Hampton.

I'm not forgiving any past sins of the government. As for Hiroshima, that was during an active-combat war with an actual declaration of war that was against a set of countries and their allies not some conceptual enemy whose definition is completely flexible and often distorted.

The surveillance tools being used today far exceed what was used even in the 60's.

Then Vietnam / Korean War, the Iranian Civilian Plane the US blew up in 1988, Iran-Contra, and the platitude of covert ops that pissed off South America.

There is a platitude of terrible wars that the US has partaken in through the years. At least Bush's war started with 5000+ US Citizens dying. The war of our generation was the first American blood spilled on American Soil since Pearl Harbor.

Osama Bin Laden was the first successful attack on New York City by a foreign entity since the War of 1812. Keep that in mind.

The legitimacy of Bush's war is far more than any of the other massive mistakes of foreign policy the US has done over the recent decades.

Come on, the US actually has had its best run of Foreign Policy in decades, mostly because US Citizens these past few years are actually keenly aware of US mistakes abroad. In the 50s, 60s, 70s, 80s, and even 90s, US Citizens routinely ignored American aggression worldwide.

As bad as Obama's / Bush's wars were, they didn't drop Agent Orange across a country and poison the population for decades to come.

>>> The surveillance tools being used today far exceed what was used even in the 60's.

Compare COINTELPRO, which allowed warrantless surveillance against American Citizens for decades before being disassembled in the 80s.

Contrast that with the NSA leaks, which are about metadata collection.

Unfortunately they are the tools of warfare used by enimies of the US as well as domestic terrorists as well. The werent used in the 60's simply because they were not available back then.

Oh, but our government had giving small pox blankets to Native Americans, or syphilis to African Americans or rounding up Asians and putting them 'segregated camps'.

That American History class may not be a bad idea. Just sayin.

>Today's laws make such surveillance and wiretapping illegal.

Which laws are you referring to here?

http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/50/1802

US Code 50, section 1802. This law was established in the 80s after the Watergate scandal showed US Congress how much police power the Presidents (specifically Nixon) were assuming.

> "Someone needs to learn American History"

Personal attacks like this add nothing to your comment. It would have been better to leave that sentence out, or replace it with something less personal like "there are examples of worse behavior in American History".

-----

"Not the absolute worst US presidential administration of all time" isn't really a compelling argument for why we shouldn't criticize this one.

Oh, he can be critical if he wants. Open Criticism of presidents is what makes Americans strong.

But when he says stuff like "like no other president before him" he needs to be ready for a historical counter-argument. I happen to know the history of several presidents ya see, and can see what Obama and Bush have done in context.

These recent Presidents are actually quite good historically, despite their disapproval ratings. Movies and stories romanticize the past, forgetting major details like Blacks illegally sitting in the front of busses... or illegally drinking out of certain water fountains.

"The idiot who praises, with enthusiastic tone, All centuries but this and every country but his own." --- W. S. Gilbert

If you are such a person, I will call you out on it. Criticize the president, for it is good. But if you start invoking history, be prepared for my counter-arguments.

Counter-arguments are great. Personal attacks are not. You can make your point better by not making it about the other person's personal failings.

Notice how I rephrased your point in my previous comment so that it wasn't about him, but was instead completely about history. It makes the point stronger.

And you can make your points better by attacking my central point. Besides, tracker1 isn't a child. If he is feeling uncomfortable with my prose, he can talk to me directly.

I don't have any reason to attack your central point (I find it mostly agreeable.)

I'm not defending tracker1; I'm defending Hacker News. Personal attacks make HN worse. They are low-value phrases that sometimes drag down high-value comments. The guidelines [0] are quite explicit about this, and the current top story [1] is about trying to improve comment quality (a discussion which is, in part, related to an e-mail exchange that came in response to a personal attack directed at my wife in [2].)

So, I reiterate: please don't make personal attacks on Hacker News.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html -- the paragraph with the word "shortened" in it

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8585597

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8552958

I don't think it's ever a bad time to point out that Republicans are generally anti-consumer and pro large corporations.

> My question to Obama is: why now?

Because it will never pass with a Republican majority so he can pretend to take a stand for the public without any actual effect that would upset business interests.

> Because it will never pass with a Republican majority

The FCC has a 3-2 Democratic majority (all current members appointed by Obama, but under law which imposes a limit of 3 members of one party), and is the body through which this needs to pass.

Is it correct to say that neither the Congress nor the Senate can override the FCC in some fashion?

> Is it correct to say that neither the Congress nor the Senate can override the FCC in some fashion?

The Congress (House of Representatives + Senate) can through the same basic process as regular legislation (the process is expedited, but it still requires majorities in both houses and either the President's signature or a veto override with 2/3 in each house.)

So, sure, Republicans in Congress could block FCC action -- if they can either get Obama or a significant fraction of the Democratic Caucus in each house on board.