Dear FCC: Thanks for Listening to Team Internet
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It is disheartening how much FUD is being spread by conservatives on the anti-NN side.
The incentive concern is real. What incentive will telecom companies have to build the wireline networks that enable next-generation of web services if they can't make enough money to justify the investment? The liberal response to this point is either myth or fantasy. Myth, in that they assume that wireline is insanely profitable, and that fat Verizon shareholders will just have to squeeze their belts a bit. In reality, the operating margin of Verizon's wireline division is 2-3%.[1] Fantasy, because they alternatively posit that municipal systems will take up the slack. How states and cities that are broke, crushed under liberal public union pension obligations, will pay for these municipal networks is up in the air.
The worry of further regulation is also real. Telecom is already a morass of regulation, largely to fulfill liberal concerns. For example, there is already rate-setting. Municipal governments require cable companies to offer basic cable at low regulated rates. Since it doesn't cost appreciably less to offer basic cable than more expensive packages, this sets an important constraint on the economics of the network. Huge amounts of wealth transfer from urban to rural areas are already baked into the system at the federal and state levels. And build-out restrictions, preventing upstart competitors from stealing away lucrative tracts of incumbants' service areas, are already stifling competition. The HN crowd acts like NN is being added on top of an otherwise pristine regulatory regime, but in reality it's just one more straw on a giant pile of hay.
None of this is FUD. The fact that these points are also raised by the telecom companies, who have a monetary interest in avoiding NN, does not make them FUD any more than the pro-NN points are FUD because they're raised by web-tech companies.
I'm not an ideologue. I'd be fine with, for example, the U.K. approach. But what that would mean, which most people on HN don't know, would be putting AT&T back together and letting them enjoy monopoly profits. Take a look at BT Openreach's financials sometime: http://www.digitallook.com/news/news-and-announcements/retai.... Their EBITDA margin is a staggering 45%, double that of Verizon wireline, significantly higher than Comcast's whole operation, and higher than AT&T and Verizon's wireless divisions.
[1] http://www.verizonwireless.com/news/article/2012/01/pr2012-0....
A 97% profit margin[0] on those very same services ought to be enough of an incentive for any business.
[0]http://www.huffingtonpost.com/bruce-kushnick/time-warner-cab...
If I spend $8 billion building an OS and sell it for $80 on an 80 cent CD, those same people would say I had a 99% profit margin.
And the issue isn't whether the companies are struggling. Nobody feels bad for Comcast's CEO's kids. The issue is the incentives to build telecom infrastructure relative to other opportunities in the economy for the billions of dollars needed.
There's no free lunch. If the writing is on the wall for wireline profitability, companies like Comcast will take their capital and buy companies like NBC instead of investing in their network. If you make it illegal for them to do so, their shareholders will force them to do stock buybacks with their capital, then take that money and invest in whoever does buy NBC.
We can just make that illegal, right?
Cable companies, like Comcast, did that with broadcast companies, like NBC, without net neutrality, so, not seeing the nexus to the immediate issue here.
The primary cost is that they have to keep building. My neighbors are going to want more and fatter Netflix streams all at the same time that my family wants them. That requiring increasing the maximum capacity at peak demand time.
Demonstrably false. AT&T and Verizon stopped with the Great Recession. US Worst/Century never seriously played that game in the first place. Don't follow the cablecos much since I'm (just) outside of a city and only have non-U-verse 150 GB/month AT&T as an option, but don't a lot of them also cap in a variety of ways, including just peering congestion, especially since Netflix directly competes with them?
Unfortunately, I'm old enough to remember watching "We're the phone company, we don't have to care", and that hasn't changed much. Cablecos, I suppose we'll see.
"I have been pretty consistent with this in the fact that we will spend more CapEx in the Wireless side and we will continue to curtail CapEx on the Wireline side. Some of that is because we are getting to the end of our committed build around FiOS, penetration is getting higher," Verizon CFO Fran Shammo said yesterday in the Q4 2014 call with investors.
Although maybe they're replacing DSLAMs as they become unmaintainable; AT&T is just moving hardware around (even pulling an old DSLAM out of a training facility), adding newer generation DSL here and there, and in many places where we supposize all the DSLAM slots are filled just refusing to supply new service.
I don't think this invalidates my argument about capacity, though. If you're not in a Verizon FiOS area, or worse, in one of the many states and territories they've sold, you're not getting more capacity out of your DSL line from them, right? They might, though, be putting in more backhaul to satisfy, and I've heard no reports of AT&T DSL suffering from saturated backhaul.
This is why people were afraid of the "let one company build the network, but everyone else gets to compete on it" plans. It might make all the networks look like the DSL networks.
And this meme that Internet speeds are staying flat is just plain wrong. Akamai's state of the internet report consistently shows average speeds increasing year-over-year in nearly every state in the US. ("Vermont was the only state across the whole country to see a year-over-year decline in its average connection speed—the cause of this decline has been discussed in prior issues of the report.") For peak speeds, only Vermont and Oklahoma saw year-over-year losses.
But if you can expect to sell 102 million copies at that 99% profit margin, those profits will justify the R&D expenses.
If you can hire an actuary, they can come up with a way to factor the initial R&D cost into your per-unit calculations with a few reasonable assumptions, such that your quarterly reports look great. But if you want the board to understand enough to calculate the right bonus for you, it's best to keep the math simple, and sweep the necessary and nonrecoverable expenses into a different category.
Even leaving aside that egregious error, that calculation excludes interest, depreciation, taxes, and all the other numbers that must be taken out to get to "profit margin."
As I've said elsewhere, this is indeed FUD. (I also disagree with most of the rest of what you say, but I agree that it's not FUD.)
The notion of "steps closer" to rate-setting makes little sense in the real-world regulatory environment. If today's FCC hadn't decided to reclassify broadband Internet service under Title II, this would do very little, perhaps nothing, to hold back a future Commission that wanted to impose a rate-setting regime. That future Commission, persuaded that rate-setting was a good idea, would simply open a proceeding to reclassify broadband internet service under Title II and impose a rate setting regime. The fact that broadband internet service was not already classified as a Title II service would be, at most, a very minor impediment given the tremendous deference the FCC is given in making such regulatory decisions. (For one thing, the reversal of a prior regulatory decision is subjected to no special scrutiny.) This would only require a single proceeding in which whatever reasoning the Commission had to support rate setting, would also be its support for Title II reclassification. And since one of the primary objections to Title II reclassification today is that it somehow raises the risk of rate setting, one can only imagine the resistance to actually imposing a rate-setting regime.
In other words, this is a classic slippery-slope argument. All the considerations that stop us from setting rates today will be present in the future. The minor administrative hassle of reclassifying broadband internet service under Title II, barely ranks as one of the impediments to imposing such a regime.
It's also not a slippery-slope argument. Rate setting is a part of Title II, whether or not the FCC says they will forebear. And it's part of Title II because there is a long history of rate-setting in telecom. I posit that it's very different to argue about the unprecedented direction a policy may lead (like the NN advocates are doing), and to argue that a policy will take us back to a place we've already been.
It is an argument that this is bad because of what might be done later based on it. That is exactly a slippery slope argument.
> Rate setting is a part of Title II, whether or not the FCC says they will forebear.
Rate setting is part of Title II, but if the FCC does forbear (not "say they will forbear") as part of the same regulatory package in which they find that retail broadband service is a Title II telecommunication service, the rate setting is expressly not part of this regulation package. Its a speculative thing that some future FCC might do, hence, a slippery slope argument. (And, its a speculative thing that a future FCC could do whether or not this FCC adopted Title II with forbearance on rate setting.)
OTOH, if the speculative future risk of rate setting is a real concern, I'm sure that many supporters of net neutrality would stand with you in lobbying Congress for a revision to Title II prohibiting, or at least establishing a long moratorium that can be reviewed later for a more permanent prohibition, FCC rate setting for retail broadband.
Regulation forcing them to build the networks or be heavily fined. Given their profit margins, I'm weeping...hold on...taking careful count...carry the seven...zero tears for them.
Comparatively speaking, politicians individually are cheaper by, say, 3-5 orders of magnitude, as a whole, maybe 2.
And there we go.
> Why do you dismiss the anti-NN concerns as FUD?
He said anti-NN were spreading a lot of FUD. I didn't see him say all anti-NN concerns were FUD.
And he's right about a lot of FUD from anti-NN people. Some claims I saw, largely from Republican official, Republican writers and radio/TV hosts, and random people whose affiliation was not stated but from their remarks about Obama being a communist, dirty liberal, or Muslim I think it is a safe bet that they are not moderates or liberals:
• You will have to apply for an expensive license from the FCC if you want to put up a website.
• The FCC will be regulating Google search results, Facebook's news feed, and the like.
• This helps the governments of North Korea, Syria, Iran, and China to oppress their people with their internet censorship, because now the US cannot pressure them for a free internet without appearing hypocritical because now we are imposing the same kind of controls on the internet in the US.
> What incentive will telecom companies have to build the wireline networks that enable next-generation of web services if they can't make enough money to justify the investment?
What money making opportunity, besides paid prioritization, does this remove?
> The fact that these points are also raised by the telecom companies [...]
By some telecom companies. T-Mobile and Sprint aren't having much of a problem with it. The rural broadband provider's trade group outright supports it and has long asked for Title II.
> I'm not an ideologue. I'd be fine with, for example, the U.K. approach. But what that would mean, which most people on HN don't know, would be putting AT&T back together and letting them enjoy monopoly profits.
What do you mean by the U.K. approach? The main aspect of their broadband approach that I'm aware of us the forced line sharing, but I don't see how that would require putting AT&T back together.
Question: wireless voice has been regulated under similar (but more extensive) Title II regulations for around 20 years. Why have the doom and gloom scenarios forecast for internet not already come to pass there? The carriers there have invested massively in their infrastructure under those rules.
BT Openreach is the successor to the government monopoly that built the phone lines, and still owns them. As a condition of privatization, they are required to lease the lines to competitors, but, and this is key, the prices for such leases are set using a "price cap" system which ensures they have an incentive to keep investing in the network: http://siteresources.worldbank.org/EXTFINANCIALSECTOR/Resour.... In practice, the price caps are set high enough that Openreach makes a lot of money. If you dig into the financials, they make way more than ATT and Verizon make on their wired networks, and about as much as they make on their wireless networks.
So no, it's not just "forced line sharing." It's about putting publicly-built infrastructure into a company that's insulated from competition, and regulating their prices in a way that ensures they are very profitable.
You mean because neither of those have happened at all, and ISPs were already charging companies for pay-for-play? Its well documented that several ISPs were throttling Netflix for months before netflix folded and agreed to pay additional fees. That happened. thats real life. Thats more of a real concern than any of your hypotheticals.
>In reality, the operating margin of Verizon's wireline division is 2-3%.[1]
Nice cherry picking, meanwhile Comcast reports over 40% operating margin each year.
>Cable Communications Segment — Operating Costs and Expenses We continue to focus on controlling the growth of expenses. Our operating margin (operating income before depreciation and amortization as a percentage of revenue) for 2011, 2010 and 2009 was 41.1%, 40.4% and 40.1%, respectively.[1]
So where was that lack of incentive again? because 40% operating margin sounds fantastic to me
>Since it doesn't cost appreciably less to offer basic cable than more expensive packages, this sets an important constraint on the economics of the network
Source? Do you know how much cable companies pay each cable channel to carry them? Are you qualified to evaluate the cost differential to the provider of basic cable vs other packages?
>And build-out restrictions, preventing upstart competitors from stealing away lucrative tracts of incumbents' service areas, are already stifling competition
I agree here, this is why google has been rolling out fiber in the way they have, they are finding municipalities willing to overlook buildout requirements
>The HN crowd acts like NN is being added on top of an otherwise pristine regulatory regime, but in reality it's just one more straw on a giant pile of hay.
I dont know where you got that opinion, I've seen little other than criticism of the current status quo.
>I'd be fine with, for example, the U.K. approach
Do you have a link that kind of explains their approach? I'd be interested to learn more about it and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_in_the_United_Kingdom#... isnt doing a particularly great job
[1] http://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1166691/0001193125120...
Blocking certain lawful services was actually done by major ISPs, and prohibiting lawful services and applications to retail customers is still policy of most ISPs (fixed and mobile.)
Likewise prioritization of content provided by ISPs affiliates (either same owner or paid prioritization of third party service) has been done, by both fixed and mobile ISPs.
So while the anti-NN concerns may be "real" in the sense of having a valid chain of reasoning supporting them, they are not more real than the pro-NN concerns which center around real, actual practices that exist in the status quo and have been seen in the period that NN has been debated.
Does this mean Apple cannot enforce "must use over wifi restrictions"? As it stands now, I can't use LTE to download large apps, media, or stream on the iPhone or iPad. Would the FCC have any authority to force Apple to change these restrictions?
Unless it's a customisation as part of some deal with the carriers. I understand that this sort of thing is common in the States.
Not that I agree with their position, but that seems to be their approach.
I would think that AT&T may have asked Apple for some sort of limitation on non-essential services like this.
You're not necessarily wrong, but it's not quite the same.
Google shouldn't be able to horde all the data. Make google a dumb pagerank index!
I don't think that is what that rule does. It is mainly to protect the user who downloads an app to still be able to use it if they are on wifi and 4G, even if the app maker didn't pay to have "special access" to the 4G network that month.
This is a huge win for consumers.
Maybe I can offer an example. I'm sure you will be able to poke technical holes in this, but let's say a company comes up with a new technology (i.e. not cable) that can handle small packets very efficiently in a small locality. It's super cheap to do this, and it's great for networking small communities. But, video traffic really slows down the network so it's filtered out and thus it can't effectively treat all data equally. Instead of being able to quickly start up and offer their services, first they have to register with the FCC. Then they have to pay an inspection fee, and account for yearly audit fees. Plus, even though their prices are cheap, they're not much cheaper than cable because all the cable infrastructure is subsidized by taxpayers so their prices appear to be less competitive. All these extra costs to comply with the regulations add up to the point where the capital needed to even start this business is way too high and way too risky, so this technology just won't even have a chance of existing. It is effectively crowded out by the heavily subsidized and protected cable telecoms.
For a real historical reference, take the railroads for example, where these types of regulations began. The railroad businesses got huge subsidies from the government in the form of land and tax breaks. This allowed the railroad companies to effectively cartelize the industry because it crowded out more decentralized forms of transportation like the small rail and networks of canal systems. Even though these localized, less capital intensive systems could have served people better than railroads, we'll never know it because of the opportunity cost of central planning: the railroads used the state to force the public to pay for and subsidize their infrastructure. These crowding out effects are the unseen consequences of regulation.
Big business has a long history of using the power of the state to impose regulatory barriers on future competitors as a way to preserve their monopoly power. It started with the railroads, continued through the Progressive Era, and continues today with policies like "Net Neutrality". And they always use the same public relations con, too, appealing to the common good and fairness to get public buy in. They say that these policies will protect the consumers, but really in the end these policies will protect big business from competition. This creates artificial scarcity and allows big business to charge consumers higher prices.
See my other post here [1] if you want a little more historical background on how this works.
This reminds me of the power grid discussion on HN, where the cool thing is hooking up independent solar arrays, and the boring thing is running the existing grid that we depend on for life. Now, having your house connected to both the grid and your personal backup makes jobs more dangerous for linemen -- already one of the top ten most dangerous jobs in the country. That was waved away with "well, if I were working on power lines, I would just assume they were always live anyway" by people who have never had an outdoors job, and whose entry-level salaries are where linemen top off at the end of a career.
People have abstracted away how much work it takes to keep society running. For the most part that is okay, because it gives them more time to specialize in their chosen field, but then they think because something has been abstracted away that it's easy to make some "minor change" without knowledge of the cost either in dollars or in lives.
Any home inverter that feeds power back to the utility is required by code to island itself when it detects a loss of utility power.
Also, I have a close friend who is a lineman, and has worked in every state between Illinois and New York. He says (over the beer we're having right now) that all lineman assume lines to be live, and they routinely perform service on hot lines without removing power.
Its not the newest fad we're after; we're excited by any prospect of the status quo shifting. History shows us technology getting cheaper and better at a constantly faster rate (I won't say exponential, but close enough). This is where the excitement comes from, perpetual destruction and creation with a higher quality of life the continual result.
Proponents of this FCC Title II reclassification have argued that this action will not curtail investment in network infrastructure and that Internet bandwidth will continue to improve unimpeded. After all, if they do not argue that, they would concede one of the points presently being dismissed as FUD hawked by the anti-Title II people such as myself: that reclassification will reduce innovation and ultimately hurt end consumers in the long run.
So an underpinning assumption of pro-Title II is that investment in networks will continue unabated and network bandwidth will continue to increase in spite of Title II regulation. Why, then, are the hardware companies that stand to profit from this unimpeded continued investment concerned? Is it because the regulation will require them or their customers to disable support for IPv6 Quality of Service flags on packets? That seems like a fairly trivial configuration change. It seems more plausible that they fear their customers (ISPs and backbone providers) will see less incentive to upgrade to the next generation of network gear to continuously improve the aggregate performance of their network. After all, the hard part of network R&D is steadily increasing bandwidth/performance at prices the ISPs and backbone providers can afford. Implementing IPv6 QoS bits isn't going to show up as a significant line item in the R&D budget or Intel, IBM, Cisco, and Qualcomm.
So yes, these companies were lined up to build the bogeyman "multi-tiered" Internet, assuming such a thing was ever going to come to pass (aside: we'll never really know if such a thing might have ultimately been a boon for consumers, because we took away the opportunity for the market to experiment with that preemptively). But more importantly, these companies were and have been lined up to continuously build the always-evolving "next" generation of Internet network hardware, full stop. And for some reason they are worried that their profits are now in jeopardy.
I for one find that a bit alarming. I want network companies to get rich selling my ISP ultra high-performance network gear because that ultimately improves my bandwidth. I don't want to still be at 30 Mbps five or ten years from now. I don't want asynchronous connection speeds to persist through my lifetime. I want more hardware and network innovation, not less.
All that said, I don't suspect much of anything to happen in the next few years because network R&D isn't a fast-moving process in any event. But in five or ten years, we should be able to assess whether the pace of innovation has been curtailed. I worry that in 2020 I'll look back with a tinge of regret.
1. Allow network providers to continue to expand their network, while growing their own services on top of their own network which will compete with third party services. If those other services compete heavily with their own, they will enact tiers or reduce reliability so that their service is better/cheaper/etc.
2. Regulate network providers, while still allowing them to grow services on top of their own networks and allowing third party services to compete more fairly. Network expansion may be slowed due to the loss of service revenue, but new service business risk will be lowered as they won't be competing unequally with their own (or customer's) network providers.
We got into this mess because networks were classified as information services in the first place. We wouldn't allow the oil companies to own the car business, nor would we allow the electric companies to own the appliance business.
Why should we think this would work any different?
Utility companies get public access across the country to install their cables and pipes. They're using vast public resources. Customers often have few or no choices.
In my opinion, the only reasonable option is regulation. I don't typically like regulation, as I think it hurts small business. But the tradeoff here is that some business will be hurt, while many more businesses should flourish.
There has been a building fear of some coming changes, presumably related to implementation of Quality of Service on Internet packets. QoS was originally considered a good idea by many of us. Now we seem to be collectively convinced that it would certainly be used for evil. But we've not yet seen how that might play out. It looks like we maybe never will.
Option #2 sounds like new legislation and not Title II of the Communications Act of 1934.
Regulation is not always bad, but Title II is broad and current promises of forbearance should be taken with a heaping serving of salt. I feel that whatever rational or irrational fears were building, this was not an urgent matter despite what appears to be a massive amount of astroturfing by Netflix and its kin to spin the current Internet's tubes as ensnared at every opportunity by nefarious ISPs. I want a better ISP like anyone else, but Netflix is no angel here. Whenever a big business (e.g., Netflix) campaigns for the rules to change in order to smite its enemies—especially when painting it as a do or die, time-critical matter—my opinion of them is tainted.
Time and deliberation should have been taken to create the proper legislation for the situation at hand. The US has developed what I see as a dangerous and wrong-headed distaste for legislative deliberation, what with Congresses being labeled "do nothing" and frequent complaints of gridlock, as if those are bad things. They are in large part evidence of no consensus, which means subverting the legislative process is likely a mistake.
A great side-effect of deliberation in the legislative process is that the market sometimes creates a superior solution in the meantime. In many cases doing nothing and allowing things to find a way is precisely the right course of action.
If they are part of the regulatory package, they are as concrete as the Title II classification itself. They aren't "promises", they either are or are not part of the regulation.
Forgive the extreme metaphor, but if you were suddenly allowed to uses weapons in a hockey game, certainly there would be a flurry of activity as new weapons and armourments are developed, and whoever built those products would benefit. But it would be a disaster for the players, and ultimately for the sport.
The Internet infrastructure relies heavily on cooperation, and what Comcast did to Netflix was essentially weaponizing that cooperation. We don't need to wait and see where this goes, because history is overflowing with examples of that tactic being toxic for the broader ecosystem. The Comcast/Netflix play was a success, and we know that a game where those kinds of plays succeed is a bad game, so they changed the rules. This is why you're not allowed to cross check in hockey - sure, it's competition (and competition is what sport is about), but that particular kind of competition leads down a bad road for everyone.
So to me, this ruling says "compete, innovate, but not in this space: this space is destructive". It doesn't address what I see as an equally large problem - lack of competition at the last mile - but that's for another ruling.
My preference would be for something very light-touch at first since in my opinion we haven't seen much evidence of the weaponizing escalation you've illustrated in metaphor. We've seen Comcact and Netflix bring knives to what was expected to be a boxing match. In my opinion, the outcome was fine. Without the metaphor: the market worked it out. Given Comcast was in the middle, I assume many Comcast customers gave them a verbal lashing and some others actually voted with their wallet and switched to whatever the second option was for them (assuming they had a second option; see last mile problem). A few people may have even decided to stream video not from Netflix but rather Amazon Prime or other services.
Given Netflix's massive bandwidth needs, the metaphor is a bit more like Netflix's whole boxing team showed up to the boxing match, so Comcast's single boxer reached into his pocket and grabbed his knife. Then the Netflix team grabbed their knives (by way of drumming up the ire of their user community). And there was a bunch of blood spilled. But ultimately, I think this process is acceptable.
Going back a few messages, we had been talking about what can be taken away from hardware manufacturers expressing concern about this regulatory change. You had said of course they are concerned, for it is natural for them to worry that their next-generation hardware for a tiered-Internet is at risk of lower demand. My premise is that implementing a tiered-Internet (whatever that is) is not much of an engineering challenge at this point. I expect ongoing R&D for network hardware has been and continues to be principally about how do we make this stuff faster, cheaper, better because our customers (ISPs and backbone providers) always want faster, cheaper, better.
Now they are presumably worried their customers won't want faster, cheaper, better.
That gives me some concern. My future Internet connectivity was supposed to be way better than my present. But will it be only a little bit better? Maybe even pretty much just the same? Maybe I will be totally satisfied; I cannot predict the future.
But are these hardware vendors the canary in the coalmine? Or are they shills for Comcast and the other evil ISPs? I'm not sure, but they are definitely an integral part of making the Internet work so their opinion should not be so broadly rejected.
Why does the legislation as opposed to the regulation need to be specially crafted to the modern internet, especially if the existing provisions of Title II, including the regulatory flexibility provisions, provide an adequate basis regulation specially crafted to the modern internet?
I'd also argue the above as a more realistic attribution of motivation than that they're worried people will just want less Internet. I don't think the hardware companies are shills, or that they're evil, I just think they're myopically focused on their next product cycle.
The point you raise about the size disparity between Netflix and Comcast is precient, but I see it from the other direction - what would Comcast and their partners start doing to market entrants with this kind of strategy? If I'm Google and I've got a comfortable relationship with Comcast, what's to stop me from asking them, as part of a larger deal, to severely degrade or outright block new entrants that might threaten me? We've seen lots of companies do this (Microsoft and the various computer manufacturers (Compaq et al.) in the 90's comes immediately to mind).
The trouble with this scenario is that it takes a long time to notice anything is wrong, and so you don't get much market pushback. Then 10 years go by and you realize that no one's challenged the incumbents in a long time, and it's not because they're any good at what they do.
> My future Internet connectivity was supposed to be way better than my present.
I don't think that's safe to say at all, considering it's been flatlined for so long:
http://blog.nprg.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/Google-Fiber...
Which is why I don't think the light-touch approach is warranted in general anymore. There's clearly big structural problems here. Having said that, I think we'd agree that the above chart is mostly a last-mile issue. The NN thing is more future-oriented, which is riskier, but also hopefully avoids a situation like the last mile issue where things are so entrenched that it's hard to imagine fixing it.
I just feel that the EFF didn't do a thorough check this time around.
Also, the decision was made at 10AM and they still haven't release the 200+ pages ruling document. It's most likely that this will head back to federal court and the process will get more complicated and lengthy before the dust settle.
The "decision" made at 10AM was to adopt the rules that have been under public comment for months. If you haven't seen them yet, it's your own fault.
Yes this will go to court. Do you expect any better from America?
From what I've read, the 322 page document wasn't released as of 3 days ago [1]. I'm not sure about the claim that it still hasn't been released, but regardless - the rules weren't really available for public review before the vote.
[1] http://dailycaller.com/2015/02/23/republican-fcc-commissione...
If it had gone through another comment phase, it would have taken another 9 months... And then another nine months...