House tells FCC to drop net neutrality

I'm a liberal Democrat and I'm queasy about enforced net neutrality; these are rules that govern what companies can do with their own infrastructure, and rules that could unintentionally retard progress instead of protecting it.

Further, Congress has a legitimate gripe here. We don't elect FCC commissioners. They're appointed. We should be particularly concerned about them overstepping their bounds. Which a reasonable case can be made for here.

I'm not sure I see what your comment adds to the discussion, other than "the duly elected Republican congress is doing something I disagree with!".

The FCC's claim of authority in this instance to impose rules from on high is problematic.

Here is what EFF says:

"We’re wholly in favor of net neutrality in practice, but a finding of ancillary jurisdiction here would give the FCC pretty much boundless authority to regulate the Internet for whatever it sees fit. And that kind of unrestrained authority makes us nervous about follow-on initiatives like broadcast flags and indecency campaigns. In general, we think arguments that regulating the Internet is 'ancillary' to some other regulatory authority that the FCC has been granted just don’t have sufficient limitations to stop bad FCC behavior in the future and create the 'Trojan horse' risk we have long warned about." (https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2011/02/part-i-fcc-ancillary-a...)

I have chimed in on this in a previous HN thread:

"The FCC is way out of its league on this one. Basically, it is a creature of statute. It can do whatever Congress has authorized it to and no more. Nothing in its authorizing statute expressly permits it to impose the rules now known as net neutrality. Therefore, it sought to justify its ability to do so under the doctrine of so-called 'ancillary jurisdiction,' meaning that it had an implied power to do so in aid of its expressly granted powers. Unfortunately, a definitive federal appeals court ruling held that no such ancillary jurisdiction existed, leaving the matter for Congress to decide. Rather than deferring to Congress, the FCC chose to adopt a new rationale for its assertion of this authority. Congress overwhelmingly balked at the idea of any broad assertion of such authority and, in the back and forth, the FCC came up with the toe-in-the water approach just adopted to the satisfaction of almost no one. Even this assertion of jurisdiction will certainly be challenged in the courts in cases that will take years to decide, leaving this whole issue in a pathetic state of uncertainty for all concerned. Nothing good will come of this except for lots of employment for the lawyers who will be litigating whether this or that action is 'reasonable' and whether the internet is really like a public utility or not. All in all, a royal mess." (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2033261)

A short-hand way of summing up the issue: do you want, in the name of a short-term goal such as net neutrality, to cede to unaccountable government regulators a broad, unchecked power to control what happens on the internet? I think this should give pause to all of us, no matter what we think of the net-neutrality issue.

It does have an interesting psychological effect, though, possibly on both the recipients of orders, and on the general public. Reminds me a bit of the similar accident of jurisdiction that led to 1980s teenage hax0rz being raided by the Secret Service, rather than by more normal-sounding police.

Australia, where metered access (XX GBs per month) rules, may provide some insight into how net non-neutrality plays out on practise. Here, it's not about speed limiting to "non-favoured" sites, but about whether consumption from those sites consume your allocated bandwidth allowance. It is routine for companies to do deals with ISPs to provide "unmetered" access to their services for customers. For example, with my ISP, anything I buy from Apple is unmetered. Other ISPs might, for example, offer free Steam traffic. This is most noticeable, I think, on mobile data plans, which often feature "unlimited Facebook" or "all you can Tweet" or similar.

I can see how this has the potential to entrench existing players but subjectively the effect seems weak at best and does not figure too much in people's purchasing decisions. Personally, I would prefer more general solutions to the problem of "corporate cliques" gaining oligopoly powers. Restrictions on cross-media ownership would seem to be the weapon of choice.