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FCC Chairman: This Is How We Will Ensure Net Neutrality

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Re: FCC Chairman: This Is How We Will Ensure Net Neutrality

#261

Post by datawhoring »

frostirosti wrote: post #19
mikegioia wrote: post #6

Using this authority, I am submitting to my colleagues the strongest open internet protections ever proposed by the FCC. These enforceable, bright-line rules will ban paid prioritization, and the blocking and throttling of lawful content and services. I propose to fully apply—for the first time ever—those bright-line rules to mobile broadband. My proposal assures the rights of internet users to go where they want, wh…

Tom Wheeler has really outdone himself with this announcement. It'll apply to mobile networks as well! Turns out this dingo knows how to stand up for what's right! I know it's early but this is a great step forward.

agreed. this level of f-u to the whims of wealthy individuals and their entrenched corporations is unheard of.

i work for a smaller cable company and it has been getting very deep lately.

sad thing is management doesn't seem to get that the grunts don't care. we never profit from the monopolies. every year we get some bs excuse why we won't be getting a raise this year even though reading the quarterly earnings and know what were spending on upgrades and know there is a lot left over that goes somewhere.

knowing how high the margins are in the industry, how little they pay, how lean things are already run its going to get bad.

if competition is somehow injected into the market and they are happy with a fraction of what the incumbents are currently enjoying would be devastating. there is very little left to cut at the bottom, and those at the top can't possibly be expected to not get their rockstar paydays.

what also could happen is the exodus of employees from existing cable companies to the new ones that would sprout up. even though the grass isn't always greener somewhere else, it won't stop those from finally having a choice.

don't get me wrong. I have zero problem with someone making a 100 million a year, but only when that comes after everyone from push broom and toilet brush to company car and private jet are all paid the highest for their position for a company that size. unfortunately almost everywhere you can go that isn't the case.

I've heard a lot of discussion how making ISPs a utility would just entrench the monopolies even further... what od you think?

Re: FCC Chairman: This Is How We Will Ensure Net Neutrality

#262

Post by ep103 »

tootie wrote: post #225
frostirosti wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tom Wheeler has really outdone himself with this announcement. It'll apply to mobile networks as well! Turns out this dingo knows how to stand up for what's right! I know it's early but this is a great step forward.

I have this weird feeling that this whole drama was a long con by Obama and Wheeler to tease out as much vocal support as possible by playing the villain. Like Wheeler was a heel in professional wrestling. They put out a shitty proposal that the ISPs would love just to show them how strong public opposition would be so they'd be perfectly positioned to go full neutrality and claim a public mandate.

If that was the case, then they would have prepared their servers to actually handle the load. As it stands, we know they lost millions of records of input

Re: FCC Chairman: This Is How We Will Ensure Net Neutrality

#263

Post by ikeboy »

dublinben wrote: post #258
ikeboy wrote: post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So the solution should be to take away the regulations that made it so, not add on more as a patch. "Here, there's a problem because regulation has made the market not free enough." "I know, let's fix it with more regulation!" Also, freeness isn't binary, it can be more or less free. It's free enough that Google Fiber can exist. As long as it's possible to open something given enough money, there will be an upper lim…

What regulations do you think caused the current lack of competition? How can the FCC change them? The FCC is doing what it can within its legal jurisdiction to improve the actual reality of internet access in the US. The one dimensional perspective of 'more regulation bad, less regulation good' is completely unhelpful in this situation.

I support regulation in other places, I don't consider my position one sided that way. I have a high bar for the benefit that a regulation needs to pass before I agree with it, but I'm not against this only because it's regulation.

See http://arstechnica.com/business/2014/04/one-big-reason-we-la...

Some solutions would be to fix the laws allowing these lawsuits to go on like this, perhaps requiring the loser to pay the costs for frivolous suits like the ones described, or stop the FCC regulations that are the official cause of the lawsuit.

Why doesn't the government go after the monopolies under anti-trust laws?

Re: FCC Chairman: This Is How We Will Ensure Net Neutrality

#264

Post by netinstructions »

evanb wrote: post #45

I violated Responsible Reading Of The Internet Rule #1 and accidentally looked at the comments. I am having a hard time reconciling the vehement anti-net-neutrality anti-government hair-on-fire screaming there with the reasoned discussion and general attitude here---I would have thought the majority of readers of Wired would be of similar mind to HN readers.

Okay, I'm going to go against the grain here and ask why there's so many people avoiding the comments section, or even suggesting installing comment-hiding browser extensions.

Do you folks always avoid the comments section? Obviously not, because you're here :) and the idea that this is such a generalized "Internet Rule" is contradictory to being here. If you're disgusted by other people's abrasive comments (on Wired or wherever else you're avoiding the comments section), can you offer your own respectable perspectives and steer the conversation that way? Or have you completely given up? A reasonable (but unfortunate) situation. I dislike the hair-on-fire knee-jerk screaming too. I hope we can change that.

I wrote more about this[1] after thinking a while about Jeff Atwood's piece[2].

[1] http://www.netinstructions.com/please-read-the-comments-sect... [2] http://blog.codinghorror.com/please-read-the-comments/

Re: FCC Chairman: This Is How We Will Ensure Net Neutrality

#266

Post by orthecreedence »

ikeboy wrote: post #236
orthecreedence wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This would work great! Except that there aren't 20 providers to choose from, there's usually one, maybe two. And the two providers you generally expect to have do not care anything for consumer experience. They also lobby for other companies (or even townships) to not be able to set up their own fiber/cable connections. The lack of regulation you want already exists, and it's starting to strangle free and open commun…

I know in my area there's more than one. >And the two providers you generally expect to have do not care anything for consumer experience. In a free market, this fact means that people don't care enough about their experience. If they cared enough, they would choose based on that, instead of on price. >They also lobby for other companies (or even townships) to not be able to set up their own fiber/cable connections.…

Free market is great if there are problems to solve and they require creative solutions. When an optimal solution is found, competition based on that one aspect of the market doesn't make sense anymore.

In this case, I truly believe net neutrality is an optimal solution for consumers. The goal of society is not to make things easier on companies, the goal is to advance society as a whole. Freedom of speech and expression of ideas does this, but allowing companies to block this at their whim benefits nobody but the companies. Battling internet providers day in, day out is tiresome enough without having net neutrality on the chopping block constantly. I don't want to have to switch providers every time they start blocking content. How do I even know they are blocking or throttling content? Will they even tell me? The free market offers me no protections against this. A company could be lying to be and I'd never know.

With a regulatory body, at least there's some oversight, and by default a good amount of protection.

I think if enough people in society determine they want something, that becomes a public matter. Trying to shoehorn every problem into the free market is a lot messier, IMO.

Re: FCC Chairman: This Is How We Will Ensure Net Neutrality

#267

Post by Lawtonfogle »

superuser2 wrote: post #83
shmerl wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think reality is already on the heavy surveillance side as known (like this example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Room_641A ). So some push should be done in the opposite direction.

Surveillance != censorship, particularly when the surveillance is supposed to be a secret. You can argue that it prompts people to self-censor, or that it actually isn't supposed to be secret, but you can't argue that Room 641A is evidence of censorship . Better examples would be the DMCA, the FBI's seizure of child porn-related domains, the seizure of Silk Road, etc. Those things are actually censorship. Having CC p…

>Surveillance != censorship

Only if we ignore the chilling effect that surveillance has on the First Amendment.

Re: FCC Chairman: This Is How We Will Ensure Net Neutrality

#268

Post by kevin_thibedeau »

Alupis wrote: post #184
metaphorm wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

this isn't an act of congress though. its regulations that the FCC has the authority to create and implement. if Wheeler says thats how it is, then that's how it is. regulations can be challenged at court but until that happens they will stick.

> if Wheeler says thats how it is, then that's how it is Not entirely. It's a proposal, which must be voted on by the rest of the FCC committee. It's unlikely everyone on the committee will agree 100%, but I'd also contend it's unlikely for this to not pass in and around it's current state.

He got a 3/2 split on the redefinition of broadband with one of the yeas publicly admitting that she would have rather seen 100Mbit as the threshold. It stands to reason that this will pass too with the current committee makeup.

If the GOP wins 2016, however, the future may not be so bright once they install their pro-business people and fix all of this "Socialist" claptrap.

Re: FCC Chairman: This Is How We Will Ensure Net Neutrality

#269

Post by RockyMcNuts »

nostromo wrote: post #129

Apparently I'm in the minority here, but I have some concerns. 1) The problem this fixes is largely non-existent today. The threat of fast and slow-lanes is one I've yet to experience. 2) Opening the door for more internet regulation seems risky. At first, things may go swimmingly, but I suspect regulatory capture will creep up on this industry, just as it has so many others. You may trust Obama and the current FCC h…

non-existent? telcos have blocked all kinds of apps on mobile, from Facetime to tethering, and of course throttled Netflix.

http://lifehacker.com/5933152/the-right-to-tether-what-the-v...

http://www.savetheinternet.com/att-facetime

Re: FCC Chairman: This Is How We Will Ensure Net Neutrality

#270

Post by Raphael »

dragonwriter wrote: post #71
revscat wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ok, here it comes: but AT&T and Verizon are going to bring lawsuits immediately in response to this action, and due to years of stonewalling judicial appointments by Republicans, this suit is very likely to land in a court that is corporation-friendly, even if it does not wind up in the (also corporate friendly) Supreme Court. There is also the separate-but-related political reality that the Internet, as a vehicle of…

> Ok, here it comes: but AT&T and Verizon are going to bring lawsuits immediately in response to this action, and due to years of stonewalling judicial appointments by Republicans, this suit is very likely to land in a court that is corporation-friendly, even if it does not wind up in the (also corporate friendly) Supreme Court. A lot of the big proponents of net neutrality -- including specifically proponents of the…

It depends on the relative predictions of the profitability of neutrality vs. of non-neutrality.
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