Careful here boys and girls. Words matter, and the word to focus on in his statement is "lawful" content and services. What exactly is defined as lawful? Is porn lawful? What about torrents to pirated software? What about stuff the government just doesn't like. This same paragraph could be read in China and be just as accurate, but China has a very different definition of "lawful content and services".
FCC Chairman: This Is How We Will Ensure Net Neutrality
281–290 of 437 posts
Re: FCC Chairman: This Is How We Will Ensure Net Neutrality
#282Careful here boys and girls. Words matter, and the word to focus on in his statement is "lawful" content and services. What exactly is defined as lawful? Is porn lawful? What about torrents to pirated software? What about stuff the government just doesn't like. This same paragraph could be read in China and be just as accurate, but China has a very different definition of "lawful content and services".
Re: FCC Chairman: This Is How We Will Ensure Net Neutrality
#283Earlier 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'm really impressed with Wheeler. When he was nominated, all the news was about how he was a lobbyist for the cable companies, and it was a perfect example of cronyism. But he's really been knocking it out of the park. Aggressive on net neutrality, redefining broadband, trying to restore municipal Internet. I'm very glad to have been wrong about my initial impressions.
I don't know Wheeler, but don't understand why having been a lobbyist (or aspiring to be one again) would make him more "friendly" to that industry: The tougher he is on them, the more they should eventually be willing to pay him to switch sides again, right?
Re: FCC Chairman: This Is How We Will Ensure Net Neutrality
#284Earlier quoted context omitted.
This reads exceedingly well but the devil is in the detail. As we have seen countless times that there is significant difference between what gets proposed and what gets passed. As others have stated > will ban paid prioritization, and the blocking and throttling of lawful content and services. the keyword here is lawful. Will all content be lawful unless proven otherwise?
In this context, "lawful" is probably intended to refer to categories of content than any particular instance. That is, it leaves the door open for blocking known categories of unlawful content like child porn, pirated software, malware, and maybe spam. Depending on implementation, this could definitely be problematic -- e.g. will Comcast interpret this as carte blanche to block BitTorrent if the majority of BitTorre…
definitely not a gain for start ups considering the legal climate towards things like ride share.
> In this context, "lawful" is probably...
If I've learned anything about law and politics, its that you can practically toss the context. If it can be twisted, it will be twisted more ways than you can imagine. Something like 90+% of "terrorist" surveillance usage is used for non-violent drug crime and they don't even have to disclose it (if you really push, they'll give you 'parallel reconstruction').
I'm sure at one point, someone in DC said something along the lines of "We will only prevent terrorist activity" (where terrorist is at least related to terrorism... probably...)
Re: FCC Chairman: This Is How We Will Ensure Net Neutrality
#285Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm really impressed with Wheeler. When he was nominated, all the news was about how he was a lobbyist for the cable companies, and it was a perfect example of cronyism. But he's really been knocking it out of the park. Aggressive on net neutrality, redefining broadband, trying to restore municipal Internet. I'm very glad to have been wrong about my initial impressions.
I had the same initial impression. All I can think is that he was in "the business" for so long, he was able to see its pitfalls and shortcomings, and chose to take the high road and do right by The People. He sounds like a genuinely good person, rare in American politics.
He actually dealt with the initial skepticism about his background in a very straightforward way. In essence, he said "Yes, I was a cable lobbyist, but that a long time ago, when cable companies were very much the outsiders with a crazy seeming business model ("Pay? For TV?") and navigating the maze of telco regulations was a matter of life-or-death. Now my former clients are big and on the inside. It's a very different world. The point is, I actually understand what life is like for those on the outside looking in, and my commitment is to the next generation of people in that position."
Again, I'm paraphrasing. And I had no idea (at the time) whether he was being sincere, or just really slick in his deflections. As of today it's looking like the former, and not the latter.
Re: FCC Chairman: This Is How We Will Ensure Net Neutrality
#286Earlier quoted context omitted.
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
Thanks again John Oliver!
Re: FCC Chairman: This Is How We Will Ensure Net Neutrality
#287Earlier 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'm really impressed with Wheeler. When he was nominated, all the news was about how he was a lobbyist for the cable companies, and it was a perfect example of cronyism. But he's really been knocking it out of the park. Aggressive on net neutrality, redefining broadband, trying to restore municipal Internet. I'm very glad to have been wrong about my initial impressions.
> When he was nominated, all the news was about how he was a lobbyist for the cable companies, and it was a perfect example of cronyism
That's because much of the tech press prefers sensationalism to get clicks over accurate reporting to inform readers. Here's a comment I made last week on another forum that covers what the tech press should have told us about Wheeler a long time ago, but didn't.
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It's important to note when he worked for cable. Much of the reporting in the tech press gives the impression he came straight from some high paid lobbying job with Comcast to the FCC.
In reality, he didn't work for any one cable company, but rather was the president of their main trade association, and that was from 1976 to 1984. That was a time when the internet was still just for military, defense contractors, and major computer science and engineering universities. There were around 1000 computers on the internet then. The opening up of the internet for civilians, starting with the creation of NSFNet by the National Science Foundation, wasn't to start until 1985, and it wasn't until 1992 that the web was released.
So when he was a cable guy, it was all about television. Cable as an industry was also much smaller than it is now, and it was divided among many more companies. They were the upstarts, challenging the big broadcasters. Being pro-cable was arguably being pro-consumer.
From 1992 to 2004, he was president of CTIA, the main cellular trade group. By then, the public internet was well under way, but it was mostly wired. Internet on phones was available, but it was more of a novelty or an expensive luxury, with voice and text being the main interest most people had in cellular. CTIA lobbied, of course, but they also had a major role in setting technology standards. Wheeler represented the industry in discussions with the FCC to draft the rules that we now have for cellular voice, which in retrospect worked out well (and are the basis for the Title II proposal he's expected to reveal).
It's also important to note that cell phones in 1992, when he joined CTIA, were not nearly as common as they are today. There was much less infrastructure in place, and you paid by the minute. They were past the point where you'd stare openly in wonder if you saw someone with one, but still were something you had to work to find a good reason to justify their purchase.
The key thing to note here is that when he has worked as a sort-of lobbyist (I say "sort-of" because both times he was president of a trade association that had lobbying as just one function), it was for industries that were young and had a lot of promise to bring great things to consumers, and his work for those industries as far as I've been able to tell helped consumers, and the customers of those industries were better off when he left than when he started.
He seems to basically be a telecom policy nerd. Heck, he even does telecom stuff in his non-professional capacity. Only a telecom nerd would write a 250 page book called "Mr. Lincoln's T-Mails: The Untold Story of How Abraham Lincoln Used the Telegraph to Win the Civil War" [1].
[1] http://www.amazon.com/Mr-Lincolns-T-Mails-Abraham-Telegraph/...
Re: FCC Chairman: This Is How We Will Ensure Net Neutrality
#288Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's ignorant to seize on one line of a political appointee's 40-year resume to insist they'll be corrupt when there is considerable evidence to the contrary. Wheeler kept a blog for years about all of his thoughts regarding telecom regulation, but it's much easier to call him a dingo and assume he's evil than it is to do research and develop a true picture of his intentions. Unfortunately, his blog has lapsed, but s…
Alan Greenspan once championed the gold standard, that obviously didn't last forever. >It's ignorant to seize on one line of a political appointee's 40-year resume People are often defined by their most recent accomplishment(s) (unless a worse one can be dredged up from the past). I try to keep myself informed of current events, but I'm not always as successful as I would like, and I've not got unlimited time to go d…
> If they were so central to Wheeler's philosophy why did they not receive more recent attention?
I don't mean to imply that you're a lazy cynic, just that the easily digestible stories on HN (especially political ones) are often lazy and cynical.
"OMG, I just saw John Oliver, did you know Wheeler was a lobbyist for the cable companies!?"
vs.
Acknowledging that he was a lobbyist for the NCTA during the Jimmy Carter administration and realizing that his more recent lobbying work was for the CTIA - (Still over 10 years ago) - where they were trying to free up more spectrum to enable wireless broadband.
For the past 10 years, he worked with a VC firm that invested hundreds of millions into tech companies. Wheeler personally sat on the board of Earthlink, InPhonic, and Telephia...
I'm not sure why the narrative was so far off the mark but I gave up trying to correct it a long time ago. Rest assured though, there at least a few people that weren't surprised whatsoever about Wheeler's pro-consumer actions.
Re: FCC Chairman: This Is How We Will Ensure Net Neutrality
#289Earlier 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.
The ISPs did not love the first proposal.
Re: FCC Chairman: This Is How We Will Ensure Net Neutrality
#290Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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.
Good. Why people want the government's hand's deeper in the internet than now is beyond me.
Look at mobile data (exempt from title II) versus "broadband"/cable speeds.
Wheeler actually points to the success of title II on "mobile" while ignoring the fact that it only applied to voice. Meanwhile, all the relevant growth and innovation occurred in data.
I have to say I'ld like to see the "socialist claptrap", feel-good crap, out of here.
Lastly, who thinks the people have a leg to stand on versus the NSA and privacy if the government has more control over the internet?
http://reason.com/blog/2015/02/04/the-bad-argument-behind-th...