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FCC Passes Strict Net Neutrality Regulations on 3-2 Vote

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Re: FCC Passes Strict Net Neutrality Regulations on 3-2 Vote

#531

Post by chaostheory »

codyb wrote: post #490
chaostheory wrote: post #465

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wouldn't drastically increased competition solve problem one over time?

Possibly but it hinges a lot on drastically increased in an often prohibitively expensive commercial sector and it would take a lot longer than enforcing one, and then encouraging competition to bring speeds up and overall cost of bandwidth down for consumers. And there's been lots of no compete agreements among these ISPs and I'm sure there's other examples out there where the "competition" makes it better for all o…

well there was one attempt by Clinton to have the gov fund increased capacity... and the telecoms just ended up taking the money without doing anything

http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/2007/pulpit_20070810_0026...

I believe the Obama admin tried it again. I don't know the full result, but I wouldn't be surprised if the same thing happened.

Re: FCC Passes Strict Net Neutrality Regulations on 3-2 Vote

#532

Post by plaguuuuuu »

chaostheory wrote: post #465
grecy wrote: post #463

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are two problems, and the FCC has solved one of them perfectly. Problem 1: ISPs trying to charge to (de)prioritize packets. Problem 2: The two biggest ISPs suck, and should be broken up, and/or it should be mandated that competition is much easier. Would you be happy if they solved problem 2 without solving problem 1? Leave problem 2 for another day, and celebrate that problem 1 has been dealt with.

Wouldn't drastically increased competition solve problem one over time?

'Competition' isn't the panacea solving all problems that some make it out to be.

Re: FCC Passes Strict Net Neutrality Regulations on 3-2 Vote

#533

Post by Karunamon »

novalis78 wrote: post #527
Karunamon wrote: post #393

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Competition requires a "free open market", which isn't a thing that exists, and it depends on a knowledgeable and informed consumer base, which also isn't a thing that exists, and this all depends upon there being choice in the marketplace, which as has been demonstrated ad nauseum, also isn't a thing that exists. Hence regulation.

What if the free market in telecommunication does not exist "yet" or is, due to a long history of regulation and government involvement, inhibited, we need to add another bureaucratic layer? If Google Fiber shows up in my neighborhood and Comcast did everything to upset us, would not we all switch and Comcast realize that it needs to adjust (its service, pricing, quality, speed)? I guess my difficulty lies in not und…

Two decades is a long time to set up a market, to be honest. And in that time, there have been fewer choices in the market, with smaller companies being regularly gobbled up into large conglomerates with astoundingly bad customer satisfaction the result.

or is, due to a long history of regulation and government involvement, inhibited

And this is really begging the question, in the fallacious sense.

Where does this "bureaucratic layer" argument come from? The only telcos that are going to be burdened by these regs are ones who are already doing shady stuff. In other words, the ones that need to be.

And on a more visceral and arational level? Fuck 'em. Fuck Comcast, fuck Verizon. They had years to get their house in order, and it wasn't regulation preventing them from doing so. It wasn't regulation that gives Comcast the worst customer satisfaction scores in the entire industry. It wasn't regulation that made Comcast's "capacity" problems magically disappear when Google Fiber shows up in the same city. It wasn't regulation that made Comcast acquire and abuse what amounts to a monopoly position. It wasn't regulation that made Verizon run what amounts to a protection racket on Netflix.

Nobody put a gun to the CEO's heads and said "be the biggest bastards you possibly can" - they managed to do that quite well with minimal government involvement.

Perhaps this market warrants a different approach because it's demonstrably broken and because the internet is more akin to infrastructure than a consumer good.

Re: FCC Passes Strict Net Neutrality Regulations on 3-2 Vote

#534

Post by dragonwriter »

xrange wrote: post #499
keslag wrote: post #316

Okay, as a Canadian with no dog in this fight, this seems to be a good thing for America. So I'm having a very hard time understanding the opposition. The arguments for title II are pretty clear and logical. The arguments against include giving up personal freedoms (You live in America, you've been giving up most of your personal freedoms willing for the pack two decades) and this isn't one of them. There are some co…

As an American, with an uncertain dog in this fight, could someone explain the pro side to net neutrality? I can certainly see that in theory if your ISP is providing you a bit pipe, they shouldn't treat different bits differently. But the status quo seems like it has been working remarkably well for the last 20 years (at least from my perspective). It seems like the big hub-bub is that one of the hated cable compani…

> It seems like the big hub-bub is that one of the hated cable companies is slowing down Netflix traffic to extract a ransom from Netflix.

The combination of limitation choice and blocking policies are actually the big thing -- Netflix specifically and "ransom"/paid prioritization are recent aspects of that debate, but it really goes back to things like Comcast blocking Bittorrent, and many ISPs having rules governing what kind of applications users are permitted to use on their connection.

> Is this really a government concern that potentially some people won't be able to stream "House of Cards" without buffering?

No, the government concern is that incumbent ISPs (who often face very little local competition) will use blocking and/or paid prioritization policies to inhibit competition with their own services (many of the major incumbents also offer their own services, like streaming video services, cable TV service, phone service, etc., for which services offered over the public internet by other providers are competition.)

> Apparently there exists a technical fix by using a VPN

In the absence of the no-blocking rule, VPNs could be blocked by ISPs, thwarting this workaround.

> Why wouldn't the customers complain to/blame their ISPs just as much as Netflix?

Lack of significant competition means that you don't have to care that people are complaining to or blaming you.

Re: FCC Passes Strict Net Neutrality Regulations on 3-2 Vote

#535

Post by yarou »

chaostheory wrote: post #465
grecy wrote: post #463

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are two problems, and the FCC has solved one of them perfectly. Problem 1: ISPs trying to charge to (de)prioritize packets. Problem 2: The two biggest ISPs suck, and should be broken up, and/or it should be mandated that competition is much easier. Would you be happy if they solved problem 2 without solving problem 1? Leave problem 2 for another day, and celebrate that problem 1 has been dealt with.

Wouldn't drastically increased competition solve problem one over time?

No, because telecom specifically has very high barriers to entry (infrastructure, licensing, etc).

Re: FCC Passes Strict Net Neutrality Regulations on 3-2 Vote

#536

Post by zbyte64 »

orthecreedence wrote: post #272
covzzire wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why couldn't we just get congress to pass a law stating that ISP's cannot throttle one type of content in favor of another? Why this heavy handed approach?

You mean Title X? The vaguely-worded proposal, hand-written by the telecoms, to castrate the FCC's ability to regulate, and to impose a set of exploitable loopholes that are difficult to reverse once in effect? After seeing the absolute ignorance congress has of the internet, how it works, who uses it, how it benefits the country/world, and why it's important, the last thing I want is those people voting on new inter…

*direct money influence

Re: FCC Passes Strict Net Neutrality Regulations on 3-2 Vote

#537

Post by wwweston »

nsxwolf wrote: post #519
grecy wrote: post #463

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are two problems, and the FCC has solved one of them perfectly. Problem 1: ISPs trying to charge to (de)prioritize packets. Problem 2: The two biggest ISPs suck, and should be broken up, and/or it should be mandated that competition is much easier. Would you be happy if they solved problem 2 without solving problem 1? Leave problem 2 for another day, and celebrate that problem 1 has been dealt with.

Did problem 1 really need 700 distinct new regulations to be solved?

This is a probematic comment in any forum, but I'd think it'd be especially unwelcome in a forum filled with programmers.

Because even assuming it's true that there are 700 new distinct regulations, programmers should know better than to use regulations as a pejorative or high numbers of them as a proxy bugaboo. We're people whose job includes filling text editors with regulations specifying the inputs, tranformations, and actions of a program. Defining entities and creating specifications and rules for how they behave is how we make systems.

700 lines of code is generally a pretty low number for doing anything complex. 700 pages of code wouldn't write you a bot to regulate network communications businesses. If the current FCC produces that much writing about how they plan to do things, it says nothing about the quality of their plans.

Re: FCC Passes Strict Net Neutrality Regulations on 3-2 Vote

#538

Post by Karunamon »

meragrin wrote: post #450
Karunamon wrote: post #395

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps if a significant amount of the new accounts were not parroting discredited anti-neutrality talking points.. It's a pretty simple calculus. Some fairly influential people hang out here, and monied interests have been screaming their heads off that they don't want this. With that in mind, it's a lot more likely that shilling and astroturfing is going on than it is not. Whether that applies to you or not cannot…

Here's the breakdown of new accounts I noticed: 4 for NN (not necessarily for the FCC action) 1 against 1 unknown 1 ambiguous Unless you have a different definition of new account, it is not even close to 'all but universally'. Edit: I'm still not seeing how your edit applies. There was only one new person I saw that would even come close to 'parroting discredited anti-neutrality talking points'.

We disagree on your characterization of the posters.

Re: FCC Passes Strict Net Neutrality Regulations on 3-2 Vote

#539

Post by zymhan »

paulhauggis wrote: post #454

Something everyone is forgetting is the FCC regulation of radio. It was a little like Net-neutrality today. Radio stations needed to be regulated because they could crank up the wattage and overpower smaller radio stations. It needed to be regulated and the intent was to just focus on the infrastructure, not the content. What happened? Speech deemed immoral is banned from the radio waves and content is clearly being…

Radio waves are different than wireline Internet. The FCC regulates radio because there is a limited amount of usable frequencies, and these are supposed to belong to the people, so they need to be distributed and managed by a central organization. Any since the Supreme Court has ruled that the FCC has the legal authority to enforce censorship, we're stuck with it.

Radio is also different because it is a broadcast medium. Any person who turns on their radio will hear what is being broadcast. Internet communication is much more analogous to a phone or mail conversation than radio or TV.

The Internet is totally different. No one has (reasonably) claimed that Title II regulation provides for the FCC to censor what is transmitted. The FCC doesn't censor phone calls now, why would they censor the Internet using the same rules?

Re: FCC Passes Strict Net Neutrality Regulations on 3-2 Vote

#540

Post by Karunamon »

Zebra20 wrote: post #411
tzs wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I wouldn't sign a contract without reading it (and having the person on the other side telling me all of the reasons why I should), and neither should you. But apparently, the general population (and many here) will. You were told this was wrong yesterday, and I know you saw that because you responded. Why are you still repeating it? Once again, we will all have plenty of time to read these regulations before they…

1. This is the news release from today: http://www.fcc.gov/document/fcc-adopts-strong-sustainable-ru... on the last page, you can see the docket number, which is 14-28. 2. This is the docket page for 14-28. http://apps.fcc.gov/ecfs/proceeding/view?name=14-28 3. In the FCC filings section, you can see that the NPRM was filed May 2014. This sets the comment period to July 2014, and the comment reply period to September…

It appears you're correct, but the news release specifically mentions that which bits and pieces of title II are going to be implemented and which will be under forbearance. Since those laws are already public, what rules are not being clearly defined, here?
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