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FCC moves ahead with Title II net neutrality rules in 3-2 party-line vote

arstechnica.com

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Re: FCC moves ahead with Title II net neutrality rules in 3-2 party-line vote

#141

Post by zamalek »

criddell wrote: post #109
ericmay wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yea that's probably an example - those companies get preferential treatment on the network w.r.t traffic and so competitors have a harder time entering the market.

But if they simply give you a free subscription without any kind traffic shenanigans, it's not a net neutrality issue?

> without any kind traffic shenanigans, it's not a net neutrality issue?

Yep.

But they do rate-limit people: https://www.t-mobile.com/support/plans-features/activate-hd-...

If you're on the top plan then you haven't experienced it. The irony is that T-Mobile was one of the ISPs throwing support behind net-neutrality, and now they are one of the most aggressive net discriminators.

Re: FCC moves ahead with Title II net neutrality rules in 3-2 party-line vote

#142

Post by snuxoll »

FireBeyond wrote: post #132
swashboon wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This was why Netflix setup Fast.com to use production servers and use data loads that mimic actual streaming video. Early on in streaming ISPs were throttling Netflix traffic when the household streaming demands started spiking (around 6 at night when every house in America would get home and turn on some streams). I believe there was a whole fight over peering agreements related to that... Speedtest.net was definite…

> Speedtest.net was definitely getting gamed and may still be or at least Comcast et al was prioritizing burst traffic Hell, during the height of this Comcast partnered with Speedtest, and now hav their own Speedtest servers all over the country, so you don't even leave Comcast's network.

> Hell, during the height of this Comcast partnered with Speedtest, and now hav their own Speedtest servers all over the country, so you don't even leave Comcast's network.

Most ISP's do, and if you tell it to use the server of some other provider off-net they'll happily make the excuse that "we can only guarantee bandwidth to the edge of our network."

It's a crap excuse, because, duh, you have no control over the path traffic takes once it leaves your AS on hopefully the best route - but if you have poor connectivity to your peers that's still on you.

Re: FCC moves ahead with Title II net neutrality rules in 3-2 party-line vote

#143

Post by mywittyname »

kstrauser wrote: post #77
connicpu wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Whether they do or do not have the authority isn't something that can be answered by anything but speculation until it's been tested in court, and I don't think any of the ISPs had enough to gain through packet prioritization that it was worth the risk of going to court.

It's been tested and upheld in court. From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_Internet_Consumer_P... : "Ninth Circuit ruled unanimously in January 2022 that California's net neutrality law may continue to be enforced and cannot be overridden by the FCC as, current as of the decision, Internet services were classified as information services."

There's still one more higher court that can overturn that decision - SCOTUS. They could conceivably rule that no government agency, state or federal, has the ability to enforce such regulations.

Re: FCC moves ahead with Title II net neutrality rules in 3-2 party-line vote

#144

Post by hn_acker »

98codes wrote: post #8

> Title II regulation isn't just about net neutrality, Rosenworcel said, arguing that the reclassification will give the FCC more authority to protect national security on broadband networks. "When we stripped state-affiliated companies from China of their authority to operate in the United States, that action did not extend to broadband services, thanks to the retreat from Title II. This is a national security looph…

My impression is that Commissioner Rosenworcel is just being performative. Let's be clear that net neutrality has only incidental relevance to national security. (At most, a rare national security issue would result from something similar to what happened when Verizon throttled emergency responders [1].) Also, in case anyone else brings the following up, net neutrality has nothing to do with government censorship of speech. Moreover, the FCC does not have authority to regulate speech on the internet (or any private speech at all, after the FCC repealed the misleadingly named Fairness Doctrine [2]).

Even if you have a problem with other parts of Title II, net neutrality is a net good for consumers. Or, it would be if the FCC believed in fighting for consumers in the first place [3]:

> And while Democratic FCC Commissioners Jessica Rosenworcel and Geoffrey Starks talk a good game about bridging the “digital divide” and addressing the “homework gap” (a lack of affordable broadband for kids), they generally lack the courage to even identify that concentrated monopoly power is the primary reason US broadband is spotty, slow, and expensive. It’s a political risk to do so.

[1] https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2018/08/verizon-throttle...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FCC_fairness_doctrine

[3] https://www.techdirt.com/2023/07/14/finally-close-to-having-...

Re: FCC moves ahead with Title II net neutrality rules in 3-2 party-line vote

#145

Post by mywittyname »

connicpu wrote: post #59
ilyt wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also see emission standards.

Exactly. Even if their laws only technically apply within California, no car maker is going to build a car that cannot be legally sold in the single largest market in the US. It gets even more difficult with the internet as there are few internet providers who don't have at least some kind of connection to California and therefore fall under its jurisdiction, and ensuring you only apply prioritization to packets that…

These emissions regulations don't cover just California, but most of New England, the Pacific, and the mid-Atlantic states as well. I think New York has a way to "fast track" new emissions laws from California, so that the states are kept in sync.

"California cars" were a thing in the early days when emissions were difficult to comply with. Even modern cars come with a "50-state compliant emissions" line item on the window sticker.

If California ratcheted up emissions standards too high, there's the possibility that such segregation could emerge again, particularly when it comes to trucks. There are already several trim levels of trucks that are specific to Texas, because the market there is so big. I could see a truck coming with a sticker that says, "RAM TRX can not be registered or sold in CA, WI, NY, [...] due to emissions restrictions."

Re: FCC moves ahead with Title II net neutrality rules in 3-2 party-line vote

#146

Post by hn_acker »

Facemelters wrote: post #64
ImJamal wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would you think it was a federal law domain? The federal government is technically only allowed to do what is granted in the Constitution. The 10th amendment says anything else is left to the states. Last I checked nothing in the constitution mentioned the internet. Not that the federal government lets that stand in their way.

The internet pretty squarely falls under the Commerce Clause

Internet communications which exit/enter the state do, but there's still the issue of communications which stay within the state. The states have Congress-given authority to regulate intrastate (not interstate) internet communications. Moreover, by reclassifying broadband from Title II to Title I, the FCC gave up the part of its authority that allowed it to preempt state net neutrality laws. I wrote more on this technicality in a different comment [1].

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37946794

Re: FCC moves ahead with Title II net neutrality rules in 3-2 party-line vote

#147

Post by mptest »

arghnoname wrote: post #127
RankingMember wrote: post #118

This is exactly the kind of thing I point to when disaffected people say that voting for Democrat or Republican presidents makes no difference. I'm not saying either are roses, but one has clearly different results in unsexy-but-important issues like net neutrality.

It's not clear to me which party is more supportive of a 'free' internet. During the Trump and COVID era Democrats became much more aggressive in advocating for and explicitly pushing censorship regimes against what they consider to be misinformation. Probably any political faction on earth is going to want to control information flows to their advantage. Whoever you vote for will probably want to censor or limit the…

Side A : repeals net neutrality

Side B: Puts net neutrality in place.

You: "It's not clear to me how these are different."

Seriously? You have to be kidding or downright silly to be an enlightened centrist in this situation.

Re: FCC moves ahead with Title II net neutrality rules in 3-2 party-line vote

#148

Post by archontes »

arghnoname wrote: post #127
RankingMember wrote: post #118

This is exactly the kind of thing I point to when disaffected people say that voting for Democrat or Republican presidents makes no difference. I'm not saying either are roses, but one has clearly different results in unsexy-but-important issues like net neutrality.

It's not clear to me which party is more supportive of a 'free' internet. During the Trump and COVID era Democrats became much more aggressive in advocating for and explicitly pushing censorship regimes against what they consider to be misinformation. Probably any political faction on earth is going to want to control information flows to their advantage. Whoever you vote for will probably want to censor or limit the…

If I were able to convince a large swath of the population to participate in a suicide ritual a la Heaven's Gate, do you think that it's wrong to quash the spread of that message on the internet?

Re: FCC moves ahead with Title II net neutrality rules in 3-2 party-line vote

#149

Post by godelski »

SllX wrote: post #114
godelski wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What I’ve never understood is the argument that what California does regulating ISPs could actually affect the service plans in 49 other States. What I've never understood is the argument that what Europe does regarding privacy could actually affect the privacy of other countries. Sure, some websites detect your location and apply different rules to you but a lot end up just following GDPR and apply it universally…

Except for the fact that the facts are different. When you sign up with an ISP, you’re signing up for a guaranteed service at a physical location with defined jurisdictional borders and laws governing it. My ISP throttling their New York customers who try to use Netflix isn’t going to affect me. Honestly throttling their Oregon customers wouldn’t either. This is factually different from Facebook who serves people ind…

> When you sign up with an ISP, you’re signing up for a guaranteed service at a physical location with defined jurisdictional borders

It's messier than that. This works if all NY, OR, gets its traffic distributed through a guaranteed hub in those locations. Specifically when you know the end point of the user. Let's just take the simple case and say a Google employee sitting in a CA office is working with a Microsoft employee sitting in a WA office and assume OR has a throttling service. The hubs along the way are Seattle, Vancoover, Portland, Eugene, Redding, SF. Do the Portland and Eugene servers throttle? To do this they'd need to know: 1) the source destination, 2) the final destination, 3) the type of traffic, 4) the type of service, and so on. Are they going to have that? Probably not. And then it'd be trivial to get around if you start using encrypted traffic and encrypted DNS services. The ISPs just can't do that wish such granularity that they don't risk being sued by CA.

> Also just to make a note on GDPR, one of the screwy things about it is that covers EU citizens.

A note on the CA thing, the DOJ and several ISP lobby groups tried to get CA's law overturned at a federal level immediately after it was passed. It's been upheld. So they kinda already looked at a solution that strongly implies what the parent implied about other states likely implementing similar laws were the ISPs to start such fuckery.

CA here isn't just acting as a filter in that they do a thing and so having to work around them is more cost than its worth. They are _also_ an example, where they tried to get the laws overturned and failed. So they don't want to get any more similar laws in other states because that will have even more of an effect and tighten what they can do even further.

Re: FCC moves ahead with Title II net neutrality rules in 3-2 party-line vote

#150

Post by godelski »

mywittyname wrote: post #140
godelski wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What I’ve never understood is the argument that what California does regulating ISPs could actually affect the service plans in 49 other States. What I've never understood is the argument that what Europe does regarding privacy could actually affect the privacy of other countries. Sure, some websites detect your location and apply different rules to you but a lot end up just following GDPR and apply it universally…

I know for a fact there are tech companies that build out separate systems for EU and US data pipelines. It's not really a big deal to have a lawyer look over the data that's being collected and flag stuff as can be collected in Europe, and can be migrated to the USA for processing. Companies generally run EU-specific infrastructure anyway. GDPR is honestly one of the easier aspects of operating in Europe.

> I know for a fact there are tech companies that build out separate systems for EU and US data pipelines.

Great, me too. I thought it was clear in my first sentence...

>> Sure, some websites detect your location and apply different rules to you but a lot end up just following GDPR and apply it universally because it is easier and cheaper to do

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