Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

arstechnica.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

151–160 of 202 posts

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

#151

Post by hn_acker »

talent_deprived wrote: post #41
a2tech wrote: post #3

Fantastic is all I can say.

> the reclassification will give the FCC more authority to protect national security on broadband networks. It's good? Did you catch the part about "give the FCC more authority"?

Be careful about how short you cut quotes. "give the FCC more authority" is irrelevant in a vacuum. "more authority to protect national security" is worrying, but to me comes off as performative nonsense and overstepping authority on Commissioner Rosenworcel's part. The FCC does not have authority to censor speech. And the FCC does not control surveillance by ISPs. (The NSA [1] does, and the FBI takes advantage of it [2].)

What the FCC does need is the authority to restore net neutrality laws, which it can't have without reclassifying ISPs back to Title II. Admittedly, Congress would do well to pass legislation declaring ISPs utilities and giving the FCC the authority to enforce net neutrality without invoking Title II.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Room_641A

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_security_letter#Conte...

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

#152

Post by WarOnPrivacy »

smolder wrote: post #71
WarOnPrivacy wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There was at least one major (non-residential) ISP that used Huawei routers in a lot of places. Due to the previous law/rulings they were required to replace all of them with non-prohibited vendors. That ISP not be fulfilling that requirement due to insufficient funding. https://www.lightreading.com/regulatory-politics/-rip-and-re...

At any point, will any company say that they have sufficient funding, subsidies, etc.? ("You've given us enough, thank you!") Plainly, I don't believe they need or deserve that money merely because they have lobbyists/bought politicians that say they do.

> Plainly, I don't believe they need or deserve that money merely because they have lobbyists/bought politicians that say they do.

The small ISPs need sufficient money to comply with federal orders to rip & replace expensive Huawei gear.

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

#153

Post by slaymaker1907 »

rich_sasha wrote: post #82

Not an American: what is the non-libertarian public-facing argument against net neutrality? I'm sure its opponents say it's bad for the general public for some reason, and one of them might be some kind of "let market competition work it out" etc. If you discard that, what is left? There is probably also the argument that various businesses want this repealed, this is kind of clear.

Some applications want extremely low latency compared to pretty much anything else such as cloud gaming. Net neutrality rules might get in the way of a cloud gaming service negotiating with an ISP to route their traffic more efficiently. It's kind of like how when ordering stuff online, sometimes you don't care if it takes 3 weeks to arrive but other times you want same day shipping. It would be a bad experience if USPS was forced to only offer one priority class for delivery since people ok with slower delivery would be forced to pay for faster service than they need and people wanting faster delivery wouldn't have that option.

However, I think rules could be put in place to prevent the anti-competitive practices without limiting the legitimate use cases for going against net neutrality.

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

#154

Post by kstrauser »

mywittyname wrote: post #143
kstrauser wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That's fair. SCOTUS is a roll of the dice lately, and there's no way of telling what crazy rulings they might back. As far as I know, though, that ruling hasn't been appealed.

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

#155

Post by dragonwriter »

mywittyname wrote: post #143
kstrauser wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That there was a hail mary appeal to the Supreme Court possible that they elected not to pursue does not negate that the issue is clearly not that the broadband ISPs didn’t see “enough to gain through packet prioritization that it was worth the risk of going to court”.

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

#156

Post by dragonwriter »

connicpu wrote: post #119
wddkcs wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Funny if the benefit was that negligible when it seems like they fought for it so hard originally.

Lobbying can be extremely cheap when compared to actually fighting a court battle

The broadband industry actually fought, and lost, a court battle on this, too.

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

#157

Post by dragonwriter »

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

Even when conduct could Constitutionally be regulated by the federal government under the Commerce Clause, that doesn't preclude state regulation unless Congress has (1) specificallly regulated that states may not regulate, or (2) has regulated in a way which the State regulations at issue would fundamentally conflict with.

So, yes, the internet is Constititionally a thing the federal government can regulate, but that doesn't make it Constitutionally a thing state governments can not regulate.

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

#158

Post by hn_acker »

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…

While you bring up important points, they take away nothing from the merits of restoring the FCC's authority to restore net neutrality rules, and the FCC's authority as a whole has nothing to do with misinformation on the internet. Moreover, I think that courts will strike down Democrats' unconstitutional speech laws (such as [1], should it ever pass) at least as reliably as they strike down Republicans' book bans [2].

> 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 reach of the speech of their enemies. The parties don't have actual principles on this stuff--vote for whomever has the same enemies as you I guess.

I'm reminded once again of why I dislike the political party system in the US. Principles are not necessary for candidates to win votes, and the political parties don't value people with principles, such as Gigi Sohn with respect to internet access policy [3].

[1] https://www.techdirt.com/2021/07/23/senators-klobuchar-lujan...

[2] https://www.techdirt.com/2023/07/31/judge-blocks-unconstitut...

[3] https://www.techdirt.com/2023/03/08/gigi-sohns-full-statemen...

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

#159

Post by hn_acker »

archontes wrote: post #148
arghnoname wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

It is not wrong for websites to restrict certain information by their own choice. It is wrong - unconstitutional, even - for the government to force them to do so. You should read a bit about Brandenburg v. Ohio, 395 U.S. 444 (1969) [1] and Hess v. Indiana, 414 U.S. 105 (1973) [2]. (By the way, suicide is not lawless action anyway. Whether advocacy of it is lawless is a different matter, but likely free speech.)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brandenburg_v._Ohio

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hess_v._Indiana

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

#160

Post by wredue »

pyuser583 wrote: post #11

Did any of the bad effects of not having net neutrality actually occur when it was gone? Did ISPs throttle competition? I haven’t seen any reports of this happening. I haven’t seen any studies showing this happening systematically. I’m woefully uninformed, so I really would like to hear more about this. What has been happening these past few years?

Do you trust providers without net neutrality codified in to law?

I sure as shit do not.

Post reply on HN