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the agency plans to impose more regulations on Web-access providers after a court stripped the agency of its powers last month. What does that mean? Which pow

by jfager 16y ago

the agency plans to impose more regulations on Web-access providers after a court stripped the agency of its powers last month. What does that mean? Which powers were stripped? How can they impose more regulations if they have less power?

showerst 16y ago
If I'm reading it right, basically the courts said that the FCC doesn't have the right to regulate internet providers like they do common carriers (like phone networks), so they're just going to reclassify them as common carriers, then regulate them. IMHO this is probably huge for net neutrality, but I wonder where their (generally accepted) efforts at traffic shaping will end up in all of this? I'm not sure anyone wants broadband that can't throttle its bittorrent users a little.
- swombat 16y ago
  I'm not sure anyone wants broadband that can't throttle its bittorrent users a little. Why would your 24MBit/s work slower for bit-torrent than other uses? The whole point of this net neutrality debate is that ISPs have no business deciding which traffic they prefer, much like your phone company has no business deciding which one of your friends you're allowed to call.
  - tedunangst 16y ago
    If my neighbor is downloading a torrent for 3 hours, it hardly matters whether it arrives in 3:04 or 3:05. But if I'm browsing HN or email, the difference between 0.1 seconds and 1.0 seconds is quite perceptible.
    - gte910h 16y ago
      They don't throttle those guys a little. They throttle them a lot.
  - gte910h 16y ago
    The issue is that network advertisers don't have the bandwidth they say they do. So they really can't give everyone 24 sustained, only burst.
    - lukev 16y ago
      God forbid they actually advertise their real and burst rates instead of picking a completely unrealistic, sky-high number.
    - randallsquared 16y ago
      And the reason most heavy users do not complain very loudly about this false advertising is that we are benefactors, since our heavy internet usage is subsidized by those that only browse the web a bit and get email, but still want 25 Mbps because it's "more" than 2 Mbps.
- westbywest 16y ago
  I'm not sure anyone wants broadband that can't throttle its bittorrent users a little. I comment in agreement with the need to maintain QoS for reasons of network health, especially if you need to maintain minimum guaranteed bandwidth in the presence of misbehaving clients (e.g. botnets, ping floods, not just abusive torrenters). However, the carriers in questions have often not been using QoS for reasons of improving service, but rather to penalize the percentage of broadband users who actually use a large portion of the bandwidth they're paying for. For example, say you buy 1.5Mbit DSL and then carefully set up your torrent client to use a consistent 1.0Mbit during nighttime. A month later you get a disconnect notice from your ISP claiming that you were hogging bandwidth, probably leaving you SOL since that's the only viable ISP in your area. This is the sort of business practice the FCC is trying to address.
  - fnid2 16y ago
    You aren't SOL, you can stop using so much bandwidth. You can be a conscientious user of shared resources. Using a constant stream like that is almost always a bit lacking in legitimacy. It usually means you are using the service in ways that your service plan wasn't designed to be used, either you're downloading and/or sharing large, perhaps copyrighted videos, music, or software, or you are running a server for gaming or something like that. Those 1.5Mbit DSL is "maximum capacity." Not what you should try to consume. Ultimately, all the customers go through one pipe, or a shared few pipes, so those hogging the lines negatively affect others. In my opinion, it's the users of the bandwidth that are greedy. Do they really need 1,000 movies on their hard drives? Many bit torrenters have more content than they could ever watch in their entire lives...
    - lutorm 16y ago
      Strawman argument. If I break the law, charge me. Otherwise you have no business second-guessing what I transfer over the line I pay for. If they don't want people to use the bandwith they pay to get, they should say so by advertising their monthly cap or whatever. The idea that I can only transfer the particular types of bits across the wire that my ISP thinks I should is exactly the point of net neutrality rules. If that's not an infringement of free speech, I don't know what is.
DanielBMarkham 16y ago
The agency gets to classify new technology in different buckets. They put the ISPs in the data provider bucket. So the providers started screwing people over depending on what kind of bits they wanted to get over the net -- the beginning of some god-awful 74-thousand tiered pricing structure. Lots of fuss about that. FCC tries to step in. Court says nope, in that bucket you don't have the authority to act. So the FCC puts them in new bucket. Huge part of the economy now regulated and nobody had to elect anybody, there was no bill, no debate, no nothing (And I support this, but damn it's a freaking Faustian bargain if I ever saw one)
- francoisdevlin 16y ago
  Eh, it's not as bad as you think. We (congress) gave the FCC the authority to do this. Granted, we didn't quite understand the implications when we did, but it is still a democratic process.
  - DanielBMarkham 16y ago
    LOL. Yes, I understand how the regulatory process works. Apologies if I seemed to mislead anyone. There is nothing unconstitutional going on. But that doesn't take away from the fact that the regulatory agencies have immense power in our society -- granted to them by Congress. For instance, the DEA can classify new drugs as dangerous, including setting what the jail time will be for possession -- and Congress has virtually no role[1]. Used to be it took an entire constitutional amendment to outlaw alcohol, but now a commission does the same work and there's little publicity. [1] Ok, so they have "oversight", but as somebody who has seen oversight behind the scenes, and watched a lot of it on C-SPAN, color me unimpressed. EDIT: Another good one is the EPA classifying CO2 -- the air we breathe -- as being under it's regulatory guidance. Now they made provision so that it only covers large producers of CO2, but that was their decision as an agency. There was no public debate or vote in Congress. Just a bunch of guys sitting around a conference table. Once again, I support the outcome in this case. I'm not trying to argue that it's a bad outcome. Just not crazy about the way we got here, or the implications for broadband 20 years from now.
btilly 16y ago
The decision last month was that the FCC did not have authority from Congress to regulate internet traffic. So now the FCC is attempting to reclassify cable providers in the same bucket as telephone providers. If courts accept this then the FCC has a very clear grant of authority from Congress to regulate as they wish. The open question is whether the courts will accept this reclassification. This question will likely take several years to wind its way through the courts, but no matter how it turns out it will be a huge headache for the cable providers. The fundamental issue here is whether net neutrality can be imposed on the cable providers. The standard meme is that net neutrality is a basic right. I am one of the few people who actually don't want net neutrality. Not because I trust ISPs to behave in a reasonable fashion, but because I think that the only real solution to bot nets is to make ISPs liable for the traffic that they let onto the Internet, and any such rule would be incompatible with net neutrality.
- swombat 16y ago
  Bot nets are a small but annoying problem for a small percentage of people in the world. A pay-as-you-go, "we'll charge you extra for downloading 1MB from youtube rather than some other site" internet such as the one ISPs would like to aim towards would be a huge problem for everyone. Have a sense of proportions...
  - btilly 16y ago
    Small but annoying? Try saying that to someone who runs a website that has been forced to pay extortion fees as the price of staying up. And truth be told, if the public had any idea how often bot nets are responsible for their computers running slowly and their personal financial details getting stolen, there would be a lot of justified outrage about that as well. Just because people aren't aware of how big a problem it is doesn't mean that it isn't a big problem.
px 16y ago
The FCC may have to rely on legislative action by Congress or a more favorable federal court opinion. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/04/06/AR2010040600742_2.html?sub=AR http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/04... The real issue question is whether or not enforcing net neutrality would introduce a new level of federal regulation that would scare off investment.

by jfager 16y ago

showerst 16y ago

If I'm reading it right, basically the courts said that the FCC doesn't have the right to regulate internet providers like they do common carriers (like phone networks), so they're just going to reclassify them as common carriers, then regulate them. IMHO this is probably huge for net neutrality, but I wonder where their (generally accepted) efforts at traffic shaping will end up in all of this? I'm not sure anyone wants broadband that can't throttle its bittorrent users a little.

swombat 16y ago
I'm not sure anyone wants broadband that can't throttle its bittorrent users a little. Why would your 24MBit/s work slower for bit-torrent than other uses? The whole point of this net neutrality debate is that ISPs have no business deciding which traffic they prefer, much like your phone company has no business deciding which one of your friends you're allowed to call.
- tedunangst 16y ago
  If my neighbor is downloading a torrent for 3 hours, it hardly matters whether it arrives in 3:04 or 3:05. But if I'm browsing HN or email, the difference between 0.1 seconds and 1.0 seconds is quite perceptible.
  - gte910h 16y ago
    They don't throttle those guys a little. They throttle them a lot.
- gte910h 16y ago
  The issue is that network advertisers don't have the bandwidth they say they do. So they really can't give everyone 24 sustained, only burst.
  - lukev 16y ago
    God forbid they actually advertise their real and burst rates instead of picking a completely unrealistic, sky-high number.
  - randallsquared 16y ago
    And the reason most heavy users do not complain very loudly about this false advertising is that we are benefactors, since our heavy internet usage is subsidized by those that only browse the web a bit and get email, but still want 25 Mbps because it's "more" than 2 Mbps.
westbywest 16y ago
I'm not sure anyone wants broadband that can't throttle its bittorrent users a little. I comment in agreement with the need to maintain QoS for reasons of network health, especially if you need to maintain minimum guaranteed bandwidth in the presence of misbehaving clients (e.g. botnets, ping floods, not just abusive torrenters). However, the carriers in questions have often not been using QoS for reasons of improving service, but rather to penalize the percentage of broadband users who actually use a large portion of the bandwidth they're paying for. For example, say you buy 1.5Mbit DSL and then carefully set up your torrent client to use a consistent 1.0Mbit during nighttime. A month later you get a disconnect notice from your ISP claiming that you were hogging bandwidth, probably leaving you SOL since that's the only viable ISP in your area. This is the sort of business practice the FCC is trying to address.
- fnid2 16y ago
  You aren't SOL, you can stop using so much bandwidth. You can be a conscientious user of shared resources. Using a constant stream like that is almost always a bit lacking in legitimacy. It usually means you are using the service in ways that your service plan wasn't designed to be used, either you're downloading and/or sharing large, perhaps copyrighted videos, music, or software, or you are running a server for gaming or something like that. Those 1.5Mbit DSL is "maximum capacity." Not what you should try to consume. Ultimately, all the customers go through one pipe, or a shared few pipes, so those hogging the lines negatively affect others. In my opinion, it's the users of the bandwidth that are greedy. Do they really need 1,000 movies on their hard drives? Many bit torrenters have more content than they could ever watch in their entire lives...
  - lutorm 16y ago
    Strawman argument. If I break the law, charge me. Otherwise you have no business second-guessing what I transfer over the line I pay for. If they don't want people to use the bandwith they pay to get, they should say so by advertising their monthly cap or whatever. The idea that I can only transfer the particular types of bits across the wire that my ISP thinks I should is exactly the point of net neutrality rules. If that's not an infringement of free speech, I don't know what is.

DanielBMarkham 16y ago

The agency gets to classify new technology in different buckets. They put the ISPs in the data provider bucket. So the providers started screwing people over depending on what kind of bits they wanted to get over the net -- the beginning of some god-awful 74-thousand tiered pricing structure. Lots of fuss about that. FCC tries to step in. Court says nope, in that bucket you don't have the authority to act. So the FCC puts them in new bucket. Huge part of the economy now regulated and nobody had to elect anybody, there was no bill, no debate, no nothing (And I support this, but damn it's a freaking Faustian bargain if I ever saw one)

francoisdevlin 16y ago
Eh, it's not as bad as you think. We (congress) gave the FCC the authority to do this. Granted, we didn't quite understand the implications when we did, but it is still a democratic process.
- DanielBMarkham 16y ago
  LOL. Yes, I understand how the regulatory process works. Apologies if I seemed to mislead anyone. There is nothing unconstitutional going on. But that doesn't take away from the fact that the regulatory agencies have immense power in our society -- granted to them by Congress. For instance, the DEA can classify new drugs as dangerous, including setting what the jail time will be for possession -- and Congress has virtually no role[1]. Used to be it took an entire constitutional amendment to outlaw alcohol, but now a commission does the same work and there's little publicity. [1] Ok, so they have "oversight", but as somebody who has seen oversight behind the scenes, and watched a lot of it on C-SPAN, color me unimpressed. EDIT: Another good one is the EPA classifying CO2 -- the air we breathe -- as being under it's regulatory guidance. Now they made provision so that it only covers large producers of CO2, but that was their decision as an agency. There was no public debate or vote in Congress. Just a bunch of guys sitting around a conference table. Once again, I support the outcome in this case. I'm not trying to argue that it's a bad outcome. Just not crazy about the way we got here, or the implications for broadband 20 years from now.

btilly 16y ago

The decision last month was that the FCC did not have authority from Congress to regulate internet traffic. So now the FCC is attempting to reclassify cable providers in the same bucket as telephone providers. If courts accept this then the FCC has a very clear grant of authority from Congress to regulate as they wish. The open question is whether the courts will accept this reclassification. This question will likely take several years to wind its way through the courts, but no matter how it turns out it will be a huge headache for the cable providers. The fundamental issue here is whether net neutrality can be imposed on the cable providers. The standard meme is that net neutrality is a basic right. I am one of the few people who actually don't want net neutrality. Not because I trust ISPs to behave in a reasonable fashion, but because I think that the only real solution to bot nets is to make ISPs liable for the traffic that they let onto the Internet, and any such rule would be incompatible with net neutrality.

swombat 16y ago
Bot nets are a small but annoying problem for a small percentage of people in the world. A pay-as-you-go, "we'll charge you extra for downloading 1MB from youtube rather than some other site" internet such as the one ISPs would like to aim towards would be a huge problem for everyone. Have a sense of proportions...
- btilly 16y ago
  Small but annoying? Try saying that to someone who runs a website that has been forced to pay extortion fees as the price of staying up. And truth be told, if the public had any idea how often bot nets are responsible for their computers running slowly and their personal financial details getting stolen, there would be a lot of justified outrage about that as well. Just because people aren't aware of how big a problem it is doesn't mean that it isn't a big problem.

px 16y ago

The FCC may have to rely on legislative action by Congress or a more favorable federal court opinion. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/04/06/AR2010040600742_2.html?sub=AR http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/04... The real issue question is whether or not enforcing net neutrality would introduce a new level of federal regulation that would scare off investment.