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FCC rescinds claim that AT&T and Verizon violated net neutrality
- mr_spothawk 10y agoso, I'm still in favor of NOT Net Neutrality. Specifically, I think the system is rigged through the telecommunications act, but that the FCCs process for "fixing" it with NetNute was an attempted end run around bad legislation from decades ago. Hopefully this will promote self-organizing mesh providers. There is (or will be) money to be made in cheap, fast, unfiltered internet.
- virmundi 10y agoHow are you laying the infrastructure, microwave transmitters or otherwise?
- mr_spothawk 10y agosure, towers I guess. maybe some clever company will float it on kites/balloons/wings/copters/microsats.
- thrillgore 10y agoKill me.
- giarc 10y ago>AT&T and Verizon allow their own video services (DirecTV and Go90, respectively) to stream on their mobile networks without counting against customers' data caps, while charging other video providers for the same data cap exemptions. Isn't that the anti definition of net neutrality?
- levelist_com 10y agoNo worries. It is my understanding, that as of last Friday the FCC will no longer enforce Net Neutrality rules. https://www.dslreports.com/shownews/Trumps-New-FCC-Boss-Halts-Agencys-Net-Neutrality-Enforcement-138873 https://www.dslreports.com/shownews/Trumps-New-FCC-Boss-Halt... https://variety.com/2017/biz/news/fcc-mignon-clyburn-ajit-pai-1201977715/ https://variety.com/2017/biz/news/fcc-mignon-clyburn-ajit-pa... so... problem solved? s/
- chimeracoder 10y ago> Isn't that the anti definition of net neutrality? Yes, zero-rating is a direct affront to net neutrality: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2016/02/zero-rating-what-it-is-why-you-should-care https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2016/02/zero-rating-what-it-is... But I don't think that we're going to see many successes in net neutrality at the federal level anytime soon - the fight really has to be carried out at the state level.
- gcb0 10y ago...and still absolutely nobody think about moving companies. We already have number portability.
- criley2 10y ago...Moving companies? Tmobile, Verizon, AT&T and Sprint uses 0 rating. That's the entirety of the American wireless infrastructure. It is literally impossible to use 4g wireless communication in America without patronizing directly or indirectly a 0 rating neutrality violator.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- dragonwriter 10y agoYes, it certainly seems to violate the Open Internet Order. The FCC is stopping enforcing the order because the new FCC leadership intends to rescind the order and opposes the order's goals and mechanisms. Net neutrality is dead.
- lisivka 10y agoI see no violation of the net neutrality. LAN traffic is completely free. Wired traffic is cheaper than wireless. Local traffic is cheaper at AWS than WAN traffic. CDN traffic is cheaper than hoster traffic. And so on. Price is part of the market competition.
- mbrumlow 10y agoI don't think you understand this at all. Yes, different modes of transportation cost more. The problem is charging different services a different rate on that mode of transportation. Sure, a wireless network can cost more, and people can pay more. What net neutrality is about protection from being charged more for bits coming from a competitor. This protection is both good for the customer and the market competition. Without it in fact you can't have market competition. All you will end up with his monopolies. I personally think it is high time that internet access be regulated as a utility and decoped from any secondary media businesses. A wireless customer is paying for wireless access and should not have any bill charge difference for the bandwidth they paid for regardless of the backend source. The best analogy I can come up with is this. There are 2 major stores in your town that sale widgets. Company A owns a single widget store. Company B owns a single widget store and a toll road. This toll road is the ONLY way to get to company A's and company B's widget store. This is mostly due to lobbying and unfair protracted company B takes part in to ensure that there are no other roads. The problem is that company B stops and ask each driver where they are going when they enter the toll road. They charge one price to cars who are going to company B's widget store and a higher price to cars going to company A's widget store. Both drivers will be on the toll road for the same time as its only a small strip of road, but still the only road. You do see the problem right?
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- ars 10y ago> Isn't that the anti definition of net neutrality? No because it's their own service. The definition would be for someone else's service. Let's pretend this is comcast and they are sending cable TV over the same wire as internet data. (Which they do.) Does that violate Net Neutrality? If not (and I think most people would say not), what's the difference? The bare fact that you can argue if there is or isn't a difference already tells you this isn't a clear Net Neutrality case.
- giarc 10y agoI think you're incorrect, but happy to hear arguments against. The phrase I quoted says that the big companies allow you to use their service free of any caps, but if you want to use a 3rd parites same service you are going to be capped. Therefore it's not neutral. The 3rd parties can pay to have cap removed, which puts it into the non-neutral territory.
- mwsherman 10y agoIn this narrow case, I believe there may be a claim that those bits are not “Internet” service. They are private network traffic, within their respective networks.
- WorldMaker 10y agoThey are still TCP/IP and/or UDP/IP packets running over the "internet protocol". At what point do you draw the fences between "private network" and the rest of the internet?
- shatteredvisage 10y agoI fear we can't stop what's happening. I miss days when I could afford political ignorance.
- e40 10y agoYeah, I wonder how all those people feel that didn't vote because it doesn't matter, they're both the same?
- derrickdirge 10y agoExhausted from all the mental gymnastics.
- equalarrow 10y agoThis only matters - voting in the presidential elections - in the red states. If you're a liberal, progressive, futurist, etc, and you're living in states like CA or NY or OR, then statistically speaking, those states are pretty much gonna go democrat regardless. So your vote counts 'less' there. What is needed is a bunch of these people to move to swing states where the vote really matters. Places like OH, FL, etc. But, the blue states people have built their own little comfortable enclaves in their respective states and there's little chance they'll be moving to places like AK, TN, or MS. Now, why does this matter? Well, because it's clear the republicans are pro big business and in the case of net neutrality, pro locking up the internet for the few (the few being, big media/telecom companies). There will never be a pro-citizen net neutrality policy as long as the republicans/big-business types are running the show. So, living in CA, for instance, doesn't matter much in this case. Having a progressive, pro-net mentality will make much more difference in swing states.
- byuu 10y agoThe simple solution is actual democracy: one person, one vote. Whoever wins the popular vote wins the White House. Now if only we had a president in office who lamented what a travesty the electoral college was, and how it should be done away with ...
- JustSomeNobody 10y agoIs there any way, as a citizen and consumer, to stop Pai? Or get him fired from FCC? Will writing Congress help?
- virmundi 10y agoNope. Not unless you can show that he did something a)unethical, b) immoral or c) illegal. Since he gets to define legality through what the FCC dictates, within reason, he can't really violate c on a policy level. If you got a and/or b, please let us know. You can even leak that information. In general Congress has to pass a law declaring the ISPs utilities. Then net neutrality is a good thing. The problem is that none of the congress (obviously a generalization) really care about the topic. It appears to be too much for them to understand that AT&T made the claim that bandwidth over the wireless is limited. They went so far as to say that caps were needed. Now AT&T has changed it argument, "Our bandwidth is too limited for our users to use services from providers that we haven't made a peering deal with." Congress can't understand that peering or not, wireless spectrum is limited. Too complex. If you write your representatives, you might need to use really basic language. Think Alan Shore explaining the pharmaceutical case to Denny. edit: grammar.
- tracker1 10y agoAlternatively, congress can pass laws that would define net neutrality and enforcement... but good luck with that.
- wmf 10y agoWouldn't he just be replaced with some "abolish the FCC" know-nothing?
- dragonwriter 10y agoPai's position on the issue is in line with the President and the majority of Congress; even if he were to be fired for some reason, he'd be replaced by someone similar on this issue, unless his firing was because you had a massive groundswell of public support for net neutrality that was enough to convince a sufficient number of members of Congress that support for neutrality was essential to their reelection prospects.
- wnevets 10y agoThanks Trump voters!
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- megiddo 10y agoPai is a very strange character. He was general counsel for Verizon, which is typical for regulatory capture stooges as far as career choices go, but worked for Jenner & Block, who's primary public record is heavily left-leaning. He's an Obama appointee, but on the recommendation of McConnell. My guess is that Jenner & Block probably fronts a lot of left-leaning legal cases outside of their bread & butter, which is telco, giving them a good face across the board with Congress. Meanwhile, his prior appointment to the FCC was almost certainly a horse trade between McConnell and Obama. Pai has been more or less a telco puppet for the last 15 years in one role or another. The interesting thing about this is that regulatory capture is generally in support of further regulation rather than against. This implies that net neutrality is actually either a grass-roots regulation (highly unlikely), or there is an inversion of concern over the general case. My guess is that the monopoly positions that telcos hold has inverted the normal regulatory capture process at the FCC, and that the primary consumers of the content (Amazon, Netflix, etc) are very shrewd operators who can see through regulatory rhetoric.
- tzs 10y ago> He's an Obama appointee, but on the recommendation of McConnell. By law the FCC can have no more than three of the five Commissioners from the same political party, so it is quite normal for a President to appoint two Commissioners from the major party that the President is not a member of. It is not required, but I believe most or all Presidents (so far...) have picked their "not my party" appointees by asking the other party's Senate leadership who to nominate.
- p4lindromica 10y agoMeanwhile, AT&T launched a traffic shaping program in December called Smart Stream that mobile customers are automatically opted in to. The program downgrades videos watched on their network to 480p quality.
- makomk 10y agoThat sounds similar to the T-Mobile scheme that the FCC had already concluded was permitted.
- awj 10y agoSo long as they do that with all videos regardless of source, what's the problem? It's annoying, possibly, but it doesn't really restrict the open flow of information that made the Internet great.
- mrgoldenbrown 10y agoIf they do it without informing me as a customer, it's more than just annoying, it's also unethical.
- deelowe 10y agoTo everyone panicking in this sub, please remember that the communication from washington is that they want this to be fought at the state and local level. So, please engage your representatives about this.
- ska 10y agocommunication from washington is that they want this to be fought at the state and local level ... isn't a good result, at all (if you care about net neutrality)
- coldcode 10y agoThe FCC no longer handles communications. The part we thought of the FCC as being in charge of will be given to the FTC which lacks any enforcement authority and is inundated with millions of things to watch.
- DenisM 10y agoThere's an interesting workaround for the Net Neutrality problem that Netflix, Amazon, Hulu, et al can implement. They could create a industry standard for testing mobile internet speed against CDNs of all major video providers, and then use their respective video services to ingrain it into customers minds that they have to use this when shopping for a mobile internet provider. This might just create enough pressure on the cell providers for one of them to break the ranks and start treating all such traffic with respect.
- kej 10y agoThat's pretty much what Netflix does with fast.com, only just for themselves. Opening that up so that other providers could use the fast.com name with their own backends is an interesting idea.
- kem 10y agoThe next step, assuming that the ISPs start moving away from net neutrality in an egregious way, is for the EFF to sue them for criminal negligence in cases of child pornography. ISPs can't have their cake and eat it too.
- BBCC 10y agoIt is good for customers to enhance the competitive of small companies.