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House tells FCC to drop net neutrality
- chopsueyar 16y ago“Today, Republicans first want to shut down the Internet, then they want to shut down the government,’’ said US Representative Edward J. Markey, a Malden Democrat... “We look forward to forever prohibiting the overreach of the Federal Communications Commission,’’ Blackburn said.
- deleted 16y ago[deleted]
- jmtame 16y agoi'm not familiar with the rules proposed in december, was this in reference to the proposal that google and verizon drew up?
- _delirium 16y agoI believe it was this: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2028807 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2028807
- johngalt 16y agoGetting the FCC to make carriers play fair is a slow road to improvement and it's filled with potholes. I'd be more inclined to support regulation changes intended to make starting a new carrier easier. Mark my words: Any net neutrality bill will benefit the existing carriers, and stifle telecom startups.
- intended 16y agoIf I am not mistaken, setting up a working telecom startup is quite capital intensive, and has high running costs on top of it, just in terms of handling Marketing and competitive pressures. How would a new startup survive and scale by any change in rules? The market would still serve the incumbents more than the startups - since their scale would make them stronger bets. I'm curious to know what type of regulation would help circumvent the high startup cost and create genuine competition. Edit: I am genuinely interested to know what regulation the original poster had in mind, or any other regulation that would help achieve his stated goal.
- tptacek 16y agoSo is starting an airline, but deregulation still got us Southwest and Jetblue.
- intended 16y agoSo you are saying LESS regulation is the change in regulation you would like to see? So what regulations would you remove?
- tptacek 16y agoI'm saying that despite the fact that airlines are a textbook example of an industry with high capital requirements for entry, deregulation did not hand the industry over to a cartel of incumbents. In fact, air carriage is regularly shaken up by new entrants and new market forces.
- cooldeal 16y agoDeregulation is such a blanket term encompassing so many things (especially the things regulated right now) that it by itself can't be judged a cure-all. Imagine deregulating the food industry by disbanding the FDA. Loss of net neutrality will hurt small players in the web space(imagine a startup competitor to Netflix which can't afford deals with so many ISPs).
- tptacek 16y agoI'm not in favor of blanket deregulation. Quite the contrary: I'm a Democrat! Message boards tend to take everyone to extremes. I simply want to make the point that deregulation in and of itself doesn't inevitably lead to megacorporate cartels.
- hammock 16y agoWhere is the startup competitor to Netflix that will be hurt? Can you send me a link or something?
- cooldeal 16y ago>Mark my words: Any net neutrality bill will benefit the existing carriers, and stifle telecom startups. Why or how?
- tptacek 16y agoBy creating rules making it harder to create new companies with novel business models for providing Internet service, because those business models might in theory allow an incumbent to unlevel the playing field.
- TimJYoung 16y agoSo, is your position that we shouldn't pass any laws or regulations because they may have unintended side-effects on companies that may exist in the future ? That sounds like pretty weak tea to me. What on earth is wrong with the FCC stating that no company can give precedence to any specific source/destination's traffic over another source/destination's traffic ? All it does is codify the basic principle that the Internet was founded on, and the same principle that allowed it to become what it is today. More importantly, it doesn't involve any changes for any company unless they're already breaking the rule, in which case isn't it a good thing that we make them stop doing so ?
- tptacek 16y agoListen to yourself. Where did you get the idea that I think we shouldn't pass laws or regulations at all? This is a message board political flame war rattling its cage trying to escape. Kill it. I don't particularly support this regulation (I'm not totally against it, either). Many other things, I do think we should regulate. What's wrong here is that I think it's too early in the connectivity industry to say that the incumbents we have now are so powerful that we should freeze them into place with regulations. And even if it isn't, it's not the place of an unelected and unaccountable FCC commissioner to pass a law that couldn't get passed through Congress, where the Constitution says new laws should come from. Every time you say the FCC should be able to make up a new rule, you're in effect saying that the executive branch should be able to make rules there by fiat. I don't recall any us being so psyched about that prospect when Cheney was President.
- teoruiz 16y agoFrom the outside it looks like the US political scene is a complete and ridiculous mess right now, led by the Republican Congress.
- samt 16y agoWhich begs the question, WTF does it look like from the inside?
- waterlesscloud 16y agoLike a functioning government, why do you ask?
- thwarted 16y agoAre you implying that the workers in sausage factory think they are making filet mignon?
- tptacek 16y agoWhat does this mean? Seriously. Sausage is delicious. The point of the sausage factory isn't that sausage is disgusting. It's that a delicious product sometimes requires production steps that appear repulsive to outsiders.
- thwarted 16y agoI love sausage, I'm going to go have some right now at a picnic. The point of a sausage factory is to make sausage, disgusting or not. "sausage factory" is a reference to how it is made, independent of if it's delicious or not. See Upton Sinclair's The Jungle. I apologize if I offended sausage. Sausage, and the people who make it and eat it, will have to come to terms with the fact that it is not filet mignon. Do government workers and public servants, who have a view from the inside, think that it looks like a functioning government? Because from the outside, according to the past entries on this thread, it doesn't.
- ck2 16y agoI know on HN this is the part we focus on (the net) but based on the republican plans for the future of the federal government (which do have a real chance of happening) this would be the least you have to worry about. It's pretty much going to be every person for themselves because government is going to be a fraction of what it was and states, therefore residents will receive a fraction of the funding you are used to. Not just the net, everything from roads, education, healthcare, prisons is going to become radically privatized.
- tptacek 16y agoIs there any possible response to this comment that will produce a thread we'd be happy to have on HN?
- ck2 16y agoNet neutrality is politics. I'm just saying this is the least of our political worries right now. When the president and half the democrats are also anti-net neutrality, basically it's gone.
- ascendant 16y agoI thought I read that if the current bill passes the president would veto it. Is it because he's pro-net-neutrality or anti-anything-republican? The last question isn't partisan, it's a perfectly valid reason for a democrat president to veto a republican-led bill. Happens the other way, too.
- ck2 16y agoHe may not want this bill but he will certainly give into anti-neutrality measures in another format. Remember he listens directly to the riaa and mpaa and other such industry groups.
- geoffw8 16y agomaybe?
- Derbasti 16y agoAnother freedom lost in the land of the free.
- tptacek 16y agoRecorded for posterity that somebody voted this non-sequitor comment up.
- lurchpop 16y agoFunny how politicians hotly debate the FCCs authority, but when it comes to DHS seizing domain names nobody says shit.
- tptacek 16y agoFunny? No, just boring. "DHS" siezes domain names because DHS was hurriedly created, as a reaction to 9/11, by jamming agencies together like so many insects in the transporter from The Fly. One of those agencies happened to be Immigration and Customs, which has always had IPR enforcement in its portfolio. Every time people make these conspiracy-theoretic comments about how "Homeland Security" is doing antipiracy raids, they betray either a lack of understanding of how their government is actually structured, or an easygoing willingness to buy into Internet drama, or both. At least, that's what it looks like to me.
- _delirium 16y agoIt does have an interesting psychological effect, though, possibly on both the recipients of orders, and on the general public. Reminds me a bit of the similar accident of jurisdiction that led to 1980s teenage hax0rz being raided by the Secret Service, rather than by more normal-sounding police.
- tptacek 16y agoIs there some controversy about the Secret Service involvement during Sun Devil? Those were interstate crimes, not to mention the fact that no local police force was in any way equipped to deal with the problem.
- _delirium 16y agoNot political controversy, just the psychological aspect that it was The Secret Service, the dramatic earpiece-wearing folks in movies who keep the president from being shot, not to mention a police agency with the conspiracy-driving word "secret" in their name. If we instead had the U.S. Government Computer Crime Agency, it'd be a lot more pedestrian.
- grellas 16y agoThe FCC's claim of authority in this instance to impose rules from on high is problematic. Here is what EFF says: "We’re wholly in favor of net neutrality in practice, but a finding of ancillary jurisdiction here would give the FCC pretty much boundless authority to regulate the Internet for whatever it sees fit. And that kind of unrestrained authority makes us nervous about follow-on initiatives like broadcast flags and indecency campaigns. In general, we think arguments that regulating the Internet is 'ancillary' to some other regulatory authority that the FCC has been granted just don’t have sufficient limitations to stop bad FCC behavior in the future and create the 'Trojan horse' risk we have long warned about." (https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2011/02/part-i-fcc-ancillary-authority-regulate-internet https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2011/02/part-i-fcc-ancillary-a...) I have chimed in on this in a previous HN thread: "The FCC is way out of its league on this one. Basically, it is a creature of statute. It can do whatever Congress has authorized it to and no more. Nothing in its authorizing statute expressly permits it to impose the rules now known as net neutrality. Therefore, it sought to justify its ability to do so under the doctrine of so-called 'ancillary jurisdiction,' meaning that it had an implied power to do so in aid of its expressly granted powers. Unfortunately, a definitive federal appeals court ruling held that no such ancillary jurisdiction existed, leaving the matter for Congress to decide. Rather than deferring to Congress, the FCC chose to adopt a new rationale for its assertion of this authority. Congress overwhelmingly balked at the idea of any broad assertion of such authority and, in the back and forth, the FCC came up with the toe-in-the water approach just adopted to the satisfaction of almost no one. Even this assertion of jurisdiction will certainly be challenged in the courts in cases that will take years to decide, leaving this whole issue in a pathetic state of uncertainty for all concerned. Nothing good will come of this except for lots of employment for the lawyers who will be litigating whether this or that action is 'reasonable' and whether the internet is really like a public utility or not. All in all, a royal mess." (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2033261 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2033261) A short-hand way of summing up the issue: do you want, in the name of a short-term goal such as net neutrality, to cede to unaccountable government regulators a broad, unchecked power to control what happens on the internet? I think this should give pause to all of us, no matter what we think of the net-neutrality issue.
- trythis 16y ago
- enko 16y agoAustralia, where metered access (XX GBs per month) rules, may provide some insight into how net non-neutrality plays out on practise. Here, it's not about speed limiting to "non-favoured" sites, but about whether consumption from those sites consume your allocated bandwidth allowance. It is routine for companies to do deals with ISPs to provide "unmetered" access to their services for customers. For example, with my ISP, anything I buy from Apple is unmetered. Other ISPs might, for example, offer free Steam traffic. This is most noticeable, I think, on mobile data plans, which often feature "unlimited Facebook" or "all you can Tweet" or similar. I can see how this has the potential to entrench existing players but subjectively the effect seems weak at best and does not figure too much in people's purchasing decisions. Personally, I would prefer more general solutions to the problem of "corporate cliques" gaining oligopoly powers. Restrictions on cross-media ownership would seem to be the weapon of choice.
- deleted 16y ago[deleted]
- nooneelse 16y agoWhat about the "what is in a name" path? What if, instead of regulating what ISPs can do with their network, there were a movement (read, "lawsuits") (using some new or perhaps just existing law) to stop anything past some previously normal level of traffic management from being called "internet service". So a teleco could give preference to their own, or affiliate, traffic, but that could not be referred to by them, or sold to customers, as "the internet". The position here is this: the term "the internet" has come to mean, through intent and common use, something that does not include, by definition, those kind of practices. Thus, selling a package with those practices and calling it internet service is deceit. If I sold a "car" to someone and, when they went to pick up their new car, they found what anyone besides my team of salesmen would call a golf cart, that wouldn't be legal. Same idea. I'm sure I'm being naïve, how?
- delinka 16y agoThis is a good path to consider. It's not "food" if it doesn't contain the right amount of edible/digestible ingredients. It's not "octane X" if it hasn't been refined in the right method. That car isn't "safe" unless it adheres to regulatory guidelines. It's not "Internet access" if it doesn't allow me to access resources on the Internet at my leisure and at the "broadband" speed advertised. (OK, I know that my 6Mbps connection doesn't get me 6Mbps all the way from Netflix, but you can see my point.)
- CamperBob 16y agoOne concern is that 99% percent of users wouldn't care if they got Internet service or "Value-Added Broadband (tm)" from their local cable monopoly, especially if the latter cost $0.01 less per month. Net neutrality strikes me as one of those cases where those who are aware of the stakes have to adopt a paternalistic attitude toward consumer protection.
- sigil 16y agoSounds like an elegant solution. Similar to a recent suggestion on the whole Honeycomb thing (open the code, but assert control of the Android trademark). http://monogatari.doukut.su/2011/04/openness-and-reputation.html http://monogatari.doukut.su/2011/04/openness-and-reputation....
- rflrob 16y ago"But critics of net neutrality rules argue that free-market competition would prevent such abuses" Is consumer internet really a free market? To my knowledge, most of the Bay Area only has a choice between Comcast and AT&T. If you only have 2 or 3 companies competing, it's relatively easy for them all to decide independently that traffic shaping is in their own best interest, which leaves the consumer with no real choice.
- delinka 16y agoI'd really like someone to take politicians to task with this. "Mr. Congresscritter, where is the free market alternative to ISP One in Somecity, seeing as ISP One bought up all its competitors?"
- waterlesscloud 16y agoIs there a free-market for the right-of-way the isp lines travel through? Is there a free-market for spectrum? In both cases, no. There are very heavily regulated markets. So if they benefit from very heavy regulation, and they do, then they should be subject to some regulation as well.
- hammock 16y agoFree market does not necessarily mean perfect competition, or 10+ competitors to choose from. I don't know where you got that idea.
- Lost_BiomedE 16y agoWhile this is true, it was essentially mandated that there be two competitors. The choice was to have many resellers of DSL competing against cable, or an entrenched duopoly. Chairman Michael Powell chose the duopoly, even using that word to describe it.
- jauer 16y agoI'm nearly 2K miles from the Bay Area but I've heard of more than 3 ISPs that serve the area. What about Unwired, Cruzio, and Sonic?
- 16y ago
- hammock 16y agoDo you have the internet? How would you like it if the FCC required you to pay an extra $20 a month to get movie downloads, whether you want them not, or to allow your kids to access violent video games or adult content, whether you want them to or not, just so everyone would get what the government considers to be “the full Internet experience?” What if you’re low income, and you’d rather spend that $20 on books? Or warm clothes? Or food? Correct me if I'm wrong, but it sounds like advocates of net neutrality want low income people to have that choice. (note words above are not mine)
- deleted 16y ago[deleted]
- nabaraj 16y agoRepublicans Mess!!