11 ms·

Judges suspends FCC net neutrality restoration rule

139 points by nickt 2y ago

allears 2y ago
[flagged]
- readthenotes1 2y ago
  With The regulators flipping back and forth between the corporations they're supposed to regulate, perhaps we should try something different then assuming the bureaucracy is pure of heart?
  - nerdponx 2y ago
    The alternative is called legislation, and we have been unable to get effective legislation out of our legislators for at least a decade.
- dang 2y ago
  Maybe so, but please don't post unsubstantive comments to Hacker News.
ryandrake 2y ago
The only branch of the government that seems to be able to do anything anymore is the judiciary, and all they seem to be able to do is flip the same light switch on and then off and then on again. Congress has been effectively gridlocked and do-nothing for at least 35 years--all of my adult life. The last time a party had over 59 Senate seats was when I was a toddler. The executive branch's powers are being quickly eroded by SCOTUS. So, net neutrality (and other policy) is going to be forever stuck in this loop of constant arguing over law that was written during the time of fax machines. With one court stopping it, another court reversing the stoppage, the next court reversing the reversing of the stoppage, another case happening with more clever lawyers and so the next court reverses the previous reverse, and then on appeal that reverse gets reversed, and then a random judge pulls out some wording from a 1807 law and reverses again, and this is basically going to be what counts as governance for the rest of my life. EDIT: Mods, feel free to destroy this thread--I can't delete it anymore. I try to talk about the inability to resolve Net Neutrality and it just turns into another unproductive flame war. Sigh.
- davidgay 2y ago
  Actually the Democrats had 60 seats from July 2009 to January 2010 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2008_United_States_Senate_elections https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2008_United_States_Senate_elec...).
  - Alupis 2y ago
    Yes, and the OP's understanding (and in fairness, many people's understanding) of how the US government is supposed to work is at odds with how it works in reality. > Congress has been effectively gridlocked and do-nothing for at least 35 years--all of my adult life. Gridlock is a design feature. It literally means there isn't consensus on whatever the topic may be. Do you really want a government that rams through unpopular policies constantly, then 4-6 years later whiplashes back again? What people often express as "congress not doing their job" is in reality "they aren't passing the policies I want!". > The executive branch's powers are being quickly eroded by SCOTUS. OP means "restored" instead of "eroded". POTUS was never supposed to be as powerful as they have become. Executive Orders are the worst way to run a country, yet we've had several presidents in a row that have abused EO's to get whatever they want done... only for the next person in office to undo it all with the stroke of a pen. The only take-away one can have here is we need better civics classes in our schools...
    - tzs 2y ago
      The problem is that they are also not able to ram through popular policies that a majority of both liberals and conservatives in the general population are in favor of.
    - singleshot_ 2y ago
      Running a country by executive order seems neither much better nor much worse than running it by political judicial decision.
      - Alupis 2y ago
        > than running it by political judicial decision Which country are you referring to? Because it's not the US.
parasense 2y ago
Back in the old days, early 1990s Net Neutrality actually meant something, and was not an overloaded nebulous term like today. It was very simple, being a boiler-plate contract clause between Internet routers, such as universities that peered with eachother. In peering agreements there are several contractual clauses, and the net neutrality was simply sayign that each side of the agreement would forward packets without any interference. In some cases this causes one side to disproportionatly overload the other, but with increased peering the load would ballance out as time went. Many universities had this kidn of agreement with other universities they peered with back in the days of inter-academic networks. No reason to router over the internet when reasearchers can direectly access paperes on the backside, and everything was peachy... Net Neutrality meant something, and it was a very concrete idea. Transiting services changes things, those are not exactly peering agreements, it more like a company connecting one university to another, and that traffic was interfered with... usually to simply offload the packets/frames off the network as quickly as possibly, or in other cases to not impact other higher paying customers.... and those packets/frames would transit over a crappy legacy network to be dumpped on the other side with little care for quallity beyond the minimum agreement. This is why it's so weird for consumers to say they get to have Net Neutrality, because consumers are not normally peering with other consumers, or universities, or whatevery industry. Their just end nodes on the network, and there is fundamentally nothing to be neutral about. When it comes to netflix complaining about some ISP refusing to peer with them for free, it's also very strange, because there is no mandate to freely peer with anybody. And, when a traffic hogs asks to peer with you (as an ISP) that would certainly entail a higher level of network management or infrastructure. So again, these net neutrality crusaders are very strange when looked at in perspeective of the OIG net neutrality. Should the internet be a common carrier, in my humble opinion probably yes. But that's orthogonal to the meaning of Net Neutrality. The point is it's an overloaded term that means nothing anymore.
- jpalawaga 2y ago
  it means the same as it always did. net neutrality as you describe it didn't draw a distinction between "end nodes". Everything that has a wire connected to it is a node. The wires are the edges. Some nodes transmit or receive more than others, and some have different purposes. Some are even behind firewalls. In this context, the net is not neutral if traffic-shaping is applied to some packets and not others, which is the same as what you describe. Perhaps the circumstances for signing agreements are a lot more complicated than it used to be, but at its heart, it is the same problem.
throwaway984393 2y ago
I wonder if this is what the slow erosion of the Roman Republic felt like
- Wytwwww 2y ago
  No, not nearly enough extreme political violence.
consumer451 2y ago
> Strengthened by a June Supreme Court decision undermining the regulatory authority of federal agencies, opponents intensify their legal offensive--this time against net neutrality. The decision could profoundly alter digital life and commerce. Incumbents rejoice!? Disruptors be dammed!? How will this new regulatory environment affect the disruption-dependent VC sector?
- tpmoney 2y ago
  That line from the sub-headline is ridiculous. Nothing about the prior "regulatory environment" stopped Net Neutrality from being enforced, and then repealed and then re-enforced all on the whims and changing of the person running the executive branch. The whole ostensible point of tossing the Chevron deference is exactly that arbitrary rules set not by laws but by whoever happens to be in charge this week and how they interpret vague holes in the law is unworkable. Is Net Neutrality the "law of the land"? The President said it was, and appointed people to make it so. Then the President said it wasn't, and appointed people to make it so. Now the President's mind has changed again, and they've appointed people to try and make it so. If any environment serves incumbents best, its one where the rules are made up as people come and go, where you only have to cozy up to a small group of people who are already part of your regulatory capture revolving door, and where annoying the wrong person can see your entire business shut down and destroyed.
  - consumer451 2y ago
    How does forum shopping fit into this new environment? Instead of buying a lobbying campaign for your employee or sympathizer to be nominated as the head of an agency, is the most efficient move for incumbents now to simply shop around for a cooperative court?
    - abduhl 2y ago
      Courts are bound by precedent below the Supreme Court. Eventually what a circuit court or the Supreme Court says will just be the Law and there will be no point to forum shop. Executive agency interpretations with Chevron intact? Not so much.
kerkeslager 2y ago
I remember when this was an important issue to me. It still is important, but at this point there are so much more important issues at stake which shouldn't even be issues. Does educating voters about issues like this even matter in 2024 if there won't be a vote any more by 2028? I'm tired.
- A4ET8a8uTh0 2y ago
  I feel this. And it does get overwhelming. As in, I actually removed myself from digesting news for the duration of my vacation and the result was pretty pronounced. Maybe uninformed people are onto something. I am only half joking at this point myself.
  - tpmoney 2y ago
    To me, it's not that you need to be uninformed, but that you need to stay out of the firehose stream. In my decades on this earth, I can't remember a single election or major supreme court decision that wasn't considered "the most important X ever in your life" that was surely going to "change everything". But they can't all be. Everything can't be a crisis all the time, even when those things are really important. But when you sit in the firehose, being blasted by constant propaganda, opinion pieces and "expert analysis", it's easy to lose sight of the fact that these things matter, but only to the extent they actually change things on the ground level. Like the day trader that sits with their stream of stocks and freaks out over the signs of the impending collapse of the world waffle iron trade. It might well be important, and it will have many knock on effects, but a lot of that importance is focused and magnified by their position in the middle of this trading market, and the whole world and market is more than just waffle irons.
- csomar 2y ago
  [flagged]
  - Spivak 2y ago
    You mean the very popular lady to everyone not chronically online? Look, I couldn't care less about Republicans at this point. I would kill for Romney. It's political Conservatism and the MAGA cult fueled by Evangelical Christians that surrounds it that genuinely scares me and I think that fear is warranted. Because when it comes to that group we're really not talking politics anymore and instead an explicit platform of walking back all social progress of the 20th century. If you want small government, low taxes, deregulation, and welfare reform then we're perfectly aligned.

139 points by nickt 2y ago

allears 2y ago

[flagged]

readthenotes1 2y ago
With The regulators flipping back and forth between the corporations they're supposed to regulate, perhaps we should try something different then assuming the bureaucracy is pure of heart?
- nerdponx 2y ago
  The alternative is called legislation, and we have been unable to get effective legislation out of our legislators for at least a decade.
dang 2y ago
Maybe so, but please don't post unsubstantive comments to Hacker News.

ryandrake 2y ago

The only branch of the government that seems to be able to do anything anymore is the judiciary, and all they seem to be able to do is flip the same light switch on and then off and then on again. Congress has been effectively gridlocked and do-nothing for at least 35 years--all of my adult life. The last time a party had over 59 Senate seats was when I was a toddler. The executive branch's powers are being quickly eroded by SCOTUS. So, net neutrality (and other policy) is going to be forever stuck in this loop of constant arguing over law that was written during the time of fax machines. With one court stopping it, another court reversing the stoppage, the next court reversing the reversing of the stoppage, another case happening with more clever lawyers and so the next court reverses the previous reverse, and then on appeal that reverse gets reversed, and then a random judge pulls out some wording from a 1807 law and reverses again, and this is basically going to be what counts as governance for the rest of my life. EDIT: Mods, feel free to destroy this thread--I can't delete it anymore. I try to talk about the inability to resolve Net Neutrality and it just turns into another unproductive flame war. Sigh.

davidgay 2y ago
Actually the Democrats had 60 seats from July 2009 to January 2010 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2008_United_States_Senate_elections https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2008_United_States_Senate_elec...).
- Alupis 2y ago
  Yes, and the OP's understanding (and in fairness, many people's understanding) of how the US government is supposed to work is at odds with how it works in reality. > Congress has been effectively gridlocked and do-nothing for at least 35 years--all of my adult life. Gridlock is a design feature. It literally means there isn't consensus on whatever the topic may be. Do you really want a government that rams through unpopular policies constantly, then 4-6 years later whiplashes back again? What people often express as "congress not doing their job" is in reality "they aren't passing the policies I want!". > The executive branch's powers are being quickly eroded by SCOTUS. OP means "restored" instead of "eroded". POTUS was never supposed to be as powerful as they have become. Executive Orders are the worst way to run a country, yet we've had several presidents in a row that have abused EO's to get whatever they want done... only for the next person in office to undo it all with the stroke of a pen. The only take-away one can have here is we need better civics classes in our schools...
  - tzs 2y ago
    The problem is that they are also not able to ram through popular policies that a majority of both liberals and conservatives in the general population are in favor of.
  - singleshot_ 2y ago
    Running a country by executive order seems neither much better nor much worse than running it by political judicial decision.
    - Alupis 2y ago
      > than running it by political judicial decision Which country are you referring to? Because it's not the US.

parasense 2y ago

Back in the old days, early 1990s Net Neutrality actually meant something, and was not an overloaded nebulous term like today. It was very simple, being a boiler-plate contract clause between Internet routers, such as universities that peered with eachother. In peering agreements there are several contractual clauses, and the net neutrality was simply sayign that each side of the agreement would forward packets without any interference. In some cases this causes one side to disproportionatly overload the other, but with increased peering the load would ballance out as time went. Many universities had this kidn of agreement with other universities they peered with back in the days of inter-academic networks. No reason to router over the internet when reasearchers can direectly access paperes on the backside, and everything was peachy... Net Neutrality meant something, and it was a very concrete idea. Transiting services changes things, those are not exactly peering agreements, it more like a company connecting one university to another, and that traffic was interfered with... usually to simply offload the packets/frames off the network as quickly as possibly, or in other cases to not impact other higher paying customers.... and those packets/frames would transit over a crappy legacy network to be dumpped on the other side with little care for quallity beyond the minimum agreement. This is why it's so weird for consumers to say they get to have Net Neutrality, because consumers are not normally peering with other consumers, or universities, or whatevery industry. Their just end nodes on the network, and there is fundamentally nothing to be neutral about. When it comes to netflix complaining about some ISP refusing to peer with them for free, it's also very strange, because there is no mandate to freely peer with anybody. And, when a traffic hogs asks to peer with you (as an ISP) that would certainly entail a higher level of network management or infrastructure. So again, these net neutrality crusaders are very strange when looked at in perspeective of the OIG net neutrality. Should the internet be a common carrier, in my humble opinion probably yes. But that's orthogonal to the meaning of Net Neutrality. The point is it's an overloaded term that means nothing anymore.

jpalawaga 2y ago
it means the same as it always did. net neutrality as you describe it didn't draw a distinction between "end nodes". Everything that has a wire connected to it is a node. The wires are the edges. Some nodes transmit or receive more than others, and some have different purposes. Some are even behind firewalls. In this context, the net is not neutral if traffic-shaping is applied to some packets and not others, which is the same as what you describe. Perhaps the circumstances for signing agreements are a lot more complicated than it used to be, but at its heart, it is the same problem.

throwaway984393 2y ago

I wonder if this is what the slow erosion of the Roman Republic felt like

Wytwwww 2y ago
No, not nearly enough extreme political violence.

consumer451 2y ago

> Strengthened by a June Supreme Court decision undermining the regulatory authority of federal agencies, opponents intensify their legal offensive--this time against net neutrality. The decision could profoundly alter digital life and commerce. Incumbents rejoice!? Disruptors be dammed!? How will this new regulatory environment affect the disruption-dependent VC sector?

tpmoney 2y ago
That line from the sub-headline is ridiculous. Nothing about the prior "regulatory environment" stopped Net Neutrality from being enforced, and then repealed and then re-enforced all on the whims and changing of the person running the executive branch. The whole ostensible point of tossing the Chevron deference is exactly that arbitrary rules set not by laws but by whoever happens to be in charge this week and how they interpret vague holes in the law is unworkable. Is Net Neutrality the "law of the land"? The President said it was, and appointed people to make it so. Then the President said it wasn't, and appointed people to make it so. Now the President's mind has changed again, and they've appointed people to try and make it so. If any environment serves incumbents best, its one where the rules are made up as people come and go, where you only have to cozy up to a small group of people who are already part of your regulatory capture revolving door, and where annoying the wrong person can see your entire business shut down and destroyed.
- consumer451 2y ago
  How does forum shopping fit into this new environment? Instead of buying a lobbying campaign for your employee or sympathizer to be nominated as the head of an agency, is the most efficient move for incumbents now to simply shop around for a cooperative court?
  - abduhl 2y ago
    Courts are bound by precedent below the Supreme Court. Eventually what a circuit court or the Supreme Court says will just be the Law and there will be no point to forum shop. Executive agency interpretations with Chevron intact? Not so much.

kerkeslager 2y ago

I remember when this was an important issue to me. It still is important, but at this point there are so much more important issues at stake which shouldn't even be issues. Does educating voters about issues like this even matter in 2024 if there won't be a vote any more by 2028? I'm tired.

A4ET8a8uTh0 2y ago
I feel this. And it does get overwhelming. As in, I actually removed myself from digesting news for the duration of my vacation and the result was pretty pronounced. Maybe uninformed people are onto something. I am only half joking at this point myself.
- tpmoney 2y ago
  To me, it's not that you need to be uninformed, but that you need to stay out of the firehose stream. In my decades on this earth, I can't remember a single election or major supreme court decision that wasn't considered "the most important X ever in your life" that was surely going to "change everything". But they can't all be. Everything can't be a crisis all the time, even when those things are really important. But when you sit in the firehose, being blasted by constant propaganda, opinion pieces and "expert analysis", it's easy to lose sight of the fact that these things matter, but only to the extent they actually change things on the ground level. Like the day trader that sits with their stream of stocks and freaks out over the signs of the impending collapse of the world waffle iron trade. It might well be important, and it will have many knock on effects, but a lot of that importance is focused and magnified by their position in the middle of this trading market, and the whole world and market is more than just waffle irons.
csomar 2y ago
[flagged]
- Spivak 2y ago
  You mean the very popular lady to everyone not chronically online? Look, I couldn't care less about Republicans at this point. I would kill for Romney. It's political Conservatism and the MAGA cult fueled by Evangelical Christians that surrounds it that genuinely scares me and I think that fear is warranted. Because when it comes to that group we're really not talking politics anymore and instead an explicit platform of walking back all social progress of the 20th century. If you want small government, low taxes, deregulation, and welfare reform then we're perfectly aligned.