10 ms·

Democrats unveil legislation forcing the FCC to ban Internet fast lanes

161 points by spenvo 12y ago

dkhenry 12y ago
So it sounds like this is less of a law restricting tiering and more of direction to have the FCC make regulations to restrict tiering. Also not having seen the bill I can't say for sure but the language "between the customer and ISP" is a little shaky since someone like Comcast is both a customer ISP and backhaul provider so can they claim they are operating as a backhaul company when they change money to Netflix .
- eli 12y ago
  To be fair, that is typically how it's done. Congress passes a law that directs the relevant agency to figure out the minutia of implementing it.
  - dkhenry 12y ago
    The issue I have with the model ( which is true across the board on issues ) is that with so many things by leaving it up to regulators you are putting governance in the hands of unelected career beurocrats with minimal oversight over what is actually being done. That is why the next phase in governance is always legal wrangling over regulations since the legislation has given such wiggle room to regulators to implement policy.
    - eli 12y ago
      Do you have an example in mind when you talk about regulations that go against the intent of Congress? Not saying it doesn't happen, but it seems like the exception. What's the alternative? Congress should rewrite FCC rules itself? How else would you bring them into compliance with the new law?
TheBiv 12y ago
>>"It wouldn't give the commission new powers, but the bill — known as the Online Competition and Consumer Choice Act — would give the FCC crucial political cover to prohibit what consumer advocates say would harm startup companies and Internet services by requiring them to pay extra fees to ISPs." The title seems a bit off. Wouldn't Congress only be the ones that could ban internet slow lanes? Not the FCC.
- ethbro 12y ago
  The debate is three part: Part A) Whether the FCC should use the existing powers Congress granted it to push network neutrality Part B) Whether Congress should force the FCC to use its existing powers to push for network neutrality Part C) Whether Congress should grant the FCC new powers to push for network neutrality (the FCC reclassifying broadband as a utility probably falls in here as well, given its impact)
  - adestefan 12y ago
    The Supreme Court has already weighed in on A.
deciplex 12y ago
I wonder which lobbying group will kill this at the eleventh hour this time? Will it be the trial lawyers again? Hollywood? Hollywood lawyers? Will it be the NSA, who claim they can not comply with the directive? Whatever the outcome, rest assured that this Congress is at its most creative when finding a reason to kill any bill that has the support of the American people.
- kiba 12y ago
  Whatever the outcome, rest assured that this Congress is at its most creative when finding a reason to kill any bill that has the support of the American people. Phone call works, but we are too distracted to care or that we don't care in the first place.
- Shivetya 12y ago
  Cynic here, more likely a move by Congressmen who do not feel they are being appreciated enough by lobbyist for the telecoms. I did notice it was a last mile restriction, so they are still free to muddle up the lines getting from the provider to the ISP.
protomyth 12y ago
"will unveil a piece of bicameral legislation Tuesday" Is the text of the actual bill up yet? I cannot find it.
- protomyth 12y ago
  I guess this is the text: http://www.leahy.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/The%20Online%20Competition%20and%20Consumer%20Choice%20Act.pdf http://www.leahy.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/The%20Online%20Com...
PaulHoule 12y ago
The trouble with all this is that it is reactive rather than proactive. There is a simple solution that would put an end to all this BS, and this is to separate the last mile from the middle mile the same way that the old AT&T was broken up to split local from long distance service. (This is how they do it in the UK and UK people are very happy with their internet service.) In this case you get a choice of different middle miles and different television services from different providers. If work got around that "the Verizon network is congested" people would just switch, and I think you would find network connectivity problems get fixed in days rather than years.
- vidarh 12y ago
  > UK people are very happy with their internet service. I wouldn't go quite that far. There's still lots of grumbling over the speed of fibre rollout. And quality. Despite fibre to the cabinet, I'm limited to 40Mbps due to line quality, for example. This is largely down to OpenReach (the company managing the last mile). But within the constraints of line quality, there's decent room for competition.
  - SteveMoody73 12y ago
    I would love to get anything near 40Mbps. My broadband speed recently dropped from 2.2Mbps down to 1.6Mbps and BT basically said that it was still an acceptable speed for my area and only way I could get a faster speed was switch to fibre. They won't even look into it as the line is working so it can't be logged as a fault! Apparently there will be fibre in my area in December, but given track record on rolling these services out where I live I won't bet money on it happening that soon.
- netcan 12y ago
  Seems like a much more 'market oriented' solution. The problem with getting specific is that it ties you in to a specific solution.
  - pyk 12y ago
    >The problem with getting specific is that it ties you in to a specific solution. Agreed -- would Google have the same incentive to roll out Google Fiber if they could just use (slower) existing coax/cable lines as a middleman? It could limit innovation from that perspective, although it depends if a company like Google has alternative reasons for rolling out their own last-mile fiber (not just data collection en masse).
insertion 12y ago
Let’s spend a minute to think about political language. Do we want to “ban Internet fast lanes” or “ban Internet slow lanes?” I suspect that most would favor the latter.
- pornel 12y ago
  It is indeed a poor term. I suggest calling it "bandwidth racketeering" ("Nice streaming service you have here, it'd be shame if some traffic shaping happened to it...")
throwaway420 12y ago
I really think this is a bad idea. If you're a business and depend on a certain type of traffic (say Skype, or maybe email) why wouldn't you consider the option of trying to ensure faster and more reliable delivery of some type of data that is absolutely critical? Maybe as a business, you actually want something like Netflix throttled to some extent so that Skype chats that you depend on are 100% rock solid. Why restrict the possibility for new types of services to emerge from actual needs? The real issue with this isn't the lack of network neutrality, but all kinds of local and other types of regulations that make it extremely difficult for all but a few connected big companies to take part in. This is why each region has maybe 1 or 2 really shitty ISPs rather than a decent array of choices.
- bitJericho 12y ago
  You throttle content (QoS) at the local lan level. If you're paying for service, you should have equal service with all other customers on the same network outside of the lan.
- mpnordland 12y ago
  You can do that with QoS on your own network. Even entry level routers can do that. The default verizon one, for example, can do it. You don't need to damage the internet for this.
- Karunamon 12y ago
  What you're describing is QoS. Packet discrimination by kind. Bulk file transfer vs streaming video vs VoIP. Necessary because because the impact if your torrent downloads go a bit slow is your torrent downloads a bit slow. If video or VoIP get congested, the effect is the service becomes unusable. Net Neutrality is about packet discrimination by source and destination. It's not a problem if VoIP gets higher priority over web surfing and arbitrary file downloads. It's a huge problem if the ISP's VoIP service has higher priority than Skype, despite them being identical traffic.
  - bitJericho 12y ago
    Except how does one tell the difference between Skype and Voip? You don't without deep level packet inspection. Simple QoS based on port could easily piss off a customer, for example, if they want Skype traffic on port 80. The simplest way to deal with this is to treat all traffic equally but serve the bandwidth that you promise your customers.
mpnordland 12y ago
What I don't get is why the FCC can't simply tell ISPs to provide the service their customers pay them to. Seriously. By paying for internet access, the customer pays the ISP to deliver any packets sent from or to their machine. This is nothing less that a protection racket in order to get paid twice. "Dat's a nice video streamin' site you got there, be a real pity if you couldn' get any customers".
- dragonwriter 12y ago
  > What I don't get is why the FCC can't simply tell ISPs to provide the service their customers pay them to. Contract law already does that. The transparency provisions of the previous and proposed Open Internet orders aim to solve the main particular problem of that in the ISP world, which is ambiguity on what exactly the service being paid for is. (The anti-blocking and anti-discrimination provisions, which are different in the old and new orders, go further and aim to align what the service being paid for is with a certain conception of what that service should be.)
- danielweber 12y ago
  People "paid for" a shared network, with all the benefits and drawbacks of such. You can have a private pipe if you want to guarantee no congestion at all, but expect to pay significantly more for it.
brokenparser 12y ago
What are these so-called "fast lanes"?
ChikkaChiChi 12y ago
That title looks like it was written by a Telco Lobbyist. Immediately it's made partisan (Democrats are regulating!), dire (unveils has a negative connotation), overbearing (forcing the FCC oh noes!), and incorrect (no such thing as an Internet "fast lane"). A better title could read: "Lawmakers Introduce bill to halt ISPs crippling Netflix-type Internet Services" It's no wonder we can't get anything done for good in Washington.
crazy1van 12y ago
"Leahy and Matsui's proposed ban on fast lanes would apply only to the connections between consumers and their ISPs" I don't see how this will address the issue in a practical sense. When I'm having trouble streaming netflix on Verizon, my speed tests still return a solid 25mbps. The connection between Verizon and Netflix is the issue, not the connection between my house and Verizon.
- autokad 12y ago
  this is why i find it strange people are basically saying netflix is sticking up for network neutrality, when in essence netflix is asking for special treatment because they are big.
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
cornholio 12y ago
Instead of limiting my ability to enter contracts and chose the Internet/streaming service I want, I would much rather they devise a methodology for measuring and enforcing connection performance. For example, "broadband internet" means at least 50Mbit. "50 Mbit" means that 90% percent of the time, there is a sustained throughput of at least 5MB/s for a TCP connection to a server in any data-center across the continental US (assuming the data-center link itself is not congested). "Unmetered" means that per month, the user can transfer a volume of data of at least 10% of the volume corresponding to a saturation of the connection 24/7 (1300 GB for a 50 Mbit connection as defined above). Under such a rule, Comcast's connections could only be sold as "Dial-up+". And if broadband is not available in an area it's fair game for the municipal or state authorities to provision it with public funds as a basic need for a modern citizen; since the incumbent private provider obviously can't get a return on it's investment (what OTHER reason for not developing your infrastructure could there be, right ?)
- ldarby 12y ago
  I had to create this account just to correct this. "Broadband" means the data is modulated on to a wide spectrum signal, on the same copper as the POTS network. Anything from good old 512kbit/s upwards can be "broadband". I say "can be", because if it's not using a wide spectrum signal, e.g. fibre-optics, then that's not broadband.
  - tehwebguy 12y ago
    It wasn't a statement of fact, it was a wish list that started with "For example"
    - ldarby 12y ago
      Ok, thank you for pointing that out. However I still don't think it's right to "re-purpose" words. Remember what happened when people tried to re-purpose kilo for 1024 etc.
  - w1ntermute 12y ago
    "Broadband" is a well-defined technical term originating from physics. But "broadband internet" (what the OP was referring to) is a vaguely defined marketing term that is often used by ISPs to deceive consumers as to the speed of their connections. The OP is suggesting that that term be repurposed as a clearly (legally) defined one that improves internet access in America without introducing onerous regulations.
exabrial 12y ago
God Dangit. Don't make this a Red vs Blue Debate.
- dragonwriter 12y ago
  Its been a red vs. blue debate for a long time. Why is it surprising that significant issues of government policy in which the opposing sides represent conflicts between the deeply-held interests of different groups also turn out to be issues of division between political parties. I mean, isn't that exactly what you'd expect?
beat 12y ago
I love how the very first paragraph implies that the problem is Netflix (as the example company) getting special, preferential treatment, when in fact, Netflix has been obviously punished for not paying ransom money, and has led the charge on the net neutrality movement that led to this bill. But this is the Washington Post, the Pravda of the Beltway. What do you expect? Honesty?
jharig23 12y ago
Anyone have a link to the legislation?

161 points by spenvo 12y ago

So it sounds like this is less of a law restricting tiering and more of direction to have the FCC make regulations to restrict tiering. Also not having seen the bill I can't say for sure but the language "between the customer and ISP" is a little shaky since someone like Comcast is both a customer ISP and backhaul provider so can they claim they are operating as a backhaul company when they change money to Netflix .

eli 12y ago
To be fair, that is typically how it's done. Congress passes a law that directs the relevant agency to figure out the minutia of implementing it.
- dkhenry 12y ago
  The issue I have with the model ( which is true across the board on issues ) is that with so many things by leaving it up to regulators you are putting governance in the hands of unelected career beurocrats with minimal oversight over what is actually being done. That is why the next phase in governance is always legal wrangling over regulations since the legislation has given such wiggle room to regulators to implement policy.
  - eli 12y ago
    Do you have an example in mind when you talk about regulations that go against the intent of Congress? Not saying it doesn't happen, but it seems like the exception. What's the alternative? Congress should rewrite FCC rules itself? How else would you bring them into compliance with the new law?

TheBiv 12y ago

>>"It wouldn't give the commission new powers, but the bill — known as the Online Competition and Consumer Choice Act — would give the FCC crucial political cover to prohibit what consumer advocates say would harm startup companies and Internet services by requiring them to pay extra fees to ISPs." The title seems a bit off. Wouldn't Congress only be the ones that could ban internet slow lanes? Not the FCC.

ethbro 12y ago
The debate is three part: Part A) Whether the FCC should use the existing powers Congress granted it to push network neutrality Part B) Whether Congress should force the FCC to use its existing powers to push for network neutrality Part C) Whether Congress should grant the FCC new powers to push for network neutrality (the FCC reclassifying broadband as a utility probably falls in here as well, given its impact)
- adestefan 12y ago
  The Supreme Court has already weighed in on A.

deciplex 12y ago

I wonder which lobbying group will kill this at the eleventh hour this time? Will it be the trial lawyers again? Hollywood? Hollywood lawyers? Will it be the NSA, who claim they can not comply with the directive? Whatever the outcome, rest assured that this Congress is at its most creative when finding a reason to kill any bill that has the support of the American people.

kiba 12y ago
Whatever the outcome, rest assured that this Congress is at its most creative when finding a reason to kill any bill that has the support of the American people. Phone call works, but we are too distracted to care or that we don't care in the first place.
Shivetya 12y ago
Cynic here, more likely a move by Congressmen who do not feel they are being appreciated enough by lobbyist for the telecoms. I did notice it was a last mile restriction, so they are still free to muddle up the lines getting from the provider to the ISP.

protomyth 12y ago

"will unveil a piece of bicameral legislation Tuesday" Is the text of the actual bill up yet? I cannot find it.

protomyth 12y ago
I guess this is the text: http://www.leahy.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/The%20Online%20Competition%20and%20Consumer%20Choice%20Act.pdf http://www.leahy.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/The%20Online%20Com...

PaulHoule 12y ago

The trouble with all this is that it is reactive rather than proactive. There is a simple solution that would put an end to all this BS, and this is to separate the last mile from the middle mile the same way that the old AT&T was broken up to split local from long distance service. (This is how they do it in the UK and UK people are very happy with their internet service.) In this case you get a choice of different middle miles and different television services from different providers. If work got around that "the Verizon network is congested" people would just switch, and I think you would find network connectivity problems get fixed in days rather than years.

vidarh 12y ago
> UK people are very happy with their internet service. I wouldn't go quite that far. There's still lots of grumbling over the speed of fibre rollout. And quality. Despite fibre to the cabinet, I'm limited to 40Mbps due to line quality, for example. This is largely down to OpenReach (the company managing the last mile). But within the constraints of line quality, there's decent room for competition.
- SteveMoody73 12y ago
  I would love to get anything near 40Mbps. My broadband speed recently dropped from 2.2Mbps down to 1.6Mbps and BT basically said that it was still an acceptable speed for my area and only way I could get a faster speed was switch to fibre. They won't even look into it as the line is working so it can't be logged as a fault! Apparently there will be fibre in my area in December, but given track record on rolling these services out where I live I won't bet money on it happening that soon.
netcan 12y ago
Seems like a much more 'market oriented' solution. The problem with getting specific is that it ties you in to a specific solution.
- pyk 12y ago
  >The problem with getting specific is that it ties you in to a specific solution. Agreed -- would Google have the same incentive to roll out Google Fiber if they could just use (slower) existing coax/cable lines as a middleman? It could limit innovation from that perspective, although it depends if a company like Google has alternative reasons for rolling out their own last-mile fiber (not just data collection en masse).

insertion 12y ago

Let’s spend a minute to think about political language. Do we want to “ban Internet fast lanes” or “ban Internet slow lanes?” I suspect that most would favor the latter.

pornel 12y ago
It is indeed a poor term. I suggest calling it "bandwidth racketeering" ("Nice streaming service you have here, it'd be shame if some traffic shaping happened to it...")

throwaway420 12y ago

I really think this is a bad idea. If you're a business and depend on a certain type of traffic (say Skype, or maybe email) why wouldn't you consider the option of trying to ensure faster and more reliable delivery of some type of data that is absolutely critical? Maybe as a business, you actually want something like Netflix throttled to some extent so that Skype chats that you depend on are 100% rock solid. Why restrict the possibility for new types of services to emerge from actual needs? The real issue with this isn't the lack of network neutrality, but all kinds of local and other types of regulations that make it extremely difficult for all but a few connected big companies to take part in. This is why each region has maybe 1 or 2 really shitty ISPs rather than a decent array of choices.

bitJericho 12y ago
You throttle content (QoS) at the local lan level. If you're paying for service, you should have equal service with all other customers on the same network outside of the lan.
mpnordland 12y ago
You can do that with QoS on your own network. Even entry level routers can do that. The default verizon one, for example, can do it. You don't need to damage the internet for this.
Karunamon 12y ago
What you're describing is QoS. Packet discrimination by kind. Bulk file transfer vs streaming video vs VoIP. Necessary because because the impact if your torrent downloads go a bit slow is your torrent downloads a bit slow. If video or VoIP get congested, the effect is the service becomes unusable. Net Neutrality is about packet discrimination by source and destination. It's not a problem if VoIP gets higher priority over web surfing and arbitrary file downloads. It's a huge problem if the ISP's VoIP service has higher priority than Skype, despite them being identical traffic.
- bitJericho 12y ago
  Except how does one tell the difference between Skype and Voip? You don't without deep level packet inspection. Simple QoS based on port could easily piss off a customer, for example, if they want Skype traffic on port 80. The simplest way to deal with this is to treat all traffic equally but serve the bandwidth that you promise your customers.

mpnordland 12y ago

What I don't get is why the FCC can't simply tell ISPs to provide the service their customers pay them to. Seriously. By paying for internet access, the customer pays the ISP to deliver any packets sent from or to their machine. This is nothing less that a protection racket in order to get paid twice. "Dat's a nice video streamin' site you got there, be a real pity if you couldn' get any customers".

dragonwriter 12y ago
> What I don't get is why the FCC can't simply tell ISPs to provide the service their customers pay them to. Contract law already does that. The transparency provisions of the previous and proposed Open Internet orders aim to solve the main particular problem of that in the ISP world, which is ambiguity on what exactly the service being paid for is. (The anti-blocking and anti-discrimination provisions, which are different in the old and new orders, go further and aim to align what the service being paid for is with a certain conception of what that service should be.)
danielweber 12y ago
People "paid for" a shared network, with all the benefits and drawbacks of such. You can have a private pipe if you want to guarantee no congestion at all, but expect to pay significantly more for it.

brokenparser 12y ago

What are these so-called "fast lanes"?

ChikkaChiChi 12y ago

That title looks like it was written by a Telco Lobbyist. Immediately it's made partisan (Democrats are regulating!), dire (unveils has a negative connotation), overbearing (forcing the FCC oh noes!), and incorrect (no such thing as an Internet "fast lane"). A better title could read: "Lawmakers Introduce bill to halt ISPs crippling Netflix-type Internet Services" It's no wonder we can't get anything done for good in Washington.

crazy1van 12y ago

"Leahy and Matsui's proposed ban on fast lanes would apply only to the connections between consumers and their ISPs" I don't see how this will address the issue in a practical sense. When I'm having trouble streaming netflix on Verizon, my speed tests still return a solid 25mbps. The connection between Verizon and Netflix is the issue, not the connection between my house and Verizon.

autokad 12y ago
this is why i find it strange people are basically saying netflix is sticking up for network neutrality, when in essence netflix is asking for special treatment because they are big.
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]

cornholio 12y ago

Instead of limiting my ability to enter contracts and chose the Internet/streaming service I want, I would much rather they devise a methodology for measuring and enforcing connection performance. For example, "broadband internet" means at least 50Mbit. "50 Mbit" means that 90% percent of the time, there is a sustained throughput of at least 5MB/s for a TCP connection to a server in any data-center across the continental US (assuming the data-center link itself is not congested). "Unmetered" means that per month, the user can transfer a volume of data of at least 10% of the volume corresponding to a saturation of the connection 24/7 (1300 GB for a 50 Mbit connection as defined above). Under such a rule, Comcast's connections could only be sold as "Dial-up+". And if broadband is not available in an area it's fair game for the municipal or state authorities to provision it with public funds as a basic need for a modern citizen; since the incumbent private provider obviously can't get a return on it's investment (what OTHER reason for not developing your infrastructure could there be, right ?)

ldarby 12y ago
I had to create this account just to correct this. "Broadband" means the data is modulated on to a wide spectrum signal, on the same copper as the POTS network. Anything from good old 512kbit/s upwards can be "broadband". I say "can be", because if it's not using a wide spectrum signal, e.g. fibre-optics, then that's not broadband.
- tehwebguy 12y ago
  It wasn't a statement of fact, it was a wish list that started with "For example"
  - ldarby 12y ago
    Ok, thank you for pointing that out. However I still don't think it's right to "re-purpose" words. Remember what happened when people tried to re-purpose kilo for 1024 etc.
- w1ntermute 12y ago
  "Broadband" is a well-defined technical term originating from physics. But "broadband internet" (what the OP was referring to) is a vaguely defined marketing term that is often used by ISPs to deceive consumers as to the speed of their connections. The OP is suggesting that that term be repurposed as a clearly (legally) defined one that improves internet access in America without introducing onerous regulations.

exabrial 12y ago

God Dangit. Don't make this a Red vs Blue Debate.

dragonwriter 12y ago
Its been a red vs. blue debate for a long time. Why is it surprising that significant issues of government policy in which the opposing sides represent conflicts between the deeply-held interests of different groups also turn out to be issues of division between political parties. I mean, isn't that exactly what you'd expect?

beat 12y ago

I love how the very first paragraph implies that the problem is Netflix (as the example company) getting special, preferential treatment, when in fact, Netflix has been obviously punished for not paying ransom money, and has led the charge on the net neutrality movement that led to this bill. But this is the Washington Post, the Pravda of the Beltway. What do you expect? Honesty?

jharig23 12y ago

Anyone have a link to the legislation?