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Tom Wheeler has really outdone himself with this announcement. It'll apply to mobile networks as well! Turns out this dingo knows how to stand up for what's r

Tom Wheeler has really outdone himself with this announcement. It'll apply to mobile networks as well! Turns out this dingo knows how to stand up for what's right! I know it's early but this is a great step forward.

coldpie 12y ago
I'm really impressed with Wheeler. When he was nominated, all the news was about how he was a lobbyist for the cable companies, and it was a perfect example of cronyism. But he's really been knocking it out of the park. Aggressive on net neutrality, redefining broadband, trying to restore municipal Internet. I'm very glad to have been wrong about my initial impressions.
- morganvachon 12y ago
  I had the same initial impression. All I can think is that he was in "the business" for so long, he was able to see its pitfalls and shortcomings, and chose to take the high road and do right by The People. He sounds like a genuinely good person, rare in American politics.
  - alexqgb 12y ago
    He actually dealt with the initial skepticism about his background in a very straightforward way. In essence, he said "Yes, I was a cable lobbyist, but that a long time ago, when cable companies were very much the outsiders with a crazy seeming business model ("Pay? For TV?") and navigating the maze of telco regulations was a matter of life-or-death. Now my former clients are big and on the inside. It's a very different world. The point is, I actually understand what life is like for those on the outside looking in, and my commitment is to the next generation of people in that position." Again, I'm paraphrasing. And I had no idea (at the time) whether he was being sincere, or just really slick in his deflections. As of today it's looking like the former, and not the latter.
- Apocryphon 12y ago
  "Only Nixon could go to China." - Vulcan proverb
  - Forbo 12y ago
    For anyone who, like me, is/was not familiar with this phrase: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nixon_goes_to_China https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nixon_goes_to_China
- rayiner 12y ago
  Note: he was a cable lobbyist from 1976-1984, long before cable internet was a thing. He was a wireless industry lobbyist from 1992-2004, but the proposed "light touch" regime looks a lot like what has been applied to the wireless industry for years.
  - aptwebapps 12y ago
    He's been on most sides of this: http://www.cnet.com/news/why-fccs-wheeler-is-defying-the-greatest-lobbyists-in-the-world/ http://www.cnet.com/news/why-fccs-wheeler-is-defying-the-gre...
- ejain 12y ago
  I don't know Wheeler, but don't understand why having been a lobbyist (or aspiring to be one again) would make him more "friendly" to that industry: The tougher he is on them, the more they should eventually be willing to pay him to switch sides again, right?
  - rudolf0 12y ago
    If he did so, he'd seem more like a greedy opportunist rather than someone genuinely interested in pushing the industry's goals.
    - krenoten 12y ago
      I don't think that's perceived as a negative in that particular line of work.
    - oldmanjay 12y ago
      It's good to require purity from people. It teaches them to lie to everyone so they can meet an unmeetable standard. See also: all modern politics.
  - wpietri 12y ago
    I think that assumes such a high level of venality that I wouldn't bet on it. The people I consider most dangerous to the public in regulatory positions aren't the ones who actively aim to undermine. They're they ones who just have such a strong sympathy with the regulated that they can't conceive of other ways to look at it. Good regulation requires both deep respect and deep skepticism. Think, for example, of people who make sure restaurant kitchens are safe for the public. They have to respect the purpose of restaurants and the people who run them; otherwise they'll be ineffectively fussy or crabby. But their whole job is to never let those people slide. So as much as they understand and empathize with how hard and expensive it is run a restaurant, they still have to be willing to take the consumer's side say, "Yes, it's expensive, but you still have to throw out that $2k of meat." And mean it.
- tzs 12y ago
  > When he was nominated, all the news was about how he was a lobbyist for the cable companies, and it was a perfect example of cronyism That's because much of the tech press prefers sensationalism to get clicks over accurate reporting to inform readers. Here's a comment I made last week on another forum that covers what the tech press should have told us about Wheeler a long time ago, but didn't. ----------------- It's important to note when he worked for cable. Much of the reporting in the tech press gives the impression he came straight from some high paid lobbying job with Comcast to the FCC. In reality, he didn't work for any one cable company, but rather was the president of their main trade association, and that was from 1976 to 1984. That was a time when the internet was still just for military, defense contractors, and major computer science and engineering universities. There were around 1000 computers on the internet then. The opening up of the internet for civilians, starting with the creation of NSFNet by the National Science Foundation, wasn't to start until 1985, and it wasn't until 1992 that the web was released. So when he was a cable guy, it was all about television. Cable as an industry was also much smaller than it is now, and it was divided among many more companies. They were the upstarts, challenging the big broadcasters. Being pro-cable was arguably being pro-consumer. From 1992 to 2004, he was president of CTIA, the main cellular trade group. By then, the public internet was well under way, but it was mostly wired. Internet on phones was available, but it was more of a novelty or an expensive luxury, with voice and text being the main interest most people had in cellular. CTIA lobbied, of course, but they also had a major role in setting technology standards. Wheeler represented the industry in discussions with the FCC to draft the rules that we now have for cellular voice, which in retrospect worked out well (and are the basis for the Title II proposal he's expected to reveal). It's also important to note that cell phones in 1992, when he joined CTIA, were not nearly as common as they are today. There was much less infrastructure in place, and you paid by the minute. They were past the point where you'd stare openly in wonder if you saw someone with one, but still were something you had to work to find a good reason to justify their purchase. The key thing to note here is that when he has worked as a sort-of lobbyist (I say "sort-of" because both times he was president of a trade association that had lobbying as just one function), it was for industries that were young and had a lot of promise to bring great things to consumers, and his work for those industries as far as I've been able to tell helped consumers, and the customers of those industries were better off when he left than when he started. He seems to basically be a telecom policy nerd. Heck, he even does telecom stuff in his non-professional capacity. Only a telecom nerd would write a 250 page book called "Mr. Lincoln's T-Mails: The Untold Story of How Abraham Lincoln Used the Telegraph to Win the Civil War" [1]. [1] http://www.amazon.com/Mr-Lincolns-T-Mails-Abraham-Telegraph/dp/006112978X/ref=tmm_hrd_title_0 http://www.amazon.com/Mr-Lincolns-T-Mails-Abraham-Telegraph/...
tootie 12y ago
I have this weird feeling that this whole drama was a long con by Obama and Wheeler to tease out as much vocal support as possible by playing the villain. Like Wheeler was a heel in professional wrestling. They put out a shitty proposal that the ISPs would love just to show them how strong public opposition would be so they'd be perfectly positioned to go full neutrality and claim a public mandate.
- ep103 12y ago
  If that was the case, then they would have prepared their servers to actually handle the load. As it stands, we know they lost millions of records of input
  - gordjw 12y ago
    And that focused the public's attention even more.
  - smhenderson 12y ago
    Thanks again John Oliver!
- tzs 12y ago
  The ISPs did not love the first proposal.
datawhoring 12y ago
agreed. this level of f-u to the whims of wealthy individuals and their entrenched corporations is unheard of. i work for a smaller cable company and it has been getting very deep lately. sad thing is management doesn't seem to get that the grunts don't care. we never profit from the monopolies. every year we get some bs excuse why we won't be getting a raise this year even though reading the quarterly earnings and know what were spending on upgrades and know there is a lot left over that goes somewhere. knowing how high the margins are in the industry, how little they pay, how lean things are already run its going to get bad. if competition is somehow injected into the market and they are happy with a fraction of what the incumbents are currently enjoying would be devastating. there is very little left to cut at the bottom, and those at the top can't possibly be expected to not get their rockstar paydays. what also could happen is the exodus of employees from existing cable companies to the new ones that would sprout up. even though the grass isn't always greener somewhere else, it won't stop those from finally having a choice. don't get me wrong. I have zero problem with someone making a 100 million a year, but only when that comes after everyone from push broom and toilet brush to company car and private jet are all paid the highest for their position for a company that size. unfortunately almost everywhere you can go that isn't the case. I've heard a lot of discussion how making ISPs a utility would just entrench the monopolies even further... what od you think?
- explorigin 12y ago
  Did you read the article?
- deciplex 12y ago
  > I have zero problem with someone making a 100 million a year Maybe you should have a problem with it. I get what you're saying, that there may not be anything immoral about being extravagantly compensated, and in principle I agree with that. However, there is also something to be said for the overwhelming amount of political power that such wealth brings. It may be that we want to avoid such concentrations of wealth not out of a sense of fairness, but to keep people from hijacking our democracy.
alexryan 12y ago
Big mistake. Government regulation kills innovation. Do you really want the technology sector to end up looking like the healthcare system or the state run education system? Everything government touches turns to crap. To believe that government regulation with make anything better is not very intelligent.
- rtpg 12y ago
  yeah, really ruined all those wonderful trust in the 1900's. Really hate cheap steel.
- usefulcat 12y ago
  > Everything government touches turns to crap. By that extremely simplistic logic, we should have no laws at all.
  - dreamdu5t 12y ago
    By that logic, laws would be created by a free market in law (polycentric court system).
    - dragonwriter 12y ago
      A "free market in law" is either (a) not a free market (as participation in a transaction is not fully voluntary for all participants), or (b) not law. Most likely, both.
      - dreamdu5t 12y ago
        > as participation in a transaction is not fully voluntary for all participants What transaction are you referring to not being voluntary? Transactions in the economic sense are by definition voluntary. Without a monopoly on law, people hire courts of their choosing to settle disputes. They are not compelled by a third party to settle disputes in the third party's court. Most importantly, they are not compelled by a third party to use the third party's law. They may each have their own laws even. More about polycentric law: http://www.tomwbell.com/writings/JurisPoly.html http://www.tomwbell.com/writings/JurisPoly.html

coldpie 12y ago

I'm really impressed with Wheeler. When he was nominated, all the news was about how he was a lobbyist for the cable companies, and it was a perfect example of cronyism. But he's really been knocking it out of the park. Aggressive on net neutrality, redefining broadband, trying to restore municipal Internet. I'm very glad to have been wrong about my initial impressions.

morganvachon 12y ago
I had the same initial impression. All I can think is that he was in "the business" for so long, he was able to see its pitfalls and shortcomings, and chose to take the high road and do right by The People. He sounds like a genuinely good person, rare in American politics.
- alexqgb 12y ago
  He actually dealt with the initial skepticism about his background in a very straightforward way. In essence, he said "Yes, I was a cable lobbyist, but that a long time ago, when cable companies were very much the outsiders with a crazy seeming business model ("Pay? For TV?") and navigating the maze of telco regulations was a matter of life-or-death. Now my former clients are big and on the inside. It's a very different world. The point is, I actually understand what life is like for those on the outside looking in, and my commitment is to the next generation of people in that position." Again, I'm paraphrasing. And I had no idea (at the time) whether he was being sincere, or just really slick in his deflections. As of today it's looking like the former, and not the latter.
Apocryphon 12y ago
"Only Nixon could go to China." - Vulcan proverb
- Forbo 12y ago
  For anyone who, like me, is/was not familiar with this phrase: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nixon_goes_to_China https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nixon_goes_to_China
rayiner 12y ago
Note: he was a cable lobbyist from 1976-1984, long before cable internet was a thing. He was a wireless industry lobbyist from 1992-2004, but the proposed "light touch" regime looks a lot like what has been applied to the wireless industry for years.
- aptwebapps 12y ago
  He's been on most sides of this: http://www.cnet.com/news/why-fccs-wheeler-is-defying-the-greatest-lobbyists-in-the-world/ http://www.cnet.com/news/why-fccs-wheeler-is-defying-the-gre...
ejain 12y ago
I don't know Wheeler, but don't understand why having been a lobbyist (or aspiring to be one again) would make him more "friendly" to that industry: The tougher he is on them, the more they should eventually be willing to pay him to switch sides again, right?
- rudolf0 12y ago
  If he did so, he'd seem more like a greedy opportunist rather than someone genuinely interested in pushing the industry's goals.
  - krenoten 12y ago
    I don't think that's perceived as a negative in that particular line of work.
  - oldmanjay 12y ago
    It's good to require purity from people. It teaches them to lie to everyone so they can meet an unmeetable standard. See also: all modern politics.
- wpietri 12y ago
  I think that assumes such a high level of venality that I wouldn't bet on it. The people I consider most dangerous to the public in regulatory positions aren't the ones who actively aim to undermine. They're they ones who just have such a strong sympathy with the regulated that they can't conceive of other ways to look at it. Good regulation requires both deep respect and deep skepticism. Think, for example, of people who make sure restaurant kitchens are safe for the public. They have to respect the purpose of restaurants and the people who run them; otherwise they'll be ineffectively fussy or crabby. But their whole job is to never let those people slide. So as much as they understand and empathize with how hard and expensive it is run a restaurant, they still have to be willing to take the consumer's side say, "Yes, it's expensive, but you still have to throw out that $2k of meat." And mean it.
tzs 12y ago
> When he was nominated, all the news was about how he was a lobbyist for the cable companies, and it was a perfect example of cronyism That's because much of the tech press prefers sensationalism to get clicks over accurate reporting to inform readers. Here's a comment I made last week on another forum that covers what the tech press should have told us about Wheeler a long time ago, but didn't. ----------------- It's important to note when he worked for cable. Much of the reporting in the tech press gives the impression he came straight from some high paid lobbying job with Comcast to the FCC. In reality, he didn't work for any one cable company, but rather was the president of their main trade association, and that was from 1976 to 1984. That was a time when the internet was still just for military, defense contractors, and major computer science and engineering universities. There were around 1000 computers on the internet then. The opening up of the internet for civilians, starting with the creation of NSFNet by the National Science Foundation, wasn't to start until 1985, and it wasn't until 1992 that the web was released. So when he was a cable guy, it was all about television. Cable as an industry was also much smaller than it is now, and it was divided among many more companies. They were the upstarts, challenging the big broadcasters. Being pro-cable was arguably being pro-consumer. From 1992 to 2004, he was president of CTIA, the main cellular trade group. By then, the public internet was well under way, but it was mostly wired. Internet on phones was available, but it was more of a novelty or an expensive luxury, with voice and text being the main interest most people had in cellular. CTIA lobbied, of course, but they also had a major role in setting technology standards. Wheeler represented the industry in discussions with the FCC to draft the rules that we now have for cellular voice, which in retrospect worked out well (and are the basis for the Title II proposal he's expected to reveal). It's also important to note that cell phones in 1992, when he joined CTIA, were not nearly as common as they are today. There was much less infrastructure in place, and you paid by the minute. They were past the point where you'd stare openly in wonder if you saw someone with one, but still were something you had to work to find a good reason to justify their purchase. The key thing to note here is that when he has worked as a sort-of lobbyist (I say "sort-of" because both times he was president of a trade association that had lobbying as just one function), it was for industries that were young and had a lot of promise to bring great things to consumers, and his work for those industries as far as I've been able to tell helped consumers, and the customers of those industries were better off when he left than when he started. He seems to basically be a telecom policy nerd. Heck, he even does telecom stuff in his non-professional capacity. Only a telecom nerd would write a 250 page book called "Mr. Lincoln's T-Mails: The Untold Story of How Abraham Lincoln Used the Telegraph to Win the Civil War" [1]. [1] http://www.amazon.com/Mr-Lincolns-T-Mails-Abraham-Telegraph/dp/006112978X/ref=tmm_hrd_title_0 http://www.amazon.com/Mr-Lincolns-T-Mails-Abraham-Telegraph/...

tootie 12y ago

I have this weird feeling that this whole drama was a long con by Obama and Wheeler to tease out as much vocal support as possible by playing the villain. Like Wheeler was a heel in professional wrestling. They put out a shitty proposal that the ISPs would love just to show them how strong public opposition would be so they'd be perfectly positioned to go full neutrality and claim a public mandate.

ep103 12y ago
If that was the case, then they would have prepared their servers to actually handle the load. As it stands, we know they lost millions of records of input
- gordjw 12y ago
  And that focused the public's attention even more.
- smhenderson 12y ago
  Thanks again John Oliver!
tzs 12y ago
The ISPs did not love the first proposal.

datawhoring 12y ago

agreed. this level of f-u to the whims of wealthy individuals and their entrenched corporations is unheard of. i work for a smaller cable company and it has been getting very deep lately. sad thing is management doesn't seem to get that the grunts don't care. we never profit from the monopolies. every year we get some bs excuse why we won't be getting a raise this year even though reading the quarterly earnings and know what were spending on upgrades and know there is a lot left over that goes somewhere. knowing how high the margins are in the industry, how little they pay, how lean things are already run its going to get bad. if competition is somehow injected into the market and they are happy with a fraction of what the incumbents are currently enjoying would be devastating. there is very little left to cut at the bottom, and those at the top can't possibly be expected to not get their rockstar paydays. what also could happen is the exodus of employees from existing cable companies to the new ones that would sprout up. even though the grass isn't always greener somewhere else, it won't stop those from finally having a choice. don't get me wrong. I have zero problem with someone making a 100 million a year, but only when that comes after everyone from push broom and toilet brush to company car and private jet are all paid the highest for their position for a company that size. unfortunately almost everywhere you can go that isn't the case. I've heard a lot of discussion how making ISPs a utility would just entrench the monopolies even further... what od you think?

explorigin 12y ago
Did you read the article?
deciplex 12y ago
> I have zero problem with someone making a 100 million a year Maybe you should have a problem with it. I get what you're saying, that there may not be anything immoral about being extravagantly compensated, and in principle I agree with that. However, there is also something to be said for the overwhelming amount of political power that such wealth brings. It may be that we want to avoid such concentrations of wealth not out of a sense of fairness, but to keep people from hijacking our democracy.

alexryan 12y ago

Big mistake. Government regulation kills innovation. Do you really want the technology sector to end up looking like the healthcare system or the state run education system? Everything government touches turns to crap. To believe that government regulation with make anything better is not very intelligent.

rtpg 12y ago
yeah, really ruined all those wonderful trust in the 1900's. Really hate cheap steel.
usefulcat 12y ago
> Everything government touches turns to crap. By that extremely simplistic logic, we should have no laws at all.
- dreamdu5t 12y ago
  By that logic, laws would be created by a free market in law (polycentric court system).
  - dragonwriter 12y ago
    A "free market in law" is either (a) not a free market (as participation in a transaction is not fully voluntary for all participants), or (b) not law. Most likely, both.
    - dreamdu5t 12y ago
      > as participation in a transaction is not fully voluntary for all participants What transaction are you referring to not being voluntary? Transactions in the economic sense are by definition voluntary. Without a monopoly on law, people hire courts of their choosing to settle disputes. They are not compelled by a third party to settle disputes in the third party's court. Most importantly, they are not compelled by a third party to use the third party's law. They may each have their own laws even. More about polycentric law: http://www.tomwbell.com/writings/JurisPoly.html http://www.tomwbell.com/writings/JurisPoly.html