FCC plans to vote to overturn U.S. net neutrality rules in December

I'm so cynical that any type of revolt, even moderately "violent", would be squashed before it ever had a chance to fully form.

It truly is an interesting time. Initially, corporations were to have a definite lifespan (something like 70 years). Of course they got rid of that.

Our system wasn't designed for corporate influence of this magnitude. Our forefathers were pretty smart dudes..I wonder how they'd change the constitution knowing what we know now.

I see every loss that occurs as a step back and no progress only side stepping afterwords...

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telecommunications_Act_of_1996

Not true. While the First Amendment does provide many protections for free press and there are no national press shield laws, many states in the US provide additional free press protections: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shield_laws_in_the_United_Stat...

Please stop trying to hijack discussion of free speech and free press (both of which are human rights / social institutions that extend beyond the scope of protections provided via the court due to the First Amendment) into being discussions of the First Amendment in the name of "education".

This kind of stuff is why I see America more as a corporate oligarchy than a democracy anymore. Gerrymandering, lobbying/bribery, and lack of contact with our government means it doesn't represent the people any longer.

The problem is that political success in the US depends on a successful marketing & sales campaign, which in turn costs a lot of money. Legislating campaign events out of existence seems to be a non-starter, but with a progressive supreme court paid political advertising could be curtailed or stopped, in return opening up debate and equal-time promo slots on network TV that uses licensed slices public airwaves. Journalists and opinion-swayers could still report on candidates as they did before, but the need to have millions of dollars to run a senate campaign would be dramatically reduced. Of course there's a big free speech juggling act that would have to be performed, but it's not an insurmountable problem.

Couple this with some relatively lightweight voting reform (IRV or something more sophisticated, plus data driven auto-districting or even proportional representation at a state level to combat gerrymandering) and a good deal of the problems with the system go away, since politicians would have to spend much less of their time seeking donations (and politicians who were still doing a lot of fundraising would stand out more and could be investigated more thoroughly.)

1) Donations to politicians from companies/foreigners need an absolute ban.

2) Personal donations should be capped at what a average politically interested person could afford.

3) A company can either lobby or hire government employees, not both. If a company lobbies government they cant hire senior government employees for 7 years. Likewise if a company hires senior government staff they cant lobby for 7 years. This way if a business is lobbying government then that person knows there is no cushy job for them at the end and your not hiring someone for their relationships that can directly influence government.

I know these will have loopholes and need more detail etc. Not least super pac issue in US (I am Australian so different challenges). I do believe something around this framework would significantly change the face of politics towards working for their constituents. Especially with the internet today and its ability to spread information and ideas.

What evidence do we have that the US Government will do this? What mechanism has Pai proposed we put in place to ensure that we address them?

It's true that I don't understand his position. And that is a fundamental failure of Pai and his team. A failure to properly explain to the American internet-going public the benefit of his position beyond "it isn't our job to police the Internet." Sorry to reduce his stance to a meme, and one that might not even accurately encapsulate his positions, but I'm a reasonably well informed individual and all I can see is higher prices for Internet ahead.

DSL started out regulated under Title II as a common carrier as an extension of the regulation for the phone network. Common carrier status automatically applies a limited form of network neutrality as it doesn't allow arbitrary blocking or discrimination of access. In 2002 the FCC decided the relatively new cable internet access should be regulated under Title I and then moved DSL to Title I in 2005 to match.

Also in 2005, the FCC give its definition of the requirement for an "open internet". These essentially described network neutrality. In 2010 the FCC issued their Open Internet Order which made the requirements for an open internet mandatory for ISPs.

In 2014 the DC court of appeals struck down the most important requirements from the FCC order in Verizon v. FCC. In doing so the court informed the FCC these regulations could only be applied to services covered by Title II. In response in 2015 the FCC moved all ISP services under Title II, back where they had started.

This is because Pai’s comments are made in bad faith.

https://gizmodo.com/the-worst-lies-from-yesterdays-anti-net-...

You sound so sure, and you just take Pai unskeptically at his word, but is there a specific reason to think that this will actually happen? If you look at the most famous recent case of deregulation (in the financial markets), what eventually happened was that all the bad behaviours enabled by deregulation just continued without any regulatory action until the whole thing blew up. That's no model for governance.

If there isn't a specific reason (like a plan with some details, so that it's actionable), then it's also quite reasonable to think it's a bit of an excuse, intended to give cover, and a fairly transparent one at that.

No this is not appropriate. Sites do not 'consume' resources, users do. Let the market do it's normal job of supply and demand. If millions of users want to match netflix at the same time and the network cannot supply that, then raise the prize and invest in more infrastructure as any company with a demand surplus would. Markets _work_ in such situations, there's room for competitors, investments, increased profit margins and all those other good things. There is little information asymmetry: either netflix works when you want to chill or it doesn't. People _will_ vote with their money. Protecting a company from a demand surplus?? MADNESS!

Instead of nitpicking further on this flawed example instead turn your argument against itself. Why create rules of which you _know_ (as you yourself mention) that they are going to be abused, only to later 'deal' (take more 'campaign' money) with them. There is a very clear conflict of interest between ISPs that are also content creators and their content creating competitors.

I too ascribe to the notion that, whatever the legal code might say, companies are not people. They should not be able to abuse the rights that people have to achieve their business agenda. Their customers' bytes on their switches are not 'speech'. They should be dumb pipes, selling access to their dumb pipes and compete with other designers or dumb pipe networks, and that should be it.

Second, lots of what he says are clear lies or contradictions. "I don't have predetermined views on where this will go" ... he announced many times exactly where he wants it to go! "I just want a competitive marketplace" ... he is trying to remove limitations on size of marketshare!

Third, we've seen his "arguments" over and over and they don't hold up. His main argument completely lies in revisionist history. The idea that somehow there was a "bipartisan light-touch" approach that was carefully applied and managed to grow the Internet, therefore imposing NN will destroy growth. The truth is very simple, that NN has almost nothing to do with infrastructure investment, it will just allow them to exploit their position as middlemen, and the truth is that large ISPs don't invest in infrastructure because they are unregulated near-monopolies and abolishing NN won't change that.

The "wait-and-see approach" is a classic vague generality that applies very poorly to this situation. There's a specific thing that the vast majority of consumers don't want these companies to do (discriminate traffic), and they have past histories of trying it only to widespread outrage, so we got a very simple, general regulation in place to stop them from doing it.

If anything, the wait-and-see approach he claims to support would be the one that leads to "an encyclopedia of rapidly dated laws". He says he wants to play whack-a-mole with laws, when we already have one extremely simple law that will age just fine: when a consumer pays for traffic, they get that traffic treated equally regardless of content or source.

Apologies if I seem angry at you but it really galls me when people are taken in by this.

"We should throw out the rule book and wait for people to break rules that no longer exist and then make rules to stop them"

I do appreciate that he's at least trying to increase infrastructure investment, and I guess I'll have to think some more before I have an opinion on whether the proposed rules are likely to do that. I do know of one small ISP that supports his approach.

As others have said here in discussions like this one, I think that net neutrality is something of a second choice. What we really need is meaningful competition among ISPs. I would be happy if we could take all this political energy being spent opposing Pai and channel it instead toward removing barriers to municipal broadband.

While I appreciate this sentiment, it really only applies to arguments that are being made in good faith.

Pai may be saying "rules should be written as necessary instead of creating an enormous rule book based entirely on today's tech.", which is a supportable position that I can reasonably defend despite not agreeing with.

However, the action they are taking includeds removing any legal ability for the FCC to write and enforce these rules. Now congress can create these types rules without the FCC having title II authority, but relying on congress to write the rules as needed in response in innovation is going to be MUCH SLOWER to respond to innovation and bad behavior than giving the FCC the authority to adjust and enforce rules as necessary.

> What he actually says, and the implications of the headlines and comments snipped by third party organizations tend to be quite different indeed!

This is because what they say they are doing (and why) is quite different from the actual actions and motivations.

Pai keeps saying "we've got to remove title II to help small ISPs", yet the is the big ISPs that are constantly pushing for it's removal, Title II was put in place to regulate large monopolies just like them (Ma Bell), and many small ISPs actually favor maintaining Title II status. It is hard to take someone's arguments in good faith when they consistently misrepresent the issues.

> If the throughput for these systems starts to become an issue would it be so unreasonable for them to throttle or block sites consuming disproportionate resources?

Yes it is unnecessary. If they can't scale those systems to match supply to demand, they can increase the amount charged to limit that demand to match supply. Giving them

> Maybe the most basic argument is that it should be clear that net neutrality has not really achieved anything. Many people seem to think we always had net neutrality and stripping it away is some radical shift.

We have had network neutrality (mostly anyways) for a long time and proponents argue that net neutrality (and it's resulting competition) is what has caused the internet to innovate as such an amazingly rapid pace. That neutrality was not enshrined by law in the US until 2015 but that doesn't mean that the principle itself wasn't being followed by convention.

I hope your misleading arguments were made in good faith rather that being a deliberate attempt to mislead people like so much of the anti net neutrality rhetoric. (There is misleading pro net neutrality rhetoric too but I see more proponents making good faith arguments)

I think the parent was implying that large telco interests have a dubious track record when it comes to the balance between investing in capacity vs. rent-seeking.

You couldn't connect a phone to Verizon's network unless Verizon sold it to you.

The phones they sold had the firmware configured to prohibit adding content from any source other than their store, which sold it at an extremely high cost.

Free up the protectionism we're granting to major telcos and let the consumer choose what they are willing to pay for.

Edit: Ultimately the consumer must own the "last mile" that is feeding their residence. In that way, ISPs would lease space in the residential IDF to tie willing customers in that neighborhood in.

I guess people actually would need to be able to still install software updates etc, which might be tricky if strictly capped?

Under current net neutrality rules, is it possible to sell a data capped plan (but content agnostic), with overages, where the data capped portion is below rival “uncapped” plans?

That way it seems like one could attract that demographic without the downside you highlighted.

In theory you'd think we could make motorized land vehicles with all random power outputs just like boats, but in practice they're all within an order of magnitude, how odd.

From an engineering standpoint I'm not sure what we could take away from a modern car to make a "Sunday church only" car that would still be street legal and not result in immense staggering levels of customer dissatisfaction. In addition, I'm kinda claiming old people saying all they want is email, are lying. The instant you sell that "email only" product the instant the phone lines light up with support calls. They don't actually want it, they want cheaper prices and they're hoping that stereotype will sell their request. They have no idea that "email only" would be costlier to provide, they just think its an inferior position so gimmie a lower bill. In summary, we can't sell it because it would be a support nightmare and its maybe not possible to engineer without significant extra expense.

The thing about market segmentation is that its very expensive to implement legacy long distance telco style era billing infrastructure... we aren't gonna split product prices from current price X into X/2, X/3, X/4 for inferior products. To fund the billing infrastructure we're going to split into 2(X+100), 0.75(X+100) etc. Both a VERY high offset to fund the billing costs, and an additional medical insurance style monopoly increase to multiples of higher price, not lower. Killing net neutrality is about monopoly middlemen raising prices, never about lowering them.

An even closer although more stretched analogy is a modern car that can drive across the country at high speeds is going to cost almost exactly as much as a car that can just barely drive to the post office. Its not like turn signals or air bags are any cheaper. Certainly there's no such thing as single mode fiber optic lasers that are only rated for email checking vs 10G multiplayer gaming use.

I've noticed watching my kids that bandwidth use has stopped increasing. Thru my life bandwidth use only increased, over many orders of magnitude. That era is over, and we're raising kids who have constant BW use over the course of their lives. For context my daughter is the same age as Youtube and nothing has happened since then WRT BW use. Everything other than streaming video is a rounding error and trillions of hours watched show resolution and quality are totally optional for video consumption despite decades of broadcast engineers and professional producers claiming the contrary in the legacy media.

Otherwise, without NN, we have to rely on ISPs "word" they won't just start forcing cable packages on us. No fucking thanks.

2. If you are not providing last mile, you are not competing with comcast, verizon, at&t or whoever else owns that infra.

Eliminating NN will make competition even worse for smaller and medium sized ISPs because the big ISPs have disproportional leverage to extract subsidies from media companies and make all sorts of deals. In some cases, the ISPs even own the media companies (for example, Comcast owns NBC). How can you possibly expect to compete with that?

I care far, far, far more about net neutrality, and not having the internet get fucked, than about your company making money.