Now that the FCC has repealed net neutrality, let’s adopt it in California
medium.com
medium.com
I do however find the doom and gloom prognostications around Title II repeal to be incredibly hyperbolic and unhelpful. Fact is, Title II was only introduced in 2015. It's not like repeal in 2017 is going to end the Internet overnight.
There are three problems here:
1. The US has a harebrained notion of "competition" in creating regional monopolies.
2. It actually doesn't make much sense to build multiple last-mile networks. This is called an overbuild and is rather wasteful given the capex involved. It's also why strict rules are in place for utilities: it underscores the fact that utilities are monopolies and seeks to prevent overbuilds.
3. ISPs have been allowed to frame the debate on peering with outright falsehoods. Specifically, the likes of Comcast claim that it's "unfair" that the likes of Netflix can "push" data onto their network for free no less. Netflix of course isn't pushing anything. Comcast's customers are requesting it.
It's all just a thinly-veiled attempt to stifle VOD providers to prop up dying (yet profitable) cable TV businesses. The fact that politicians aren't able to or don't want to see through this is both unsurprising and disappointing.
Adopting net neutrality laws at a state level is an interesting idea that may force Federal regulatino. I mean what's worse that one set of Federal rules for a large company? 50 sets of state rules, that's what.
Even if just CA and NY adopt this, that's already a sizable amount of the population.
Honestly asking, my memory of new events from that era is somewhat hazy.
What resulted were a bunch of efforts to let ISPs remain Title I but still allow the FCC to enforce net neutrality on them. They failed because the ISPs would sue the FCC over each successive plan/rules.
The last case was Verizon vs the FCC and in that case the judge said the FCC could enforce net neutrality if and only if it classified the ISPs as Title II instead of as Title I.
The FCC then took a couple years trying to find a way around this, but ultimately decided in 2015 to jsut reclassify the ISPs as Title II, because they couldn't find any other way to enforce net neutrality while keeping the ISPs classified as Title I.
PS:
>>>> VERIZON: During oral arguments in Verizon v. FCC in 2013, judges asked whether the phone giant would favor some preferred services, content or sites over others if the court overruled the agency’s existing open internet rules. Verizon counsel Helgi Walker had this to say: “I’m authorized to state from my client today that but for these rules we would be exploring those types of arrangements.” Walker’s admission might have gone unnoticed had she not repeated it on at least five separate occasions during arguments.
This may have been revised extensively in the Telecommunications Act of 1996 [4] and with subsequent policy changes around treatment of "telecommunications services", "information services" and "common carriers" but the point remains: Title II has a long history.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Net_neutrality_in_the_United_S...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communications_Act_of_1934#Str...
[3] https://transition.fcc.gov/Reports/1934new.pdf, pp35-136
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telecommunications_Act_of_1996...
And before that no ISP would even consider tiered pricing because there were no services worth tiering. Alexadra Petri has a really good analogy over at the WaPo:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/compost/wp/2017/12/14/n...
>>It may not be technically illegal to bring a bear into a maternity ward, but we have, I think, started to live our lives with the expectation that nobody will do this. So if we put forth a rule saying, just so we’re clear, No Bears in the Maternity Ward, I would not expect anyone to complain that this was stifling innovation. In fact, if someone said “Hey, let’s get rid of that rule about not bringing bears into hospitals so we can restore the wonderful, competitive environment we had before,” I would wonder, “What exactly are you PLANNING that you need us to get rid of this relatively basic protection?”
The rule about No Bears in the Maternity Ward only came to be after a number of cases where someone had brought a bear into a maternity ward, following a long history of bear-free maternity wards, in which time the rule had not yet been needed.
Wasn't the original phone system vastly over built and that is the reason that things like DSL were possible without having to run new wiring in many homes?
Phone lines had a filter on them to only pass through voice range frequencies. It's why you could hear the sounds made by a modem (or a fax for that matter). These were simply working around the filter.
xDSL was a result of removing that filter. Or, rather, moving it into the customer premises so instead of 2-3kHz, the copper line could support frequencies into the MHz range.
ADSL has a speed limit that follows an inverse square law to the distance the line travels to the exchange. Under ~1km ADSL2+ can get 20+ Mbps. At about 6km ADSL/ADSL2/ADSL2+ all cap out at about ~1.5Mbps and much beyond that it doesn't work at all.
4-5km is a typical average distance for a phone line, putting the max speed in the 5-8Mbps range. Pretty good for the early 2000s. Not so great now.
There are various workarounds for this, most notably reducing the copper distance. In Australia, the NBN (in part) uses FttN (fiber to the node) so Exchange -> fiber -> Node -> copper -> Customer. Limit the copper distance to 1.5km and put VDSL2 on it and you can get closer to 100Mbps.
I remember a time when you couldn't text to other carrier, while Europe had it since the 90s.
I remember how your carrier would not let you use facetime/skype etc....
Anyway, you are paying for access to internet and you should have it.
This is akin to letting a private entity building a private highway on a public ground, and the owner of the highway can say: Only Audis and BMWs are allowed here...
Same with your gas/electric/water line
While "Wireless" provides are given PUBLIC spectrum to use for their business (they pay for it, but that's besides the point).
So yes, 99% of internet out there uses some public areas at some point.
If anything, I've seen a significant rise in censorship since NN was passed.
The hyperbole today is just off the charts sad.
1996 Telecommunication Act: It was a legal gray area, particularly given dial up / dsl over telephone lines.
2002: FCC exempts NCTA by declaring it an information service, not telecommunications.
2005: NCTA wins at the Supreme Court
Open Internet Principles: 2005-2010 (i.e. Threatening to regulate)
Open Internet Order: 2010-2015 (Regulating, legally overturned)
Regulatory framework repealed today: 2015-2017
------------------
"If anything, I've seen a significant rise in censorship since NN was passed."
Censorship by whom? A bunch of websites that are completely separate entities from ISPs that are monopolies for all intents and purposes?
Yes, those same web sites that are breathlessly telling me today the repealing NN is a mortal threat to my very existence, who then turn around and engage in censorship themselves.
Free market competition exists for websites and there is probably a market for it if you are upset about it.
I actually laughed out loud today when I saw a tweet from twitter saying that NN will allow for censorship. Twitter is a festering den of opaque censorship. No one sees the irony?
Let's suppose I put up a website where I accept articles about model trains. You submit articles about how to grow anthrax at home. I pass, in that they are not about model trains. Am I a shocking censor? No.
Or let's suppose you submit an article that is about model trains, but I don't think it's very good. I refuse it. is that censorship? Also no.
Twitter gets to decide what goes on their platform. If you don't like it, you can post it on some other platform. Or just make your own platform, one equally available to every Internet user.
If Comcast, on the other hand, decides to block a site because it's critical of them, then many millions of people will not be able to see it, and many of them won't be able to switch to a different ISP. That is censorship.
This whole debate has been so completely hijacked by utterly false premise arguments.
This feels too much like a similar argument that people have been making lately, where silencing voices can only be considered "censorship" if it comes from the government. I'm so tired of seeing this! It's part of a larger trend, where people arbitrarily narrow definitions in service of their argument. It's disingenuous, to say the least.
(For the record, I'm AGAINST censorship whether it's Twitter, Comcast, or anyone else who provides services to the masses. Small private "clubs" like your model train website are a different animal. And yes, obviously that means that there are grey areas that cannot be cleanly resolved. Such is life.)
(Edit: toned down my response a bit.)
In effective marketplaces, we trust the choice of purchasers to do most of the necessary work of making sure companies really serve the public. If some ISP in a competitive market decided to shut off access to all Republican-leaning news and commentary, we'd expect many people to switch to an ISP that didn't censor. But if Comcast did that, many people would just be screwed.
I agree that censorship is the pervasive silencing of voices. I disagree that Twitter can do that. Twitter may kick some people off their platform, but the Internet's open nature means those people can set up their own website. ISPs in noncompetitive markets, on the other hand, can indeed censor material, because many people will have no easy way to get that material.
That's why common carrier regulations predate the Internet by decades: some societal infrastructure is too important and too prone to capture to leave it up to the whims of individual executives. You could make the argument that Twitter is that kind of infrastructure. But given that only 20% of Americans use Twitter even once a month and a much smaller number use it daily, I think it's hard to say it's in the same category as the telephone or the Internet itself.
In my opinion, when a company's platform becomes one of the largest and most important venues for public discussion, they can no longer be considered a purely "private" entity in the same way. Corporations exist at the leisure of the public, as the public allows their charters to exist and defines (through law) the powers granted to the corporation. Expression of fundamental freedoms like freedom of speech defeats corporate concerns in this case. The public square must be open to the public, or democracy cannot function.
I get your theory that private community spaces take on additional responsibilities once they're important enough to a community and maybe there's a way to legislate that. But it would be challenging. HN is definitely an important space for this community, for example. Every local newspaper is important too. The notion that we should have detailed federal regulations for exactly how to moderate a discussion thread plus a legal appeals process strikes me as unworkable in practice.
If we really want virtual public space, I think the thing to do is just to build or buy it. It would be easy enough to nationalize Facebook and Twitter for example; Congress just says "now they're part of the government", optionally paying the shareholders.
I completely agree that it would be impractical to legislate moderation or terms of service, except on maybe a very coarse scale. I'm not sure what the answer is. Like much in the political sphere, this may just be a space where law and litigation has to fight it out with private industry until the end of time. A "solution" that satisfies all parties may not be possible.
Thanks for the discussion.
An utterly different KIND of private company! A fundamentally different situation which does need regulation due to the differences that exist.
How the heck can we be this deep into the discussion and that's somehow unclear?
Edit: Downvoting a simple, verifiable fact? Nice. That about sums up this whole charade.
Look up US Telecom Association v FCC (2016)
https://techliberation.com/2017/07/12/heres-why-the-obama-fc...
https://www.cadc.uscourts.gov/internet/opinions.nsf/06F8BFD0...
What? The break the internet movement didn't mention that part? That censorship by ISPs was ok under net neutrality?
https://www.attpublicpolicy.com/consumer-broadband/the-surpr...
1) You are in favor of censorship without clear disclosure.
2) You believe its acceptable such censorship should be controlled by government granted near monopolies.
---
You are talking about a ruling that mentions as an unrelated aside about the editorial right of content curation being legal and that right being more powerful than Title II due to the existence of the First Amendment. However, if its exercised, you are required to clearly disclose it to consumers before they purchase from you.
Without Title II, that requirement to clearly disclose no longer exists with a clear history of case law.
So...I'm really uncertain why you feel a requirement to disclose censorship before a purchase is made was an unfair regulatory burden.
I'm glad you have made it clear you were being disingenuous about your earlier complaints about censorship publicly.
> That would be true of an ISP that offers subscribers a curated experience by blocking websites lying beyond a specified field of content (e.g., family friendly websites). It would also be true of an ISP that engages in other forms of editorial intervention, such as throttling of certain applications chosen by the ISP, or filtering of content into fast (and slow) lanes based on the ISP’s commercial interests. An ISP would need to make adequately clear its intention to provide “edited services” of that kind, so as to avoid giving consumers a mistaken impression that they would enjoy indiscriminate “access to all content available on the Internet, without the editorial intervention of their broadband provider,”
> It would not be enough under the Order, for instance, for “consumer permission” to be “buried in a service plan—the threats of consumer deception and confusion are simply too great.”
And now, you've legalized the "buried in a service plan" option. Congratulations.
> The only real roadblock is money. Fiber ISPs are super cheap at scale, but are effectively impossible to bootstrap unless you are already a millionaire.
(I didn't downvote you)
Please back up your statements by pointing to sources that support your interpretation of laws and events so that others can verify them.
https://techliberation.com/2017/07/12/heres-why-the-obama-fc...
https://www.cadc.uscourts.gov/internet/opinions.nsf/06F8BFD0...
...and this: https://www.attpublicpolicy.com/consumer-broadband/the-surpr...
> Does the rule lie within the agency’s statutory authority? And is it consistent with the First Amendment? The answer to both questions, in our view, is yes.
This was the majority opinion, although one judge dissented and said it did violate the First Amendment.
The court did mention a clause in the FCC order then under consideration about ‘edited’ services, which is what your first link takes out of context. The order itself explicitly allowed for such services, so as far as I can tell, the court did not opine one way or the other on whether ISPs separately have a First Amendment right to provide them. This isn’t as big a loophole as it sounds, though. Describing the order’s requirements, the court wrote:
> That would be true of an ISP that offers subscribers a curated experience by blocking websites lying beyond a specified field of content (e.g., family friendly websites). It would also be true of an ISP that engages in other forms of editorial intervention, such as throttling of certain applications chosen by the ISP, or filtering of content into fast (and slow) lanes based on the ISP’s commercial interests. An ISP would need to make adequately clear its intention to provide “edited services” of that kind, id. ¶ 556, so as to avoid giving consumers a mistaken impression that they would enjoy indiscriminate “access to all content available on the Internet, without the editorial intervention of their broadband provider,” id. ¶ 549. It would not be enough under the Order, for instance, for “consumer permission” to be “buried in a service plan—the threats of consumer deception and confusion are simply too great.” Id. ¶ 19; see id. ¶ 129.
> There is no need in this case to scrutinize the exact manner in which a broadband provider could render the FCC’s Order inapplicable by advertising to consumers that it offers an edited service rather than an unfiltered pathway. No party disputes that an ISP could do so if it wished, and no ISP has suggested an interest in doing so in this court. That may be for an understandable reason: a broadband provider representing that it will filter its customers’ access to web content based on its own priorities might have serious concerns about its ability to attract subscribers.
So when you say "it was only introduced in 2015", what you really mean is "it was a heavily disputed situation for 20 years in with multiple court cases being won and lost by ISPs".
So yeah, this is the first time the regulatory framework is basically _gone_ even if it wasn't "Title II".
1996 Telecommunication Act: It was a legal gray area, particularly given dial up / dsl over telephone lines.
2002: FCC exempts NCTA by declaring it an information service, not telecommunications.
2005: NCTA wins at the Supreme Court
Open Internet Principles: 2005-2010 (i.e. Threatening to regulate)
Open Internet Order: 2010-2015 (Regulating, legally overturned)
Regulatory framework repealed today: 2015-2017
Some action against Comcast throttling/blocking BitTorrent (in 2007-2009) ultimately resulted in action by the FCC in 2010, made rather toothless in 2014 with the provisions against blocking and throttling struck down.
So between 2010-2014 and 2015-2017 we have ~6 years of regulation, with the ISPs fighting it all the way (surprise surprise).
Just to clarify: I'm in agreement that we need net neutrality. I've just been around the block enough times to know that the FCC's latest action just isn't the end of the world.
Comcast wasn't the only enforcement action under the 2005-2010 case-by-case approach. (The first was the Madison River VoIP blocking case, in 2005.)
That's contradictory. Either we don't need net neutrality, and we're all being silly caring, or we do need net neutrality, and the ruckus is justified.
I don't see how we could need net neutrality, have it just be repealed, but be told that it's no big deal and we should just go about our business and not care.
I agree it's not the end of the world, in the sense that now ISPs will start to behave badly again, and either Congress or the FCC will be forced to act/backpedal (of course, after a lot of harm has already been done), or, at worst, we'll have to wait for a sane administration to be in office to restore some regulation. But that doesn't mean it's not a big deal right now.
Yes, obviously. Just like roads. Which is why local governments should design and operate all residential internet networks.
Or: Yes, obviously. A house really only needs one electrified wire, which is why we should turn over internet service to the power company.
Or: Yes, obviously. We don't want an internet that's wasteful in any part of its operations, which is why it should be run entirely by the federal government. In fact, it's about communications, so let's combine it with the USPS.
Or: Yes, obviously. Given its vital role in society and its origins as a DARPA project, it should be entirely built and operated by the US Army.
On the other hand, maybe what we need is a proper market in internet connectivity, with multiple providers using different technologies and approaches to meet consumer needs, and a strong regulator that keeps large companies from driving the small ones under.
As somebody who lives in one of the few competitive ISP markets in the US and pays $50/month for my gigabit home fiber connection, I think I prefer the latter.
The access was provided only to dry pairs ( think alarm wires) for DSL if the carriers had unused dry pairs ( they did not ). To do that, one needed to colocate in a certain number of COs ( large ), take at least a rack per CO ( $2.5K-5K ) even if one had only ONE subscriber. The rack was placed into a special area of CO (so only some COs had them - there was no requirement to build out that area ) and finally in order to terminate anything out of that rack one needed to buy a crazy expensive service from the CO carrier ( think $10-15k/mo ) to get a DS3 or OC3 out.
This meant that absolutely no sane ISP could really afford to do this as there would be no customers wanting to pay hundreds of dollars a month for IP service. ISP DSL access was a replacement for T1s selling for $1.5K/mo between loop and IP, not for residential.
There was no requirement to share fiber builds.
Regardless, I agree it never took off as regulators intended, but my point was the intent was similar: mandatory shared last-mile infrastructure.
This completely side-skirts the rule that disallows states from making their own NN legislature.
It was treated as such prior to that, implicitly (without the force of law). Policy was established to enforce it, formally. It wasn't just "introduced", it was tacitly accepted until there were known bad actors, because there was an expectation that acting in opposition would birth policy (it did). Pretending that traffic was treated equally before and after, is just another piece of mischaracterization. A piece that is used to distract from, and minimize, the problems with removing the policy.
I think it's really just because it was successfully made into a mainstream political issue. So now you have to appeal to the mass audience, not just IT nerds; and we're just seeing the same tactics that is routinely used to whip up support (or opposition) to other stuff.
I'm actually weirdly uncomfortable about this. It's like being the guy who has cried wolf for many years, and now half of the village is there with you; but you see them pointing at rocks, logs etc, and insisting that these are all wolves, and we're all going to die now. It really made me question just how many people who happen to share my political positions, do so because they genuinely understand and agree with the policies, and not because it's just what you're supposed to do when you have a certain identity (liberal etc).
I just can't imagine that ISPs won't make a grab for revenues, otherwise why spend money to lobby against NN? They're probably just waiting for the current furor to die down and sneak it in without people noticing.
I think it will be interesting to see what happens now. I imagine the ISPs already feel they're very near the peak price:demand curve for consumers. Their monopoly is such that customers can't really say no unless they're willing to go with no access. So I'd agree that if there was going to be a squeeze it'd be on other large companies. But that also opens up the door to a far more motivated Google Fiber. And the lack of net neutrality opens up some interesting things - for instance a Netflix arrangement with an upstart ISP could offer free access at ultra-premium speeds to Netflix. That is something that the current monopolists could not necessarily match.
Should be interesting to see how this plays out.
Forget about all the political and business aspects -- the actual effort required to lay out new wiring, then run it to the home, is from an economic standpoint just pure deadweight loss.
1 cable is necessary. 2 cables is redundant.
Unfortunately, the ISPs have a point here that 'competition' in the form of multiple companies laying wiring to the same home is sheer folly.
Now what's the value proposition to an investor to fund direct competition?
If you shake someone down, there's more than one way to get paid off. It can come in the form of protection money, or you can just get them to buy you out. I'd imagine that Comcast et al will want to keep the tolls just low enough that it's in nobody's best interest to actually run more wiring.
Plus the ISPs can always buy off cash-starved local and regional governments, like they have been doing to Google Fiber, and delay the laying of new fibre indefinitely. There's no need to outlaw competition, just leverage the legal and administrative process to indefinitely fight over details like utility pole access.
Its worth thinking about how well reasoned and deeply researched justifications of positions make headway in a democracy. Expert opinion is expensive to acquire and not accessible to the majority. In a hierarchy of coalitions information is potential compressed at every level. If it gets compressed enough it might just end up as a left versus right or up versus down issue, with the justification for this reasoning only accessible by traversing up and down the hierarchy. I am not sure that this is a bad thing, butI can appreciate your concern about causes of an individuals motivation, especially in light of the potential for a propaganda apparatus to insert itself into my aforedescribed idealization.
As soon as it comes to anything political, we're all suddenly experts predicting gloom, doom or salvation over every single policy issue. Logic says every person is probably wrong on average half of the time, yet every person believes they are correct in their political team playing 100% of the time. That can't be healthy.
This hysteria is undoubtedly the reason you have things like bomb threats being called in on the FCC. Did the person who did that actually have any degree of understanding on the issue for which he probably was fantasizing about hurting or even killing people over? The safe guess there is probably not.
The solution is to break the monopolistic stranglehold on last-mile internet service.
If it were possible to have competition in the last-mile ISP space, then consumers could vote with their wallets and choose those ISPs who supported Net Neutrality.
An alternate partial solution would be to force companies breaking net neutrality to report it on their customer's bill.
Many rural areas have only one grocery store.
[1]: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/jul/09/what-happene...
I am implying this is a equivalent situation where govt didn't create rules for grocery stores to call all brands of goods equally.
Also, that is not what a word game is.
There's only one grocery store in many towns, because the moment another chain opens, the dominant one lowers prices to below what the market can bear. The dominant chain takes temporary losses to drive competition out of business, then raises prices sky-high and returns to business as usual. This exact behavior occurs in many broadband markets.
You bring up a great point though, even if 100 of the biggest cities have municipal internet infrastructure, there are still lots of areas that wouldn't be covered and could benefit from basic NN regulation.
I don't necessarily think the issues are orthogonal, but I do think basic "don't be a dick" ISP regulations should be in place.
They're not. If NN is a user sought feature, true competition will bring it.
E.g. a few years ago cell phone plans sucked in the US. TMobile started some real competition. The other big ones had to follow. Unlimited data plans, demanded ages ago, have been recently introduced.
This week I'm upgrading my connection to gigabit up/down over DOCSIS 3.1. While my own wifi supports near gigabit speeds, it will be a while before whole neighborhoods can enjoy the same over cellular service.
Good luck using 500GB of cellular in a month.
You have a lot of choice in your ISP in the uk
LLU happens at the exchange where the local loop edge is. But today's users want speeds which aren't practical over the long local loop. So the fibre was pushed out to street cabinets, FTTC, which are much closer to the end user and too small and numerous for LLU to work.
This makes good technical/engineering sense but it means there is no real competition. What the UK did about that is heavy regulation. The regulator decides how much can be charged to deliver the FTTC service from a consumer to a POP owned by an ISP as a wholesale price.
when I helped sort out our BB for an office move in Farringdon (London) there is a lot of whining about BB but we manged to get a 70Mbs ELM in less than 2 weeks and 100Mbs in a quoted 3 months actually delivered less than 2
http://app.leg.wa.gov/billsummary?BillNumber=2282&Year=2017
http://lawfilesext.leg.wa.gov/biennium/2017-18/Pdf/Bills/Hou...
(tl;dr: fcc-will-also-order-states-to-scrap-plans-for-their-own-net-neutrality-laws/ )
I tend to agree that the FCC probably won't be able to ban states from enacting their own form of net neutrality, but I've seen the courts side with business interests with weak arguments more times than I'd like.
Courts are wary of letting the federal government regulate how states organize themselves.
I reserve to right to have completely misunderstood the legalese that I was hearing :)
>The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.
If the Federal government chooses not to regulate it, then the states should be allowed to do so.
Edit: Here the FCC is choosing to not regulate Telecoms as "Common Carriers", so would not the states then be allowed to do so, barring other federal agencies that may be able to regulate "Common Carriers" (ala the FTC)? Honest question.
Your statement seems self-contradictory.
It's going to be interesting to see this idea tested again.
[1] https://www.fcc.gov/document/fcc-releases-order-preempting-t... [2] https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2015/02/fcc-o... [3] http://www.opn.ca6.uscourts.gov/opinions.pdf/16a0189p-06.pdf
If it's true that the majority wanted to keep net neutrality, then how come the majority was ignored? Maybe I'm missing something but this seems like a good example that our voice in the US doesn't matter beyond local things like whether or not your town will allocate money towards a new public swimming pool.
Go vote on whether or not you get a nice new swimming pool. The monopolists are the only ones that have a voice in grown-up topics. That's what I'm gathering from this. Accurate or alarmist nonsense?
Because the majority (at least, as weighted for electoral influence in both political branches of government) has prioritized other things in voting for representatives. Legislation, whether direct votes or through representatives, involves not only opinions on particular questions, but opinions on the relative priority of questions, which effects how questions are aggregated and how those aggregated questions are answered.
The majority wants net neutrality, sure, but continuously says (by voting) that they care about it much less than they care about other things, and that they are willing to sacrifice NN tomget those other things.
In generaly, the things that the majority want don't get enacted under the US system e.g. the tax bill with very low approval, so net neutrality falls into the general bucket of stuff that the majority want but that the Republicans don't want to them have.
An absolute majority of voters casting ballots for the House of Representatives in 2016 voted for either Republican or Libertarian candidates, both parties opposed to the FCC regulating for net neutrality and Congress legislating in favor of net neutrality.
It's a little less clear in the Presidential election, in part because you have to go beyond the top four candidates tomget a majority on either side, and detailed information on minor (often no-party) candidate positions on the issue can be hard to find.
And the Senate requires aggregating across different election years.
Because the FCC isn't accountable to the public, majority or not. If a majority protest was directed at a congress person, you can be sure they would listen – we're the ones who vote them in/out. And that's exactly what we're going to do to get NN enacted as law.
[1] Yes, I know Pai was appointed by Obama, on Mitch McConnell's advice. That's how these things work: 5 members, split between the two parties, with the incumbent administration's party getting the extra seat.
If net neutrality really IS good/bad, you'll notice it when you cross state borders and go online.
Which is probably why the courts have been rejecting the FCC's attempts at enforcing net neutrality for the past 12 years.
I cannot believe that I live in the middle of the infamous Silicon Valley and only have a single choice when it comes to fast broadband, and that one goes down every other month for 3-8 hours.
I took the time today to inquire (again) with Wave/Astound, Sonic, AT&T about FTTH.
AT&T gave me the worst rep humanly possible. I spent 20mins on the phone with her for her to still utterly misunderstand my question, as she was apparently unable to understand or speak english. I already knew Gigapower was not available, I just want SOMEONE to tell me when they plan to offer service at my house, less than a mile from the Redwood City / Spring St CO. No luck.
Sonic did the usual "maybe if you sign up for DSL and you talk all of your friends and neighbors into signing up, we'll vaguely consider bringing FTTH in 2050".
Wave actually had me enter my info and said someone would check my neighborhood (!?) and get back to me within a couple of days.
I'd love to pay, whatever, $1000 to get someone to bring some FTTH here and subsequently make it available to neighbors, improve their local service offerings, etc.
We'll see.
Google might have some smart developers, but they know very little about rolling out a full ISP with fiber plant. Their webpass acquisition showed that. This is another case of Google's hubris tripping them up and landing smack on their face.
Real companies and organizations with good operations can roll out an all fiber ISP. It's not like it's never been done before. Your two counter examples were due to greed and incompetence.
Interesting background of the current president trying to pull the waver here:
https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2017/03/trump-ca...
Where is libertarianism?
Largely still arguing about what it means to be a libertarian.
Given the fact that we only have 2 viable parties (yes it would be nice if that weren't the case but it is), what choice do we have but to dogpile on the party that responds at least somewhat to what constituents want and consistently supports pro-consumer policies? Sure both parties take money from wall street, but which one actually tries to protect the consumer from the excesses of wall street? People just keep saying "well they are all corrupt", don't look at who takes money and how much look at how their opinions and actions change after they take the money!
I'm against false dichotomy and false equivalencies. The only avenue I see is to make democratic reforms part of the democratic party platform where we prevent these problems in the long term. That will show if they can be a truly mature party, one that is willing to give up power to restore long term viability to our democracy.
[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/monkey-cage/wp/2017/10/0... [2]https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2017/12/12...
I honestly don't think that they've used as sleazy of tactics to get what they want (such as denying a president a supreme court appointment) but I don't have hard data to back that up other than a couple recent examples.
I'm saying they need to make it part of their platform. Someone has to be adult enough to realize that restoring our democracy to a more working order is essential. That means gerrymandering, campaign finance, filibusters etc.
cf) The entire history of the term "states' rights".
The modern 'conservative' stance towards the affairs of the day.
I never paid much attention to what they got up to before the feds stepped in but I kind of doubt it was a last mile problem, once the packet got that far why mess with it?
But, knowing California, they'll do one of those "...and any packet destined for a customer in California."
Ignoring the around the world latency and assuming CA has a trans-pacific pipe to asia they could route all CA traffic out of country first. Would this disregard the "interstate" premise?
(talking hypothetical here)
The Commerce Clause has been ruled to apply to something you grow in your own backyard and consume yourself because of a theoretical impact on the national market: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wickard_v._Filburn So it's very easy to see how regulating state internet regulations also falls into the purview of the federal government from there.
I just see it as opportunity to hone my subtle trolling skills.
AFAIK, however, that's up to an appellate court to decide, which hasn't happened yet. (Another comment in another thread cites the recent case the FCC lost regarding its ability to pre-empt municipal broadband — see TN, NC v. FCC — which is probably somewhat dispositive.)
EDIT: also: "delegated to the United States by the Constitution". Note the emphasis. The FCC can assert all the authority it wants, but absent an Amendment to that effect, or a specific ruling on that question by a "court of competent authority", I don't believe the matter is nearly as settled as you suggest.
If it's true for handguns, it's true for the Internet. I say Californians might have a shot at this (as would any other state)
If you've seen my previous posts, you'll know I'm anti Title II, because I think it's a terrible way to achieve the goal. I think state laws, relative to local context, are absolutely the way to go.
The repeal is working exactly the way Pai said it would. It is encouraging new ISP entrants. Startup ISPs are the answer. NN supporters still don't realize they've been on the wrong side the entire time.
https://www.recode.net/2017/12/14/16777356/full-transcript-a...
Small internet services were being shut out due to the Title II regulations.
> We [ISPs across the country] have encountered no new additional barriers to investment or deployment as a result of the 2015 decision to reclassify broadband as a telecommunications service and have long supported network neutrality as a core principle for the deployment of networks for the American public to access the Internet.
https://www.eff.org/files/2017/06/27/isp_letter_to_fcc_on_nn...
no, they weren't:
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2017/12/ajit-pai-claims-...
https://www.recode.net/2017/12/14/16777356/full-transcript-a...
"The main complaint consumers have about the Internet is not and has never been that their Internet service provider is blocking access to content. It’s that they don’t have access at all or enough competition. These regulations have taken us in the opposite direction from these consumer preferences. Under Title II, investment in high-speed networks has declined by billions of dollars. Notably, this is the first time that such investment has declined outside of a recession in the Internet era."
"The impact has been particularly serious for smaller Internet service providers. They don’t have the time, money, or lawyers to navigate a thicket of complex rules."
"the Wireless Internet Service Providers Association, which represents small fixed wireless companies that typically operate in rural America, surveyed its members and found that over 80% “incurred additional expense in complying with the Title II rules, had delayed or reduced network expansion, had delayed or reduced services and had allocated budget to comply with the rules.” Other small companies, too, have told the FCC that these regulations have forced them to cancel, delay, or curtail fiber network upgrades. And nearly two dozen small providers submitted a letter saying the FCC’s heavy-handed rules “affect our ability to find financing.”"
"a coalition of 19 municipal Internet service providers—that is, city-owned nonprofits—have told the FCC that they “often delay or hold off from rolling out a new feature or service because [they] cannot afford to deal with a potential complaint and enforcement action.”"
If you'd like a deep dive level of information, you could try contacting some of the named companies and associations, like
I'm sure they'd be happy to fill you in, if you're willing to listen to them.
This is the signal. Startup ISPs are where the action is starting today.
This is not how you do discourse on the internet — asserting the emotional state (or ability to read) of people on the other side of the screen. I'm quite calm, thanks; I simply reject Pai's agenda-serving statements as anything but agenda-serving (and also a little bit "appeal to authority", but I'm not feeling terribly inclined to chase that notion down the fallacy rabbit hole when I have so much work to do I'm only now breaking for lunch, so whatever).
Please do what you've repeatedly been asked in this thread and cite examples, not propaganda.
I did, in the post you are responding to.
>>>>Do you have any examples? Or any reason to believe that the startup ISPs will bother with anyone outside of a major metro area?
>>>the Wireless Internet Service Providers Association, which represents small fixed wireless companies that typically operate in rural America
Yes, competition would absolutely be better for everyone. There is not a single NN supporter out there who would not love more competition. But we still have to live in the real world. And in the real world, there flat out is no competition. And in many places, particularly rural and inner-city areas, there likely is not enough of a customer base to support multiple ISPs. And, as I said, we do not have competition now. Repealing Net Neutrality is this environment is nothing more than an anti-consumer move. It absolutely is required now, to protect consumer interests. If we were in an environment where market forces could work, then you would have an argument that NN is not needed. But, once again, to stress the point, we do not live in that environment. Getting rid of NN before that environment comes is utter foolishness, and does nothing but serve to turn the internet into Cable TV.
The problem is a portion of the US has no good network infrastructure. Another significant portion of the US has only 1 provider servicing them with decent internet connectivity.
A new market entrant will need years to dig and install adequate coverage for even urban US locations. Meanwhile, the US consumer will suffer shit service and outright market manipulation.