Pissed Off by Verizon, Firefighters Join the Fight to Restore Net Neutrality
motherboard.vice.com
motherboard.vice.com
The point the article is trying to make is that this stems from a shift in policy that clearly favors Verizon.
> former FCC lawyer Gigi Sohn stated the FCC’s elimination of net neutrality rules also eliminated the first responders’ ability to complain to the FCC. If the rules had still been intact, the department could have complained that Verizon was unreasonably interfering with its ability to use broadband under the “general conduct rule,” Sohn noted.
This is not a compelling argument. If there's one problem these guys aren't suffering from, it's an inability to complain about what happened.
Yeah, they can complain now, but that's under a radically different sense of “complain”; an argument based on conflating the two embodies the fallacy of equivocation.
The related rules allow for formal complaints alleging that rules were broken. That's not recourse, as even under previous NN rules, data threshold throttling was perfectly fine. Recourse would be if they could complain and there was an actual rule broken that Verizon could be punished for.
It's generally extremely lucrative for them to attempt to infer the purpose of a communication, and then attempt to put the customer over a barrel to extract value based on it [0]. Hence how this recent topic ties in - "Awfully big fire you're fighting there - it'd be a shame if it got even bigger because you didn't pay us more money".
[0] in fact this was the historic model of the phone and cable companies, which technology moved past - cf. "Ma Bell has you by the calls".
You can sit here and say Net Neutrality has nothing to do with this, but to the layman, there is nothing neutral about throttling traffic, especially during an emergency.
It doesn't matter if by the letter of the law before this type of behavior would have been allowed. They see Net Neutrality rolled back, then an ISP holding firefighters over a barrel...WHILE FIGHTING a major fire.
You DO NOT obstruct an emergency service over sixty dollars a month. You especially don't do it while the State is on fire. Verizon brought this on itself. "Customer Service" failure or not. This represents a major loss of public faith in A) the market to put the safety of it's host civilization first,and B) the willingness and or ability of the governmental agency intended to prevent this sort of malfeasance from happening.
Don't get me wrong. I DO NOT like heavy handed government interference anywhere it isn't absolutely needed.
I love a free market...With the caveat that the actors conduct themselves in a responsible, ethical, and honorable manner, and with due deference to providing the necessary aid to the area in which they operate in terms of protecting the ability of that area to even maintain an ability to safely host civilization. In case anyone out there is wondering, throttling firefighters isn't that.
And if anyone else wonders where I draw the line for due deference: typically at the division between "this can completely render the area uninhabitable to humans" as opposed to "there are scary people here". (I.e. Fire, rescue, and Medical gets due deference. Law Enforcement can take a number and get in line due to the specific abuse potential).
The closest anyone seems to have got is that under some unrelated rules that were changed at the same time as net neutrality was repealed, it's now harder for the firefighters to complain to the FCC that Verizon is breaking some entirely different unrelated rule. Except 1) no one seems to think Verizon is actually breaking that rule, and 2) even if they were, nothing here is related to net neutrality.
In reality prioritizing first responder traffic over my YouTube cat video will prove impossible. What will happen is the ISP will insert cat videos in to first responder traffic. Therefore, net neutrality is the best we could ever hope for. I’ve called my senator and my representative. I hope you have too.
Municipal governments should band together and make their own fiber networks.