House tells FCC to drop net neutrality

http://www.boston.com/news/politics/articles/2011/04/09/house_urges_blockage_of_net_neutrality_rules/

by knodi • 15 years ago

127 93 15 years ago

chopsueyar• 15 years ago

“Today, Republicans first want to shut down the Internet, then they want to shut down the government,’’ said US Representative Edward J. Markey, a Malden Democrat...

“We look forward to forever prohibiting the overreach of the Federal Communications Commission,’’ Blackburn said.

jmtame• 15 years ago

i'm not familiar with the rules proposed in december, was this in reference to the proposal that google and verizon drew up?

_delirium3• 15 years ago

I believe it was this: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2028807

johngalt2• 15 years ago

Getting the FCC to make carriers play fair is a slow road to improvement and it's filled with potholes. I'd be more inclined to support regulation changes intended to make starting a new carrier easier.

Mark my words: Any net neutrality bill will benefit the existing carriers, and stifle telecom startups.

intended2• 15 years ago

If I am not mistaken, setting up a working telecom startup is quite capital intensive, and has high running costs on top of it, just in terms of handling Marketing and competitive pressures.

How would a new startup survive and scale by any change in rules? The market would still serve the incumbents more than the startups - since their scale would make them stronger bets.

I'm curious to know what type of regulation would help circumvent the high startup cost and create genuine competition.

Edit: I am genuinely interested to know what regulation the original poster had in mind, or any other regulation that would help achieve his stated goal.

tptacek20• 15 years ago

So is starting an airline, but deregulation still got us Southwest and Jetblue.

cosmicray• 15 years ago

Here is one alternative path. The State of Florida, under the auspices of the North Florida Broadband Authority, is setting up a "middle mile" quasi-government carrier. They will connect to a tier-1 provider (Level3 in this case) and distribute the broadband feed to small rural counties and cities, in an area which is economically disadvantaged (when compared to larger cities in Florida).

While this is capital intensive, they're trying to accomplish something that no private carriers seem to have interest in.

http://www.nfba-fl.org/

johngalt2• 15 years ago

I doubt a highly skilled/motivated telecom team would have trouble finding capital in todays market. Millions are being handed out to teams whose infrastructure consists RoR app running on AWS.

I don't have anything specific in mind regulation wise. I have no agenda, merely that net neutrality is trying to cure a symptom not a cause.

cooldeal2• 15 years ago

>Mark my words: Any net neutrality bill will benefit the existing carriers, and stifle telecom startups.

Why or how?

tptacek20• 15 years ago

By creating rules making it harder to create new companies with novel business models for providing Internet service, because those business models might in theory allow an incumbent to unlevel the playing field.

teoruiz• 15 years ago

From the outside it looks like the US political scene is a complete and ridiculous mess right now, led by the Republican Congress.

samt• 15 years ago

Which begs the question, WTF does it look like from the inside?

waterlesscloud2• 15 years ago

Like a functioning government, why do you ask?

tptacek20• 15 years ago

I'm a liberal Democrat and I'm queasy about enforced net neutrality; these are rules that govern what companies can do with their own infrastructure, and rules that could unintentionally retard progress instead of protecting it.

Further, Congress has a legitimate gripe here. We don't elect FCC commissioners. They're appointed. We should be particularly concerned about them overstepping their bounds. Which a reasonable case can be made for here.

I'm not sure I see what your comment adds to the discussion, other than "the duly elected Republican congress is doing something I disagree with!".

jimktrains23• 15 years ago

Wasn't that infrastructure paid for by taxes?

delinka3• 15 years ago

I think we're at a point where Internet access needs to be classified as a utility, like electricity and water.

We are indeed in a situation where many companies have invested in their own infrastructure and maybe that requires consideration. I'm absolutely certain that jimktrains2 has a point: the U.S. taxpayers coughed up tremendous amounts of money to invest in infrastructure which makes those lines ours. (Sure, 'legally' AT&T et al own title and deed, but you and I still provided the money.)

Ultimately the point is that it's time to classify access to the Internet as a utility and regulate it as such: separating ownership from operation, mandatory line sharing, various and sundry other mechanisms to make sure the consumer has choice amongst competitors. Then we can say net neutrality is not needed.

T-R• 15 years ago

While I agree that Congress has a legitimate gripe with overstepping unelected officials, I really think that's a separate issue that should be treated independently.

Regarding rules that could unintentionally retard progress - that's not necessarily a bad thing. In the same sense, the FDA retards progress of the pharmaceutical industry. We should be able to decide that some things are harmful enough to individuals and their rights that companies shouldn't be allowed to compete on them, at least beyond a certain level. At the very least, they should be required to make those things as visible to consumers as price, because consumers can only vote with their wallets on things they're aware of.

nxn• 15 years ago

As far as slowing down progress, there is a danger of this happening without net neutrality as well.

Consider the current state in Australia: you have ISPs that charge you based on GB of bandwidth used per month. For example, lets say your ISP signs a deal with Hulu so that traffic from them is free for you. Most people would probably not give any consideration to competing services because they will have to pay for bandwidth while using them. This is a huge advantage to already established online tv services that have resources to make these kinds of offers with ISPs. Meanwhile, new services that can't afford them get ignored by users despite perhaps having better feature sets.

ascendant2• 15 years ago

It's been a mess for a long time. And it's not just the Republicans. Anyone with a brain can look back over the past 20-30 years and see the fingerprints of both parties all over the collective disaster that is the current situation politically, financially and militarily.

tptacek20• 15 years ago

Every time someone says this I think back to the politics of the 19th century, or the early 20th. It's probably true that we're at a depressing ebb of productivity and good faith in national politics, but politics 'twas ever thus. You think Fox News is bad? Try Hearst's papers in the 1890s.

There are 307 million people in the United States. That the three million? people of in the original colonies managed to agree on a system of government that scaled this far and this well over so many diverse interests and conflicting worldviews is astonishing.

jerf• 15 years ago

There's other perspectives, such as "The political scene is a complete and ridiculous mess as the bill for decades of feckless spending and promises is coming due and only one faction in one party is even capable of admitting that, and for that they are being burned at the stake." (Which I consider a plain-and-simple case of shooting the messenger.) The mess we have right now is politicians trying to follow the time-honored bi-partisan tradition of kicking the can down the road and discovering there's not all that much road left.

tptacek20• 15 years ago

The fact that you feel like you have to make a comment about spending on a thread about net neutrality is an indication that the thread has developed at least some ambient toxicity. Notice how little it takes for that to happen! Just a couple seed comments about "Republicans" and we're off to the races.

(I'm not criticizing you).

r0s• 15 years ago

It seems that way if you think every bill is law before it reaches the Senate.

From this time last year:

http://thehill.com/homenews/house/83059-senate-sitting-on-29...

Maybe the sky isn't really falling?

jacoblyles• 15 years ago

I don't believe such blatant partisanship belongs on Hacker News.

ck23• 15 years ago

I know on HN this is the part we focus on (the net) but based on the republican plans for the future of the federal government (which do have a real chance of happening) this would be the least you have to worry about. It's pretty much going to be every person for themselves because government is going to be a fraction of what it was and states, therefore residents will receive a fraction of the funding you are used to.

Not just the net, everything from roads, education, healthcare, prisons is going to become radically privatized.

tptacek20• 15 years ago

Is there any possible response to this comment that will produce a thread we'd be happy to have on HN?

ck23• 15 years ago

Net neutrality is politics. I'm just saying this is the least of our political worries right now. When the president and half the democrats are also anti-net neutrality, basically it's gone.

geoffw8• 15 years ago

maybe?

Derbasti• 15 years ago

Another freedom lost in the land of the free.

tptacek20• 15 years ago

Recorded for posterity that somebody voted this non-sequitor comment up.

lurchpop• 15 years ago

Funny how politicians hotly debate the FCCs authority, but when it comes to DHS seizing domain names nobody says shit.

tptacek20• 15 years ago

Funny? No, just boring. "DHS" siezes domain names because DHS was hurriedly created, as a reaction to 9/11, by jamming agencies together like so many insects in the transporter from The Fly. One of those agencies happened to be Immigration and Customs, which has always had IPR enforcement in its portfolio.

Every time people make these conspiracy-theoretic comments about how "Homeland Security" is doing antipiracy raids, they betray either a lack of understanding of how their government is actually structured, or an easygoing willingness to buy into Internet drama, or both. At least, that's what it looks like to me.

_delirium3• 15 years ago

It does have an interesting psychological effect, though, possibly on both the recipients of orders, and on the general public. Reminds me a bit of the similar accident of jurisdiction that led to 1980s teenage hax0rz being raided by the Secret Service, rather than by more normal-sounding police.

grellas2• 15 years ago

The FCC's claim of authority in this instance to impose rules from on high is problematic.

Here is what EFF says:

"We’re wholly in favor of net neutrality in practice, but a finding of ancillary jurisdiction here would give the FCC pretty much boundless authority to regulate the Internet for whatever it sees fit. And that kind of unrestrained authority makes us nervous about follow-on initiatives like broadcast flags and indecency campaigns. In general, we think arguments that regulating the Internet is 'ancillary' to some other regulatory authority that the FCC has been granted just don’t have sufficient limitations to stop bad FCC behavior in the future and create the 'Trojan horse' risk we have long warned about." (https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2011/02/part-i-fcc-ancillary-a...)

I have chimed in on this in a previous HN thread:

"The FCC is way out of its league on this one. Basically, it is a creature of statute. It can do whatever Congress has authorized it to and no more. Nothing in its authorizing statute expressly permits it to impose the rules now known as net neutrality. Therefore, it sought to justify its ability to do so under the doctrine of so-called 'ancillary jurisdiction,' meaning that it had an implied power to do so in aid of its expressly granted powers. Unfortunately, a definitive federal appeals court ruling held that no such ancillary jurisdiction existed, leaving the matter for Congress to decide. Rather than deferring to Congress, the FCC chose to adopt a new rationale for its assertion of this authority. Congress overwhelmingly balked at the idea of any broad assertion of such authority and, in the back and forth, the FCC came up with the toe-in-the water approach just adopted to the satisfaction of almost no one. Even this assertion of jurisdiction will certainly be challenged in the courts in cases that will take years to decide, leaving this whole issue in a pathetic state of uncertainty for all concerned. Nothing good will come of this except for lots of employment for the lawyers who will be litigating whether this or that action is 'reasonable' and whether the internet is really like a public utility or not. All in all, a royal mess." (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2033261)

A short-hand way of summing up the issue: do you want, in the name of a short-term goal such as net neutrality, to cede to unaccountable government regulators a broad, unchecked power to control what happens on the internet? I think this should give pause to all of us, no matter what we think of the net-neutrality issue.

trythis4• 15 years ago

It certainly does give me pause, but we also know how the Republicans will come down on net neutrality regardless of whether an overreaching regulatory body is advocating (some version of) it. That, to me, is the bigger story.

As you said, the FCC can only do what Congress has authorized it to do, so we're not in any real danger of the FCC having a "broad, unchecked power to control what happens on the internet". What we are in danger of is having a Congress that kills net neutrality, period.

Edit: Not that I care about karma, but I'm curious as to why I'm being downvoted. I'm not disagreeing with grellas' point.

cookiecaper• 15 years ago

I didn't downvote, first of all. I upvoted! I am also disappointed to see it downvoted. There is some contention that downvoting is a valid way to express disagreement; I don't really agree. Downvotes should be reserved only for poor decorum or other disruptive behavior.

The point Grellas is making is that if we let the FCC slide on net neutrality by accepting their arguments of ancillary jurisdiction and implied authority over the internet, then it would give the FCC free reign to do whatever they wanted with the internet unless Congress came in and expressly forbade or altered their authority. Right now, we have the opposite situation, where the FCC is not allowed to exercise authority over the internet without an express dispensation from Congress allowing them to do so.

The latter is better because it's much easier to hold elected representatives accountable than it is to hold appointed bureaucrats accountable. If Congress gives the FCC authority to regulate the internet that way, they can use the FCC as a proxy for all their unpopular regulatory actions and redirect the flak.

hammock5• 15 years ago

You probably got downvoted because you show a lack of understanding of what grellas was saying. What he was saying was that if the FCC had been allowed by the courts to use 'ancillary jurisdiction' to impose new rules, the FCC would indeed be in the very situation which you say is impossible, a situation of broad, unchecked power.

lutorm• 15 years ago

"unaccountable government regulators"?

Just wondering about this. If you think a popularly elected government is "unaccountable", can you give an example of something that is accountable?

grellas2• 15 years ago

Perhaps better stated as not directly accountable to voters. Thanks for pointing out the overstatement (lawyers are inclined to this, especially after they start to warm up and become enamored of the sound of their own words).

HelloBeautiful2• 15 years ago

China also has a popularly elected government ... The fact that there are two parties in US and one in China does not make any difference IHMO.

Switzerland referendum system would be my example of accountable government.

enko• 15 years ago

Australia, where metered access (XX GBs per month) rules, may provide some insight into how net non-neutrality plays out on practise. Here, it's not about speed limiting to "non-favoured" sites, but about whether consumption from those sites consume your allocated bandwidth allowance. It is routine for companies to do deals with ISPs to provide "unmetered" access to their services for customers. For example, with my ISP, anything I buy from Apple is unmetered. Other ISPs might, for example, offer free Steam traffic. This is most noticeable, I think, on mobile data plans, which often feature "unlimited Facebook" or "all you can Tweet" or similar.

I can see how this has the potential to entrench existing players but subjectively the effect seems weak at best and does not figure too much in people's purchasing decisions. Personally, I would prefer more general solutions to the problem of "corporate cliques" gaining oligopoly powers. Restrictions on cross-media ownership would seem to be the weapon of choice.

nooneelse• 15 years ago

What about the "what is in a name" path?

What if, instead of regulating what ISPs can do with their network, there were a movement (read, "lawsuits") (using some new or perhaps just existing law) to stop anything past some previously normal level of traffic management from being called "internet service". So a teleco could give preference to their own, or affiliate, traffic, but that could not be referred to by them, or sold to customers, as "the internet". The position here is this: the term "the internet" has come to mean, through intent and common use, something that does not include, by definition, those kind of practices. Thus, selling a package with those practices and calling it internet service is deceit.

If I sold a "car" to someone and, when they went to pick up their new car, they found what anyone besides my team of salesmen would call a golf cart, that wouldn't be legal. Same idea.

I'm sure I'm being naïve, how?

delinka3• 15 years ago

This is a good path to consider. It's not "food" if it doesn't contain the right amount of edible/digestible ingredients. It's not "octane X" if it hasn't been refined in the right method. That car isn't "safe" unless it adheres to regulatory guidelines.

It's not "Internet access" if it doesn't allow me to access resources on the Internet at my leisure and at the "broadband" speed advertised. (OK, I know that my 6Mbps connection doesn't get me 6Mbps all the way from Netflix, but you can see my point.)

CamperBob• 15 years ago

One concern is that 99% percent of users wouldn't care if they got Internet service or "Value-Added Broadband (tm)" from their local cable monopoly, especially if the latter cost $0.01 less per month.

Net neutrality strikes me as one of those cases where those who are aware of the stakes have to adopt a paternalistic attitude toward consumer protection.

sigil2• 15 years ago

Sounds like an elegant solution. Similar to a recent suggestion on the whole Honeycomb thing (open the code, but assert control of the Android trademark).

http://monogatari.doukut.su/2011/04/openness-and-reputation....

rflrob• 15 years ago

"But critics of net neutrality rules argue that free-market competition would prevent such abuses"

Is consumer internet really a free market? To my knowledge, most of the Bay Area only has a choice between Comcast and AT&T. If you only have 2 or 3 companies competing, it's relatively easy for them all to decide independently that traffic shaping is in their own best interest, which leaves the consumer with no real choice.

delinka3• 15 years ago

I'd really like someone to take politicians to task with this.

"Mr. Congresscritter, where is the free market alternative to ISP One in Somecity, seeing as ISP One bought up all its competitors?"

waterlesscloud2• 15 years ago

Is there a free-market for the right-of-way the isp lines travel through?

Is there a free-market for spectrum?

In both cases, no. There are very heavily regulated markets. So if they benefit from very heavy regulation, and they do, then they should be subject to some regulation as well.

hammock5• 15 years ago

Free market does not necessarily mean perfect competition, or 10+ competitors to choose from. I don't know where you got that idea.

Lost_BiomedE• 15 years ago

While this is true, it was essentially mandated that there be two competitors. The choice was to have many resellers of DSL competing against cable, or an entrenched duopoly. Chairman Michael Powell chose the duopoly, even using that word to describe it.

jauer• 15 years ago

I'm nearly 2K miles from the Bay Area but I've heard of more than 3 ISPs that serve the area.

What about Unwired, Cruzio, and Sonic?

sigil2• 15 years ago

> If you only have 2 or 3 companies competing ...

If there were truly only 2 companies that provided internet in the Bay Area (this would be extremely surprising to me), collusion might be possible.

With 3, you now have a nice unstable equilibrium in game theory terms.

But what do you want to bet there are even more, and you've only heard about the name brand ones?

We haven't considered wireless broadband providers. How many of those are there?

Okay, so maybe the Bay Area's okay, but what about the rest of America? Turns out that, according to the FCC's own data, 98% of zipcodes have 2 or more landline providers, and 88% of zipcodes have 4 or more. Again, this is not counting 3g or 4g.

http://hraunfoss.fcc.gov/edocs_public/attachmatch/DOC-292191...

hammock5• 15 years ago

Do you have the internet? How would you like it if the FCC required you to pay an extra $20 a month to get movie downloads, whether you want them not, or to allow your kids to access violent video games or adult content, whether you want them to or not, just so everyone would get what the government considers to be “the full Internet experience?” What if you’re low income, and you’d rather spend that $20 on books? Or warm clothes? Or food?

Correct me if I'm wrong, but it sounds like advocates of net neutrality want low income people to have that choice.

(note words above are not mine)

nabaraj• 15 years ago

Republicans Mess!!

House tells FCC to drop net neutrality

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