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Several news sites are reporting that Donald Trump is looking to elevate Ajit Pai to head up the FCC:
Ajit Pai, a Republican Federal Communications Commission member and foe of net neutrality regulation, will be named to head the agency, according to a person familiar with the transition.
Pai has often dissented as FCC Democrats voted for tighter regulations, including the 2015 open internet, or net neutrality, decision that forbids internet service providers from unfairly blocking or slowing web traffic. The rule opposed by AT&T Inc. and Comcast Corp. is among those likely to be reversed by president Donald Trump's FCC, according to Bloomberg Intelligence analysts.
Additional information at Politico and Reuters.
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Ajit Pai to Become New Head of the FCC
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To be a kind of moral Unix, he touched the hem of Nature's shift.
-- Shelley
(Score: 2) by jmorris on Saturday January 21 2017, @10:21PM
Say this every time this comes up, regulars should expect it by now.
Network neutrality is not the solution. It isn't even aimed at the problem. The problem is the natural monopoly on the 'last mile'.
Admit that and solutions become clear. Break up the telcos one last time. Government regulated monopoly has the last mile but is forbidden to own anything else. It is a utility, returns good dividends but has the poor stock market appreciation typical to a utility. The other half is almost entirely deregulated, buys access on exactly equal terms with new new entrants to the last mile and offers any services it wants under any terms it can convince a customer to agree to without outright fraud.
Network neutrality is stupid, it is typical rabbitry in that it pretends that bandwidth is infinite and free. Streaming HD video from the other side of a transatlantic link should cost more than from a server sitting inside the perimeter because it DOES cost more. Pretending it doesn't causes all sorts of distortions in the short term but reality wins in the end. Making all bits equal regardless of the underlying reality removes the incentives to invest in technology to improve things.
If Netflix is allowed to offload the entire burden of transporting their traffic, which is often the single biggest load on the network, they have no motive to continue putting "Netflix in a box" appliances all over the Internet. And once they have made that investment it isn't right to allow an upstart to then offload their expenses to unfairly compete with Netflix.
On the one hand, it is often hard to actually know what the true expense of transporting a bit across the Internet is and the accounting of it in any case often exceeds the expense of moving it in the first place. But rules of thumb that apply to random web accesses change when people start streaming multiple HD streams into their home for hours per day. At some point the costs must be taken into account and wasteful usages charged for enough to discourage them. Broadcast / multicast is far more network efficient than individual streaming, but if pricing is forbidden to reflect that reality there is no incentive to broadcast. Why use a DVR and catch broadcasts when you can use the On Demand streaming service for free? We have companies trying to put DVRs in the cloud because it can be sold as 'free.'
But open up the market, let various players try different pricing models and see what works. I'm betting the ones offering totally unlimited, network neutral access will end up pricing themselves into a small niche but I could be wrong.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 22 2017, @05:31PM
Gads you are such a corporate tool!
"Netflix offloads their burden" haha what exactly do you think the business model of an ISP is? I seem to recall its something about transferring data the customer wants.... Telecoms have made more money than ever and you want to complain? You ant to allow them to nickel and dime customers even more? Fuck you you fascist fuck.
(Score: 2) by gidds on Monday January 23 2017, @02:36PM
You appear to be using a slightly different definition of 'net neutrality' from mine — or misunderstanding the real problem.
Yes, it sounds like many places in the US do seem to have a real problem with monopoly providers of broadband. But that's a separate issue, with a separate solution. Here in the UK, for example, although most of the 'last mile' is still owned by BT, they are required to open it up, and as a result there are many broadband providers and real competition.
Nor is net neutrality about discrimination on type of data. (I don't think it's entirely unreasonable for carriers to treat different types of data differently, as long as they do so fairly.)
No, I think the real issue with net neutrality is discrimination based on the source/destination of data. Especially discrimination by upstream providers: even when the last-mile issues are sorted out, market forces won't be able to fix that, because the customers (ISPs and other carriers) are not the people suffering (end users). If Bob's Internet Backbone Business decides to extort money from Melvyn's Movie-Streaming Megacorp, then I as a Melvyn's subscriber am helpless; I can't choose another Internet carrier, or threaten Bob's in any way. Effectively, Melvyn's customers are being held hostage in a dispute which affects them but which they have no control over.
In economics terms, you could say that Bob's has identified an externality; they take the profits, and someone else takes the losses.
That's one of the main scenarios that net neutrality prevents. With net neutrality, market forces will prevent most of the abuses deep in the infrastructure, and companies will develop pricing structures that work for everyone; without it, infrastructure companies are free to price-gouge without anyone being able to stop them — like we've see with Netflix.
To take the obligatory car analogy: It's OK to charge heavy lorries more to use your road than cars, because they cause much more wear and tear; but it's not OK to charge BigRetailer lorries more than equivalently-sized SmallRetailer ones, simply because they can afford to pay more.
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