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posted by janrinok on Thursday November 16 2017, @07:32PM   Printer-friendly
from the so-long,-interwebs,-it-was-nice-knowing-you dept.

The U.S. Federal Communications Commission next month is planning a vote to kill Obama-era rules demanding fair treatment of web traffic and may decide to vacate the regulations altogether, according to people familiar with the plans.

The move would reignite a years-long debate that has seen Republicans and broadband providers seeking to eliminate the rules, while Democrats and technology companies support them. The regulations passed in 2015 bar broadband providers such as AT&T Inc. and Comcast Corp. from interfering with web traffic sent by Google, Facebook Inc. and others.

[...] Pai plans to seek a vote in December, said two people who asked not to be identified because the matter hasn't been made public. As the head of a Republican majority, he is likely to win a vote on whatever he proposes.

[...] The agency declined to comment on the timing of a vote. "We don't have anything to report at this point," said Tina Pelkey, a spokeswoman for the commission.

Source: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-11-15/killing-net-neutrality-rules-is-said-readied-for-december-vote


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  • (Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Thursday November 16 2017, @08:19PM (21 children)

    by The Mighty Buzzard (18) Subscriber Badge <themightybuzzard@proton.me> on Thursday November 16 2017, @08:19PM (#597868) Homepage Journal

    Erm... proper network management reasons were loopholed from the beginning. Your argument is invalid.

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 16 2017, @08:31PM (20 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 16 2017, @08:31PM (#597873)

    The form that is "proper" must be found through the mechanisms of the market.

    It's the classic mistake of the central planner: Defining what is proper at one point in time, rather than finding it continuously.

    • (Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 16 2017, @08:37PM (3 children)

      by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 16 2017, @08:37PM (#597877)

      You're missing some detail about how voluntary contracts and multiple enforcement agencies would work here.

      I'm coining a new word for people like you, "evolutiotard": people who have a narrow understanding of evolution, generalizing with "survival of the fittest", and apply such concepts to every aspect of life.

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 16 2017, @08:47PM (2 children)

        by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 16 2017, @08:47PM (#597885)

        It is YOUR implication that there must be an Intelligent Designer—you know, at least to get things started with a single cell or something.

        That is what sounds like the conclusion of someone who has a narrow understanding.

        • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 16 2017, @09:54PM (1 child)

          by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 16 2017, @09:54PM (#597929)

          Just when you think I couldn't "WTF??" any harder you chime in and prove me wrong. My point had nothing to do with religious beliefs or any other kind of "intelligent design".

          I'll be kind enough to explain: some people view evolution as "survival of the fittest" and take only the competition / meritocracy aspect as a result. This is a narrow view that makes people think there is some Universal Law that means greed is good and people should be able to do whatever they want, thus creating an "optimal" society through this process of "evolution". It is narrow minded and we even have a term for it, Social Darwinists. For more info see: Survival of the fittest [wikipedia.org]

          • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 17 2017, @05:54AM

            by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 17 2017, @05:54AM (#598080)

            I'm sorry that you don't understand what the other poster is saying.

            Survival of the Fittest does not imply an inhuman process; after all, humans are part of that process.

            Evolution just means variation and selection, which are 2 aspects of the process provided by a free market.

    • (Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Thursday November 16 2017, @08:40PM (15 children)

      by The Mighty Buzzard (18) Subscriber Badge <themightybuzzard@proton.me> on Thursday November 16 2017, @08:40PM (#597879) Homepage Journal

      No. There is zero justification for legalizing extortion. Ever.

      --
      My rights don't end where your fear begins.
      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 16 2017, @08:52PM (14 children)

        by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 16 2017, @08:52PM (#597888)

        When is something extortion?

        It doesn't matter whether the legislature limits the price of bread to $5/loaf. If there ain't enough flour, you're going to have to pay a lot more for it—and it might be better that you starve to death so that the community's medical doctor might live instead.

        • (Score: 5, Insightful) by The Mighty Buzzard on Thursday November 16 2017, @09:12PM (6 children)

          by The Mighty Buzzard (18) Subscriber Badge <themightybuzzard@proton.me> on Thursday November 16 2017, @09:12PM (#597901) Homepage Journal

          When you say "Nice content you got there. Be a shame if nobody could consume it." it is extortion. When both consumer and site have already paid their ISPs for the bandwidth they require and peering agreements have covered inter-network communication costs nobody has a legitimate excuse to throttle content.

          --
          My rights don't end where your fear begins.
          • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 16 2017, @09:43PM (5 children)

            by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 16 2017, @09:43PM (#597919)

            Coming into someone else's grocery store and demanding "protection money" is different.

            Your analogy doesn't apply.

            • (Score: 3, Insightful) by The Mighty Buzzard on Thursday November 16 2017, @09:54PM (3 children)

              by The Mighty Buzzard (18) Subscriber Badge <themightybuzzard@proton.me> on Thursday November 16 2017, @09:54PM (#597928) Homepage Journal

              You failed to even attempt to refute my explanation before claiming it refuted. Try again if you like.

              --
              My rights don't end where your fear begins.
              • (Score: -1, Redundant) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 16 2017, @10:27PM

                by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 16 2017, @10:27PM (#597946)

                Now, try again.

              • (Score: -1, Redundant) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 17 2017, @03:44AM

                by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 17 2017, @03:44AM (#598054)

                Now, try again.

              • (Score: -1, Spam) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 17 2017, @07:03PM

                by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 17 2017, @07:03PM (#598321)

                Now, try again.

            • (Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 16 2017, @10:06PM

              by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 16 2017, @10:06PM (#597934)

              Ok that's it, the intertubes need to become a public infrastructure that gets leased by ISPs. We gotta shut up these morons who think it is OK to extort as much money as people will suffer to give. Also, we need single payer healthcare but it should be tied to a database. Anyone who doesn't want to pay the taxes will be charged 30X the actual hospital rates because I'm sure their life is worth it to them.

        • (Score: 3, Insightful) by meustrus on Thursday November 16 2017, @09:32PM (2 children)

          by meustrus (4961) on Thursday November 16 2017, @09:32PM (#597915)

          Except that in this case, the supermarket set the price of bread at $5/loaf, the legislature paid the supermarket billions for infrastructure buildout to ensure there would be enough flour for everybody. Demand for bread rose, but the supermarket doesn't want to use the government's money to actually build out their infrastructure like they were supposed to, so instead they want to charge the baker a carrying fee for the privilege of putting their bread on the shelf [qz.com].

          Meanwhile, bread is now $5/loaf, plus $1/loaf in "regulatory recovery" fees, $1/loaf in "infrstructure buildout" fees, and $1/loaf in "we assume you're not paying attention to the line items on your bill" fees.

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          • (Score: -1, Offtopic) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 16 2017, @09:47PM

            by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 16 2017, @09:47PM (#597921)

            It looks like the problem in this scenario is your government; stupid things happen when an organization ("government") gets to demand income by decree, and thereby spend other people's hard-earned resources.

          • (Score: -1, Offtopic) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 17 2017, @07:07PM

            by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 17 2017, @07:07PM (#598325)

            It looks like the problem in this scenario is your government; stupid things happen when an organization ("government") gets to demand income by decree, and thereby spend other people's hard-earned resources.

        • (Score: 4, Insightful) by tibman on Thursday November 16 2017, @09:34PM (3 children)

          by tibman (134) Subscriber Badge on Thursday November 16 2017, @09:34PM (#597916)

          This isn't about price. This is about you buying flour. The clerk is too far away to hand you the bag so he has to hand it to someone else who then hands it to you. You find your flour now has coupons mixed in and some kind of tracking device. The clerk says "weird, when i measured out the flour it didn't have anything mixed in?" He tries again to give you exactly what you ordered. The middle-person takes the flour and throws it on the ground and tells you that you shouldn't be using this flour distributor and hands you a completely different bag with something that looks like flour.

          Does this middle-person's actions sound illegal to you? It should! That's why net neutrality exists. Your packets should arrive unaltered. Even if you can shop around for a different ISP that doesn't mean you can control all the middle-people between your ISP and your web destination.

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          • (Score: 1) by mobydisk on Thursday November 16 2017, @10:05PM (2 children)

            by mobydisk (5472) on Thursday November 16 2017, @10:05PM (#597933)

            FYI: There's actually laws preventing someone from doing what you describe in your analogy. The Common Carrier laws forbid, for example, the shipping company from modifying or substituting the product.

            • (Score: 4, Informative) by Thexalon on Thursday November 16 2017, @10:15PM

              by Thexalon (636) on Thursday November 16 2017, @10:15PM (#597941)

              And part of what this vote is doing, along with some previous regulatory changes, is removing any kind of common carrier obligations from ISPs. They've already been working towards getting rid of those obligations [federalregister.gov].

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            • (Score: 2) by tibman on Friday November 17 2017, @01:28AM

              by tibman (134) Subscriber Badge on Friday November 17 2017, @01:28AM (#598010)

              https://ting.com/blog/getting-straight-about-common-carriers-and-title-ii/ [ting.com]

              In 1996, Congress passed a major Telecommunications Act that, says Cherry, “basically approved the distinctions between transmission and enhanced services that the FCC had had to make up on its own,” although the Act relabeled “enhanced services” as “information services.”

              The FCC maintained these distinctions as the Internet arose. Back when DSL was the best way for customers to connect to the Net–sending signals over the telephone companies’ wires–the FCC counted your DSL connection as a regulated transmission service (Title II), and the applications running over your DSL connection as unregulated enhanced services (Title I). This was perfectly in accord with how it handled the telephone network.
              Then came the change

              In 2002, the agency had to decide how to classify broadband Internet access provided by a new player: Cable TV companies. With Republicans now in the majority, the FCC took the opportunity to undo the very framework it had established. Now the FCC declared that cable broadband access would come under Title I, along with the “information services” provided over the network. Cable companies would not be required to live up to the demands of common carriage even for the transmission service they provided.

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