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posted by Fnord666 on Monday April 08 2019, @03:44PM   Printer-friendly
from the is-my-pipe-dumb-enough dept.

Jon Brodkin at Ars Technica reports that the House Energy And Commerce committee approved the Save The Internet Act, which rolls back the Federal Communications Commission's (FCC)* 2017 repeal of its 2015 order on network neutrality[PDF].

The Ars Technica article states:

Democrats in the US House of Representatives yesterday rejected Republican attempts to weaken a bill that would restore net neutrality rules.
[...]
Commerce Committee Republicans repeatedly introduced amendments that would weaken the bill but were consistently rebuffed by the committee's Democratic majority. "The Democrats beat back more than a dozen attempts from Republicans to gut the bill with amendments throughout the bill's markup that lasted 9.5 hours," The Hill reported yesterday.

Republican amendments would have weakened the bill by doing the following:

  • Exempt all 5G wireless services from net neutrality rules.
  • Exempt all multi-gigabit broadband services from net neutrality rules.
  • Exempt from net neutrality rules any ISP that builds broadband service in any part of the US that doesn't yet have download speeds of at least 25Mbps and upload speeds of at least 3Mbps.
  • Exempt from net neutrality rules any ISP that gets universal service funding from the FCC's Rural Health Care Program.
  • Exempt ISPs that serve 250,000 or fewer subscribers from certain transparency rules that require public disclosure of network management practices.
  • Prevent the FCC from limiting the types of zero-rating (i.e., data cap exemptions) that ISPs can deploy.

[amendment links above are all PDF]

Another Republican amendment [PDF] would have imposed net neutrality rules but declared that broadband is an information service. This would have prevented the FCC from imposing any other type of common-carrier regulations on ISPs.

The committee did approve a Democratic amendment [PDF] to exempt ISPs with 100,000 or fewer subscribers from the transparency rules, but only for one year.
[...]
Rep. Greg Walden (R-Ore.) claimed that the Democrats' bill "is not the net neutrality that people want" and is "actually more government socialism," according to The Hill.

But the primary opponents of the FCC's net neutrality rules were broadband providers and Republicans in Congress, not the people at large. Polls showed that the FCC's repeal was opposed by most Americans: "Eighty-six percent oppose the repeal of net neutrality, including 82 percent of Republicans and 90 percent of Democrats," the Program for Public Consultation at the University of Maryland reported last year after surveying nearly 1,000 registered voters.

"It's embarrassing watching telecom shills in these committee votes attempt to turn this into a partisan issue when it's actually quite simple: no one wants their cable company to control what they can see and do on the Internet, or manipulate where they get their news, how they listen to music, or what apps they can use," Deputy Director Evan Greer of advocacy group Fight for the Future said.

The now-repealed net neutrality rules prohibited ISPs from blocking or throttling lawful content and from charging online services for prioritization. The Democrats' bill would reinstate those rules and other consumer protections that used to be enforced by the FCC. For example, Pai's repeal vote also wiped out a requirement that ISPs be more transparent with customers about hidden fees and the consequences of exceeding data caps.

*The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) is an independent agency of the United States government that regulates communications by radio, television, wire, satellite, and cable. The FCC serves the public in the areas of broadband access, fair competition, radio frequency use, media responsibility, public safety, and homeland security.


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  • (Score: 2) by NotSanguine on Monday April 08 2019, @10:27PM (3 children)

    We will not have net neutrality until we have the dumb pipe, priced by bandwidth, not content or anything else. Anything less is political bullshit.

    That's what we had prior to the Bush II FCC reclassifying ISPs (not web sites, ISPs) as "Information Providers" in the early 2000s.

    In 2013, the Obama FCC tried to implement net neutrality without reclassifying ISPs back to being common carriers, which was loudly decried by Rs and litigated by the ISPs. And the ISPs won. The court ruled that as long as they were classified as "Information Providers," ISPs could *not* be
    required to provide, your words, "dumb pipes."

    In 2015, the Obama FCC reclassified ISPs as "Common Carriers," which *requires* them to provide "dumb pipes" with no throttling, blocking or paid prioritization..

    And in 2017, the Trump FCC rolled it all back, allowing ISPs to block, throttle and give preference to some traffic over other traffic. Exactly the *opposite* of a dumb pipe.

    You're talking out of your ass and it smells that way too. Perhaps you should educate yourself before spouting off (I know, that's out of fashion)?

    Here are a few places to start:
    What is a Common Carrier [wikipedia.org]?
    What was the actual law applied [wikipedia.org] in the reclassification mentioned above?
    What is Network Neutrality, and what is its history in the US [wikipedia.org]?

    --
    No, no, you're not thinking; you're just being logical. --Niels Bohr
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  • (Score: 0, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 08 2019, @11:58PM (2 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 08 2019, @11:58PM (#826444)

    Yes, fuck the FCC. Congress is responsible. And the voters are responsible for the congress we have. The democrats AND republicans need to excised from our government, and replaced by people that don't owe favors to their "donors". Then you might get net neutrality. Failure to do so is on the voters and nobody else.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 09 2019, @02:28AM (1 child)

      by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 09 2019, @02:28AM (#826523)

      I find your fact-free ideas interesting and would like to subscribe to your newsletter.

      Facts are for suckers, amirite?

      • (Score: 0, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 09 2019, @02:43AM

        by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 09 2019, @02:43AM (#826527)

        Facts are for suckers, amirite?

        Evidently they're not for you! You all prefer GOP/DNC propaganda. I hope you get something out of it.