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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.
(Score: 2) by Snotnose on Tuesday April 09 2019, @12:41AM (3 children)
I wish I'd saved it, I've already looked for it in all the usual places with no joy. I do hope I'm proven wrong here and Congress actually does something in the people's interest.
When the dust settled America realized it was saved by a porn star.
(Score: 2) by NotSanguine on Tuesday April 09 2019, @01:32AM (2 children)
The link to the bill in TFS [govtrack.us] allows you to look at *all* versions of the bill (and the site does this for all bills being considered by the House). At the top of the page, look for "This bill has 2 versions" and select the original version.
There's nothing in that version about either:
So, if you heard/read that somewhere, someone was lying to you.
If it were me, I'd make an effort to figure out where those lies came from, so I'd know not to pay attention to those folks any more. Just sayin'.
No, no, you're not thinking; you're just being logical. --Niels Bohr
(Score: 2) by urza9814 on Tuesday April 09 2019, @03:53PM (1 child)
Or that person was discussing one of the several OTHER "net neutrality" bills. Note that OP indicated they heard about it "maybe a month or 6 weeks ago", and the bill in question was first introduced exactly one month ago. There are earlier bills like HR 1006 which I think would more likely have been under discussion in that timeframe (1006 was introduced in Feb.) I'm not seeing anything directly authorizing warantless wiretapping in the two that I've found so far (not that I'd expect to find that stated so directly), but I *do* see some very broad language about giving providers a right to "address the needs of law enforcement" and also some broad text about implementing network management to prohibit unspecified "unwanted" traffic.
Another option is that the concern is buried not in the text of the bill itself, but in one of the referenced documents. Are you certain that there are no additional privacy protections somewhere in the 539 pages of FCC 17–166 [fcc.gov] which is being repealed? Have you checked? I do see some references within that ruling to other privacy regulations...but frankly, this thing is getting a bit too dense for me to parse properly at the moment.
It appears that you would also need to review the text of the 2015 "Open Internet Order" (FCC 15-24) [fcc.gov], as that was repealed by 17-166, and therefore repealing 17-166 would bring that back into effect. Perhaps that has something about surveillance? That's another 400 pages. And in these pages I DID find some text stating that broadband providers are required to comply with FISA for example, although I think that does generally involve a "warrant"...but there's also a sentence in the same section referencing continuation of the 2010 Open Internet Order (FCC 10-201) [fcc.gov] and in this order I did notice that it explicitly states that they considered, but rejected, the idea that broadband providers should only provide information to law enforcement where required by law, and instead they wrote the regulations such that the providers are not restricted from providing data to law enforcement as they choose. See page 59 and 60 of that document. It certainly *enables* warrantless wiretapping and similar behavior, although there is a distinction between allowing that behavior and actually requiring it, and I haven't yet seen anything which requires it. But that's a hell of a lot of text to go through...
(Score: 3, Informative) by NotSanguine on Tuesday April 09 2019, @05:15PM
That's a reasonable point. I was unaware of H.R. 1006 or any other similar bills until I saw this hearing which happened yesterday [c-span.org], after posting the comment to which you replied. Apparently, in addition to H.R. 1006, two other bills were also submitted by Republican members as well.
The network management section of HR 1006 is very similar to that in the 2015 order. I find it interesting that you equate "public safety" with "law enforcement", as those, while not necessarily mutually exclusive, are not the same thing.
As for the rest of the network management stuff, that's all pretty boilerplate. It allows networks to prioritize voice traffic *within their own networks*, block persistent spammers, re-prioritize/re-route traffic under high loads and/or link outages and stuff like that. all of which (as someone who has managed large networks) is essential to ensuring decent performance.
IIRC, the 2015 order doesn't include any references to warrantless wiretapping or setting peering charges, and I spent quite a bit of time with that document back in 2015.
Your comment got me to go and look for the other two bills (plus HR 1006) mentioned in the linked hearing above by Rep. Latta.
They appear to be:
H.R. 2136 [govtrack.us] for which no text is available, and;
H.R. 1101 [govtrack.us] which modifies the relevant law [cornell.edu] as follows (there are other changes, but these appear to be the closest to what GP was talking about:
I suppose that *could* be interpreted to mean the warrantless wiretapping/metadata collection that GP mentioned, but it does not require any *new* behavior from ISPs, just that these changes don't impact current requirements. As such, saying that the bill includes *new* requirements for that is a pretty big stretch, IMHO.
But AFAICT, there's absolutely nothing about setting peering charges anywhere. I suppose that there may be some verbiage in Title II [cornell.edu] of the relevant law.
A brief search of the 'net for H.R. 1101 didn't bring up any stories about the items (see below) mentioned by GP.
Please understand that I'm not questioning GP's recollection. Rather, I was attempting to discover what he might have been talking about, as I hadn't heard anything about it. And given that opponents of net neutrality have repeatedly made ridiculous claims about Title II classification, I was understandably suspicious.
Thanks for doing some work and getting me to do some more as well. The more we understand about what's going on, the better we can make decisions about making noise and deciding who our representatives should be. It's appreciated.
And to Snotnose [soylentnews.org] (the GP in question), if it was H.R. 1101 that was being discussed, then while you may not have been lied to, but you were certainly given misleading information. Regardless, mea culpa.
No, no, you're not thinking; you're just being logical. --Niels Bohr