WASHINGTON — The Federal Communications Commission voted on Thursday to dismantle rules regulating the businesses that connect consumers to the internet, granting broadband companies the power to potentially reshape Americans' online experiences.
The agency scrapped the so-called net neutrality regulations that prohibited broadband providers from blocking websites or charging for higher-quality service or certain content. The federal government will also no longer regulate high-speed internet delivery as if it were a utility, like phone service.
The action reversed the agency's 2015 decision, during the Obama administration, to have stronger oversight over broadband providers as Americans have migrated to the internet for most communications. It reflected the view of the Trump administration and the new F.C.C. chairman that unregulated business will eventually yield innovation and help the economy.
It will take weeks for the repeal to go into effect, so consumers will not see any of the potential changes right away. But the political and legal fight started immediately. Numerous Democrats on Capitol Hill called for a bill that would reestablish the rules, and several Democratic state attorneys general, including Eric T. Schneiderman of New York, said they would file a suit to stop the change.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 15 2017, @08:16AM (1 child)
People are talking way over each other in the discussions.
Pro side is talking about the principle, con side is talking about the law as written (and/or loopholes).
(Score: 2) by DeathMonkey on Friday December 15 2017, @08:03PM
The Con side is difficult to understand because English isn't their first language (and a lot of them are dead).
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 15 2017, @08:27AM (11 children)
If you don't like how your ISP shapes your traffic, switch to a different ISP. I've switched because I didn't like how my old ISP optimized images for my convenience. I didn't bitch and moan about it like you shitstained morons.
If you don't feel like switching ISPs, learn to hack the traffic shaping. I've done it and I know all the traffic shaping rules and I can hack my traffic to be as fast as I want.
If you think your ISP doesn't have any competition and you can't switch, you're fucking delusional. Mobile broadband or satellite broadband are always an option regardless of how loudly you shout, "fiber internet is the only internet."
And get a fucking VPN.
(Score: 5, Touché) by Bot on Friday December 15 2017, @08:32AM (3 children)
> If you don't like how your ISP shapes your traffic, switch to a different ISP.
Good in principle, but wishful thinking. See "if you don't like how your congress shapes your laws, switch to a different congress".
Tell me how well it works out, pal.
Account abandoned.
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 15 2017, @08:54AM (2 children)
You know if you would read one more sentence then you would see I did switch. I switched from an ISP that was doing image compression and speed throttling to an ISP that provided unmodified unthrottled traffic for a flat rate. Of course the particular ISP which I switched to was too cheap and too generous and soon went out of business.
Switch to a different congress, you say? You mean like how some Jews escaped from Nazi Germany and built atomic bombs for America and bombed the shit out of Japan? Emigration fucking worked out well for them, now didn't it?
(Score: 5, Interesting) by Phoenix666 on Friday December 15 2017, @11:10AM
Said with all the conviction and profanity of a thirteen year old whose entire world is quite small but generalizes it to the rest of creation.
Even in Brooklyn, NY, there are very limited options for broadband. It was only two months ago they brought FiOS to my block, and I'm sure they only did that because the Mayor of New York lives on the block kitty-corner to mine. So your blithe, posited, "Hey, jump back and forth between providers to get them to compete to your bliss point," is so optimistic as to be delusional.
I think what it does mean is we need to extend the Open Source philosophy beyond software and the couple of nascent forays into open source hardware to an open source network. We need a non-government, non-corporate alternative in our material culture (preserving modernity, without reverting to primitive, pastoral life).
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 2, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 15 2017, @06:50PM
Demolished your own argument in one sentence:
Of course the particular ISP which I switched to was too cheap and too generous and soon went out of business.
Sooo, your fantastic "bullet proof" solution was a pipe dream . . . precious
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 15 2017, @09:32AM
> If you don't feel like switching ISPs, learn to hack the traffic shaping. I've done it and I know all the traffic shaping rules and I can hack my traffic to be as fast as I want.
Wow, you so l33t. Now tell me about the time you hacked the CIA!
> If you think your ISP doesn't have any competition and you can't switch, you're fucking delusional. Mobile broadband or satellite broadband are always an option regardless of how loudly you shout, "fiber internet is the only internet."
Right. Enjoy the generous data caps for mobile, with throttling and overage fees so cheap you can pay them by selling only half of your organs. Or the lightning-fast response time of the satellite internet, which is finely tuned to the reaction time of your 90-year-old grandmother.
> And get a fucking VPN.
Just be sure to buy a "VPN Power User" package, for just $69.99 (+fees)!
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Runaway1956 on Friday December 15 2017, @02:32PM (2 children)
You may be an asshole. You may be an idiot. You may be both. How many Americans have the luxury of picking and choosing among internet service providers? In a recent poll, I pointed out that I have exactly three choices: dialup, satellite, or DSL. Each of those choices is offered by one, single provider. That's it. Dialup sucks ass - always did, always will. Satellite sucks a little less ass, but latency is worse than dialup. That leaves me with DSL - at a fraction of the speed that most of the country enjoys.
Now - if I don't like Walnut Hill's traffic shaping policies, where in HELL do I go?
What's that? You think that my situation is unique? Maybe you should do some research. Even city dwellers have been known to complain about their lack of choices. Do you understand what collusion is? The telcos and other providers tend to NOT infringe on each other's territories. It costs money to build infrastructure, so they don't bother building into areas already served by someone else.
Wake up and smell the coffee. The telcos have been raping us for about twenty years, and they are now formalizing the laws that make it legal to screw us all.
Thank Trump for appointing a telco puppet to the FCC.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 15 2017, @05:32PM
#Trumpgropedyou
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 15 2017, @07:06PM
Mitch McConnell and Obama**
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 15 2017, @04:05PM
Easy for you to say. A lot of areas in the good ol' USA only have one ISP, me included. No other choices, and the one I do have is pathetic ($80/month for ~1mb download/200k upload). I wish I could call them and dump them. Satellite is not an option with 2 teenagers in the house wanting to stream videos - very expensive. And cellular is not an option in rural America. You need to learn a little about life outside big cities.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Freeman on Friday December 15 2017, @04:58PM
VNPs slow your internet. Maybe not be a lot, but enough to make an already not great connection even worse. Perhaps, I just don't have a good VPN, or my ISP doesn't like VPNs, beats me. I've tried Mobile broadband and had it right up until the provider closed up shop. They were reselling Sprint data or something like that. Purchasing enough Mobile Data to support a family of 3 isn't going to cut it, cost wise. Also, my 4G LTE data shared over my phone doesn't work as good as it used to. I blame AT&T. You claim Satellite Broadband is an "option". Satellite suffers from the same Data restrictions and pricing as Mobile Data, except it has a built-in 1 second lag. Go ahead and try to do anything that requires a decent ping. (We'll call 50ms or less decent. 1000ms is probable ping with satellite, even it's 1/2 that the point's still the same.) Satellite will only be a viable option, if we can get Satellite providers with 50ms or less ping. I am eagerly awaiting Mr. Musk's plan and others. Otherwise, I don't call, become your own ISP, or pay current ISP $10k to get a line dug to you, reasonable options. Assuming, they'd even dig a line to me for that much.
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 15 2017, @11:20PM
51% of the US only has one choice for broadband providers.
If 100% of the US had three or more broadband providers to choose from, I'd support repealing Net Neutrality. But the market solution doesn't work when there is only one player in the market.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 15 2017, @08:42AM
Show those nerds who's boss by hurting them where they live: in the basement internet connection.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 15 2017, @09:09AM
GIMME MUH HARDCORE PR0N FAST
(Score: 5, Informative) by canopic jug on Friday December 15 2017, @09:49AM (3 children)
It'd be nice if there were a way to be able to append to breaking news posts. Here is some additional coverage.
Money is not free speech. Elections should not be auctions.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by The Mighty Buzzard on Friday December 15 2017, @11:31AM (2 children)
There is if you're of a mind to take up editorial duties. That wall o text and links is too bloody long to slap in a story though.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by canopic jug on Sunday December 17 2017, @09:30AM (1 child)
I'd probably be up for trying that if there is no IRC or social control media (esp Faecebook) involved. However, I'm not yet able to meet my own informal goal of averaging seven decent article submissions per week.
Money is not free speech. Elections should not be auctions.
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Sunday December 17 2017, @05:21PM
Editing's easier than submitting, IMO. Yeah, it's more work but it's utterly predictable work that only depends on what's in the queue instead of having to go out and find stuff worth publishing; though several of the eds do in fact submit quite a lot of stories as well.
IRC is fairly necessary during the training phase but, while handy, it's not actually required after you're all trained up and pushing stories on the production servers. We've got editors that push stories but haven't said a word in IRC for quite a long time.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 1) by shrewdsheep on Friday December 15 2017, @09:52AM (6 children)
In the whole discussion, I get confused, as people do not seem to have any definition of net neutrality to begin with. When I contract an ISP, I get some bandwidth promises/guarantees. What do those mean? If they are defined as to be valid up to the internet exchange point of the ISP, I have not bought any internet access at all as upwards, my bandwidth might be 0. Any contract with an ISP can therefore be only be meaningful when uplink bandwidth sharing rules are explicitly stated in the contract. No mentioning would, as far as I can see, default to a fair share policy, AKA net neutrality (in my book). Implicitly, this argument traverses all the further exchange point too, implying that if all the consequences are not explicitly detailed in the contract, I can expect a fair share policy (I want to communicate with host A, if it is not on a fair share basis, what guarantee would I have?). I therefore cannot see how the FCC decision could have any legal standing as a general rule.
If however, ISPs decide to partition their bandwidth and sell it separately, that would be possible under current "net neutrality" rules already, it would just influence the peering/settlement rules between ISPs. Just pulling the rug from under your peering partner by meddling with their traffic would probably always be seen as unacceptable between the contractual partners new FCC rules or not. As a conclusion I do not see why these new rules are needed (to achieve "higher-quality" service) on the one hand or how they could be implemented, legally, on the other hand
(Score: 5, Insightful) by maxwell demon on Friday December 15 2017, @10:45AM (5 children)
My definition:
Seems easy enough to me.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 1) by shrewdsheep on Friday December 15 2017, @11:07AM
Yes, that is a definition, but one that has never been applicable. For example, point three is always violated whenever peering gets involved.
(Score: 3, Informative) by jimtheowl on Friday December 15 2017, @11:24AM (3 children)
My ISP, which is also a content distributor, should not get to slow down Netflix just because they are a competitor. As well, duckduckgo does not get slowed down to a crawl because they cannot buy the same access as google given that they do not track and sell your information.
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Friday December 15 2017, @05:19PM (2 children)
You cannot slow down a connection without dropping packets. If there is a certain number of packets per second arriving, then either you pass all of them, or you drop some of them. Prioritizing packets means changing the probability that a packet is dropped, and thus is covered by that point.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 15 2017, @06:13PM
Consider the blackouts in California caused by Enron and friends. Electrical power would be routed in "stupid" ways to purposely fill the capacity of various connections. This forced some areas to buy more expensive power, since the connection to cheap power was already at capacity. Profit!
So in this case, suppose Hulu wants to take down Netflix. That is easy enough. Send every packet 100 times. Packets get dropped based on your criteria. Hulu service does fine, since usually at least one copy of each packet will get through. Netflix customers don't get their packets... until Netflix joins the arms race with each packet duplicated 10000 times. So then Hulu responds...
(Score: 2) by jimtheowl on Saturday December 16 2017, @01:03PM
Window size for one can limit throughput, even without packet loss. The "Window size" section under the following article is a good read, but I'm sure you can find plenty more.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TCP_tuning [wikipedia.org]
(Score: 5, Insightful) by bzipitidoo on Friday December 15 2017, @11:46AM (6 children)
No phone call neutrality meant super expensive "long distance" charges. It meant $10/minute international calls (adjusted for inflation-- a typical charge in the 1970s was $3/minute). It meant 900 numbers. It even meant 800 numbers that were very expensive to the businesses that knew they had to have them.
And just when you thought it was reasonable that longer distances should cost more, the phone company messed that up too. How could it cost more to call in the same state than to call out-of-state? We were located in the corner of our county. The county seat of the county next to us, though 20 miles away, was a free local call. But to call the county seat of our own county was one of those weird "local toll" calls that cost more than an out-of-state long distance call! Even the city that the post office chose for our address, only 7 miles away, was a local toll call. The nearest public high school, which I attended, was in that city, and it was not free to call there, it was a local toll call. Yeah, cost more to call my high school than to call my relatives who live 1000 miles away in another state. After a few years of being careful not to make too many local toll calls and to keep them short when we did, we opted to pay more per month for this extended area metro service, which made our address city with my high school and another entire neighboring county into a free local call, but still did not include our own county seat.
Cell phones and Internet telephony finally ended that insanity.
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 15 2017, @02:03PM (2 children)
Right, that was what made the costs high... not the fact you had no wireless technology, had to run wires everywhere (across the fucking ocean) and the data was ANALOG, and you had no automated switchboards SO YOU HAD TO PAY PEOPLE TO MAKE CONNECTIONS. Yeah that couldn't have been the reason for the fucking costs being high... it had to be some made up bullshit called "phone call neutrality".
Jesus Christ man, are you one of those retarded Socialists that doesn't understand how business works?
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 15 2017, @02:15PM
OR it was companies with monopolies "increasing shareholder value" by maxing out marketing strategies. You need the local call package and the metro package and the state-2-state package and the international package and the multiple lines package and the non-ATT phone package.... in order to get functional phone service.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 15 2017, @04:14PM
Hey jackass, phones were automatically switched for a long time before ma bell was broken up. Ignoramus.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Runaway1956 on Friday December 15 2017, @02:39PM (1 child)
Don't feel lonesome with those crazy telephone toll schemes. Until relatively recently, calling our local sheriff's office was a toll call. When the 911 system was FINALLY implemented, we could call the sheriff for free - but for genuine emergencies only. Routine calls are still toll calls today. If you want to chat with the sheriff, you better have a cell phone, which is a free call - except, cell service really sucks at this end of the county. It might be better to just drive the 25 miles into town, and chat in person.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 16 2017, @01:14AM
It's just unbelievable that the implementers didn't foresee the probability that there would be idiots who would use that number for cats stuck in trees or cable TV gone down or whatever and implement and PUBLICIZE WITH EQUAL FERVOR the 3-1-1 system in parallel with 9-1-1.
-- OriginalOwner_ [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 3, Interesting) by darnkitten on Friday December 15 2017, @06:40PM
We had local toll in our rural county several years ago, courtesy of our (monopoly) telecom provider, which served about a third of the state. We kept asking for an end to it, at least within the county (county emergency services being a toll call, etc), as well asking for better internet speeds. Nothing happened for years, so a group of residents from the various county towns got together, formed a telecommunications committee, and started inviting in other telecom providers: wireless, infrared, satellite, etc., to present on how they could provide alternatives to our telecom provider.
When people from other counties started showing up to our meetings to see what we were doing, our provider got worried. They sent out the CEO and CTO to the next meeting and promised an end to local toll, fibre-to-the-premises, tv-over-fibre, and more, if we stayed with them. Then, to show they were serious, they actually and immediately abolished local toll for all areas where they were the sole provider (which sort of put the lie to the claim that they "had to" charge the rural areas higher prices because, you know, technobabble), and started laying fibre.
Unfortunately we got complacent and the committee disbanded. The provider kept the local calls, and they did lay fibre, albeit three years after they promised (work slowed down immediately once we weren't holding their feet to the fire); but they also spun off and sold their cell division, which was the one thing they provided us that actually worked well, leading to a spiral of sell-offs, mergers and takeovers that has left us, about a decade later with four cell towers around the town, but no coverage in most of it. We also, if we have internet, have to pay an extra $95 a month for a fibre-based landline (supposedly, to contact emergency services) that stops working in the event of a power outage (which happens routinely when the power substations stop working in the middle of the night in -20 or below temperatures).
So, a mixed bag, in retrospect.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by digitalaudiorock on Friday December 15 2017, @04:33PM (2 children)
Quote from industry shill Ajit Pai:
...because instead, Internet providers should be picking winners and losers in every economy right? Individuals and businesses already pay more money if they want more bandwidth. What's supposedly missing from that business model?...tolls to actually use the shit in the middle? When I pay for a 200 mbit connection all I get it a 200 mbit connection to my provider but not to anywhere I actually want to get to?...and not because they're not paying for a lot of bandwidth, but because they're not rich enough to pay the extortion in the middle? The very fact that the FCC chairman would make statements like this proves that the industry has too much power already.
When you look at the likes of the FCC now, or what's left of the EPA, you see crony capitalism that rivals the gilded age. It's really just sad.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Thexalon on Friday December 15 2017, @06:57PM (1 child)
Of course it's nonsense.
We know exactly why it's nonsense: Mr Pai's previous job was lobbying the FCC on behalf of the major ISPs with the specific goal of eliminating net neutrality rules. So the major ISPs certainly knew exactly who was going to win with their repeal. He just benefited Comcast, Verizon, AT&T, and Spectrum at the expense of Amazon, Google, Netflix, etc, and he knows that's exactly what he did. Also, he presumably has every reason to expect that once he's done with being FCC chair he'll be getting a nice big paycheck from the major ISPs. They straight-up bribed their way into public policy for a reason.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 15 2017, @11:23PM
More importantly he benefited Comcast, Verizon, AT&T, and Spectrum at the expense of the next Amazon, Google, Netflix, etc... and in fact those new innovators are probably going to be smothered in the cradle because the ISPs can now legally bleed them to death.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by crafoo on Friday December 15 2017, @05:18PM (2 children)
Unregulated government-granted monopolies will yield innovation and help the economy. Sure, sure. That makes sense. That's how markets work.
(Score: 3, Touché) by redneckmother on Friday December 15 2017, @06:52PM
Yeah, yeah, sure, sure. Just like the "trickle down" in the '80s - I'm still yellow and wet.
Mas cerveza por favor.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Azuma Hazuki on Friday December 15 2017, @09:39PM
Crafoo, you and the other anti-gubbamint types seem to be missing something: ANY concentration of too much power in too few hands is a problem, whether government or private. In the end it doesn't matter, not even a little bit. Human nature is human nature. Your government vs private corporation dichotomy is false. Pull your fucking head out and get with the program.
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...