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President Trump's Supreme Court nominee argued last year that net neutrality rules violate the First Amendment rights of Internet service providers by preventing them from "exercising editorial control" over Internet content.
Trump's pick is Brett Kavanaugh, a judge on the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. The DC Circuit twice upheld the net neutrality rules passed by the Federal Communications Commission under former Chairman Tom Wheeler, despite Kavanaugh's dissent. (In another tech-related case, Kavanaugh ruled that the National Security Agency's bulk collection of telephone metadata is legal.)
While current FCC Chairman Ajit Pai eliminated the net neutrality rules, Kavanaugh could help restrict the FCC's authority to regulate Internet providers as a member of the Supreme Court. Broadband industry lobby groups have continued to seek Supreme Court review of the legality of Wheeler's net neutrality rules even after Pai's repeal.
[...] Consumers generally expect ISPs to deliver Internet content in un-altered form. But Kavanaugh argued that ISPs are like cable TV operators—since cable TV companies can choose not to carry certain channels, Internet providers should be able to choose not to allow access to a certain website, he wrote.
"Internet service providers may not necessarily generate much content of their own, but they may decide what content they will transmit, just as cable operators decide what content they will transmit," Kavanaugh wrote. "Deciding whether and how to transmit ESPN and deciding whether and how to transmit ESPN.com are not meaningfully different for First Amendment purposes."
Kavanaugh's argument did not address the business differences between cable TV and Internet service.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by fritsd on Sunday July 15 2018, @08:53AM (2 children)
That's a good point. However:
You are assuming, that you TMB can somehow find out when they're censoring a certain website i.e. are assholes, and choose another ISP when they are not delivering.
If the existing University of Manitoba server with the free downloadable copy of "The Authoritarians" disappears(*) from the Internet (from your ISP's perspective), how would you ever find out?
Better still: if someone makes a new website or web service, say something like "yfitops: better than Spotify and shares more revenue with the artists".
Your ISP blocks it because it is innovative and a competitor to services that pay your ISP. Now monopoly has been locked-in and you'd have to find out by word of mouth that it even exists.
(*) http://home.cc.umanitoba.ca/~altemey/ [umanitoba.ca]
(Score: 2) by jcross on Sunday July 15 2018, @01:41PM (1 child)
The way the law is going is probably bad, I won't deny that, but all the handwringing is based on the assumption that the internet has no proper privacy layer. And it doesn't yet (e.g. standard DNS is still travelling in the clear), but it's already a giant stack of protocols and what's one more? This has been needed for a long time, and I think the incipient legal/commercial landscape might be the push required to get mainstream traction for it. Until we deploy a technical solution, we're just taking someone's word for it that our communications are uncensored and private. I doubt anyone here buys that, but I think the general public will assume it until shown otherwise. Why should we stop the law from showing them otherwise?
Here are two of the proposed networking layers I've heard of, there are probably more:
https://www.zerotier.com/ [zerotier.com]
https://www.orchid.com/ [orchid.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 15 2018, @04:19PM
i tend to agree with this notion. the only practical way to deal with the corrupt nature of the world's businesses and governments is to use technology to make these fucks obsolete. it's probably our only hope. to do it faster than the systems of slavery they are building with all their slave trade money, we need to use tech to organize a global effort.