FCC Does Its Job On Net Neutrality

DSWright at FDL:

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The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) voted today to approve a rule to regulate internet service providers to promote an open internet often known as net neutrality. The vote marks a stark loss for the ISPs who aggressively fought the rule and has said they plan to sue to overturn it.

After a federal court rejected a compromise proposal using Section 702 of the Telecommunications Act of 1996 due to a lawsuit of the ISP companies, the FCC has decided to approve a more rigorous and legally sound rule under Title II authority of the Communications Act of 1934. The use of this rule means ISPs will be classified as “common carriers” and regulated as utilities.

The vote was 3-2 with both Republican commissioners – Michael O’Rielly and Ajit Pai - opposing the rule and citing the dangers of regulation in stopping service innovation and expansion of internet access. FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler said the internet was too important to be controlled by either “government or corporate,” calling the internet too important to have ISP “making all the rules.”

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Right... let's have just the ISP telecomm megacorp's make all the rules. As if that would be an improvement...

This is still not over, but it's a damned good start.

FCC Net Neutrality: Proposed Rules Appear A Respectable Beginning

FCC Chairman Wheeler proposes some rules. — c|net reacts basically positively. — Computerworld emphasizes other desirable aspects of the proposal's net neutrality rules. — And Computerworld's Matt Hamblin talks about the telecomms' inevitable lawsuits...

More later; I'm in kind of a hurry at the moment.

To The FCC

To the FCC:

If ever there were a case of foxes guarding hen-houses, this is it. When I signed up for my two domain names, I was not knowingly signing up for blatant discrimination against small businesses. When I resorted to signing up with a major telecom for an allegedly high-speed internet connection, I did not expect to be competing with megacorporations for access to bandwidth on the backbone. When I placed my meager content on two web sites, I expected customers to be able to actually view and read those web sites without going out for a cup of coffee while the content was downloading. I was promised net neutrality and I expect and demand exactly that. My government must see to it that I get that neutrality... nothing else, and certainly nothing less!

(Sent via freepress.net.)

How Many Legs Does A Dog Have...

FCC's Net Neutrality

,,, if you call FCC's proposed new Section 706-based rules "net neutrality"? Well, surely not more than three. As Michael Weinberg, vice president of Public Knowledge, paraphrased by Juan Cole at Informed Comment, said (as best I can parse it), "The FCC’s proposal still falls well short of real net neutrality rules," and [b]ecause of its emphasis on Section 706, “[i]t would create a two-tier internet where ‘commercially reasonable’ discrimination is allowed on any connections that exceed an unknown 'minimum level of access' defined by the FCC. A two-tier internet is anathema to a truly open internet, and rules under section 706 authority are insufficient to prevent harmful paid prioritization."

For what it's worth, the Commission voted for this proposed rule 3-2 along party lines. I.e., for one rare time, I find myself siding with the Commission's Republicans, though I suspect they voted against the rule because Obama proposed it, and they are determined to oppose his every move from now until the end of his term. Still, there is no one on the Commission who truly backs the apparent public majority view, favoring genuine net neutrality. There is still a four-month public comment period, but in Obama's administration, as in Bush Junior's before him, one needn't hold one's breath hoping public comments will affect a damned thing.

In short: it was your internet; it isn't yours anymore. Bite deep into the shit and try to like it.

The Pay-To-Play Internet: A Fable

In this fable, you are about to attend a conference. It is a medium-size conference, so that it fits in one hotel... all sessions are held in conference rooms of various sizes within the hotel; most of the attendees stay in rooms in the hotel, etc. The hotel is not overbooked: getting from your room to a session is not obstructed by, e.g., too many people crowding the halls. Some attendees may pay a bit more to strategize the location of their room to reduce distance to conference rooms or elevator wait time, but getting to and from any room and a given session is not in and of itself anticipated to be an issue. The cost of the conference rooms is paid as part of the conference fee, which is on a per-attendee basis: no differentiation is made among attendees.

On the morning of the opening session, everyone leaves his or her room, heading for the grand conference hall. To everyone's surprise, there are "Security" personnel stationed at every hall intersection and every elevator entrance. The security folks wear hats labeled "ATTComcastVerizon" and are also wearing a change belt like an old-fashioned bus driver. As you leave your room, the first of these "Security" officers approaches you and says, "That'll be five bucks, please!" She will not let you pass her station in the hall until you give her five dollars.

When you reach the elevator, there's another "Security" officer, who demands $10 to allow you onto the elevator. You protest; he responds, "Well, you could always pay ATTComcastVerizon $1000 a day for an all-day hall/elevator pass." You do not see right away what service these "Security" officers perform related to the conference, but you are expected at the opening session, so you pay your sawbuck and ride to the lobby. After another $5 to transit the hallway to the grand conference hall and another $5 to enter the grand hall, you finally hear the first session. There are a lot of justifiably angry people in the audience.

Over lunch you do a bit of phoning and texting to find out WTF is going on with these hallway/elevator fees. Despite a lot of close-mouthed people, you manage to learn that ATTComcastVerizon secretly negotiated a deal with the hotel to allow ATTComcastVerizon to collect these fees. All the big companies already knew about this, and prepaid their attendees' $1000 daily pass fees in advance; none of those attendees was ever unintentionally late for a session. On the other hand, you, and every other small-business attendee, are busily scrounging and stuffing your pockets with $5 and $10 bills, but even so, the lines at each of the Security stations on every hallway and at every elevator entry are so long that everyone is late to every session... except those who work for the big corp's; they breeze right through.

"This never happened before!" you blurt out to one of the Security officers. "That's how things are now, buddy; get used to it. The Federal Crapola Commission (FCC) ruled that we can do this, and do it we most certainly will."

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Thus ends our fable... unless our very own FCC turns it into reality this week. You might want to scream bloody murder at a few FCC officials before the decision is made mere days from now...

Bill Moyers On Net Neutrality

You may not have given any thought to all the warnings that the FCC is about to do away with "net neutrality." What does it have to do with you, anyway? and even if you knew, what could you do about it?

Moyers

The answers are "a whole lot," and "more than you might think." If regulations are put in place which privilege the delivery of content provided by the big internet service providers themselves (Comcast, Verizon, AT&T... actually, the list is distressingly short) over the content provided by web sites put up by your church, your nonprofits on which you depend to inform you about the environment, global warming, international relations, the niche market served by your one-person business, your favorite political activists, your least favorite political activists (!) whom you want to keep an eye on, etc., you will soon find the internet resembles old-fashioned broadcast TV networks in, say, the 1950s, where the companies responsible for delivering things to you are also the companies that determine what is delivered to you (at an acceptable transfer rate)... and hence what you consume. As so often happens with very large corporations who find themselves in control of sources (of laundry soap or information or entertainment), the telecom's (telecommunications companies... see the partial list above) will use their de facto monopoly power to supply you with what they think you should want, serving their own interests and profitability, and ignoring your real needs.

When Microsoft was at its most dominant in the software industry, they had a slogan, "Where do you want to go today?" which I used to misquote intentionally as "Where does Microsoft want you to go today?" The self-serving behavior of the telecom's under faulty FCC regulations will be similar. You won't like it at all... unless you're CEO of Comcast, or someone similar.

Tom Wheeler: FCC Chair,
former Telecom CEO, etc.

Here's the main thing about the threatened loss of net neutrality: Obama's FCC chair and several other FCC officials are former telecom executives. And they're ready to do this thing right away, starting this month. Don't dither while you decide: contact your congresscritters right away and tell them to put legislation in place to preserve net neutrality. Bug the bejezus out of the FCC chair and other high FCC officials. And be sure to remind Obama that he promised to protect net neutrality in his first campaign for the presidency.

Moyers offers three segments of basic information, video here (summary) and here (full show), and text here (article about net neutrality). It's now or never, folks... put it on your calendar for this week!

Net Neutrality Is In Grave Danger

... and Obama's FCC chairman Tom Wheeler is a former telecom CEO. The proposal under consideration would allow ISPs to offer faster internet delivery rates for more money from companies willing and able to pay it, while the rest of us... bloggers, small businesses, small nonprofits, etc. ... would slog along in the slow lane.

Neutrality of transport has been essential to the Internet from its beginning, and everyone involved in the original development of the 'net opposes this pay-to-play scheme. But you know Obama, the closet Republican; he appoints cabinet officials and agency heads who give big corporations whatever they want. You can fight back or watch the 'net you know and love... the content you really want... go to ground to make room for as much fast Fox News as Fox can pay for. The petition on Kos is a place to start; please sign it. You don't have long; the decision will be made in about the middle of next month.

DC Circuit: Internet Still Not 'Common Carrier', So FCC Lacks Authority At Present To Mandate Net Neutrality

This could be really bad news... or not. Net Neutrality, a convenient handle for the set of Federal Communications Commission (FCC) regulations, issued in 2010 under the Telecommunications Act of 1996, under which the companies that actually provide the internet to Americans and America-based companies must treat all comers equally (i.e., roughly put, must provide the same services... bandwidth, connectivity and delivery... for the same prices, regardless of content), is in danger of being overthrown in favor of a model in which the largest corporate customers can receive the best services at good prices and the rest of us are left with the dregs... possibly dialup.

Other than the obvious, what is bad about this? There's a good argument to be made that a lot of the internet's contribution to the dramatic technological progress of the past two decades has happened at the fringes, where individuals or small companies have come up with often astonishing improvements in technology or process, in part because those individuals and small companies aren't out-competed for the "raw materials" ... i.e., bandwidth and delivery... by the telecoms themselves, AT&T, Verizon etc. After this ruling, if it survives the inevitable appeal to the Supreme Court, the big telecoms will be able to leave us little folk with inadequate resources, or adequate resources at obscene prices. (Internet access in America is already high-priced by world standards.)

This is not quite a done deal. The appeal to the Supremes is still a possibility, though I don't expect that to help much if at all. But there are still things the FCC could do, changes it could legally make to its own regulations and policies, that would enable it to regulate the internet as what it in fact is, namely, a common carrier. The previous FCC chair, Julius Genachowski, was apparently motivated to serve his large corporate telecom masters... apparently Obama's ideal as well. ("After all, the chief business of the American people is business" could as easily have been said by Obama as Coolidge.) The current FCC chair, Tom Wheeler, seems (according to several writers) to advocate a wait-and-see approach, which isn't much better, if it means ditching the open internet and waiting for the worst to happen. Or perhaps if we can mount an immense, dramatic public campaign, including citizens and small businesses, to pressure the FCC to preserve the open internet, just maybe it can be done. I'm not betting on it, but I'm not... yet... betting against it. Meanwhile, please read Kit O'Connell's linked post and view the attached video. (I don't often complain about fast speech, but these good people strain the limits of my old Texan ears.)