From the WSJ:
Even HuffPo thinks this is a bad idea:
According to all reports, the rule, which will be voted on during tomorrow’s FCC meeting, falls drastically short of earlier pledges by President Obama and the FCC Chairman to protect the free and open Internet.
The rule is so riddled with loopholes that it’s become clear that this FCC chairman crafted it with the sole purpose of winning the endorsement of AT&T and cable lobbyists, and not defending the interests of the tens of millions of Internet users.
You and I are one of those tens of millions. So the immediate question: With this newfound power, how long before it mutates beyond original scope, and websites that are critical of the government begin to be shut down, or simply IP throttled out of meaningful existence?
I would imaging that site like this one would be a target, since we don’t report what the government line on climate change is.
I can only imagine the future where I’ll be typing some story, like this one, and there will be a knock at the door and
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One of the worst things in the internet out here in the rural areas is that users are allowed to download nearly unlimited video drivel over a very limited 3G bandwidth. Gamers are even worse There is no other alternative for many people, so we need to let the providers throttle bandwidth to give everyone decent service. I will buy service from the company that gives me bandwidth free from glitches and outages without any need of government regulation.
We can only hope the new Congress stomps on this camels nose before it gets any further in the tent.
Anthony…? Anthony…?
…damn.
The FCC action has already been shot down by the courts in April because they do not have the power to do this. They will be shot down again, or if that fails, the new Congress will legislate to keep the internet unregulated.
I am always fearful when the excuse for government interference is to …… no wait, I am always fearful of government interference, period.
FCC overreaching, Climate Brown shirts, TSA Proctologist (without a license), trash monitors, EPA carbon footprint experts. Bankrupt ideas of a bankrupt administration, driving a society bankrupt. Change we can believe in.
“I can only imagine the future where I’ll be typing some story, like this one, and there will be a knock at the door”
Or your domain will simply disappear from the Internet. I believe something like 70 domains have been “confiscated” by DHS just since this fall.
We will then see a “not the internet” form. People will begin using tunneling protocols to create an internet within the internet with its own domain naming and probably even its own IP addressing.
I’m wondering if it isn’t more in-line with the healthcare legislation:
Legislate/regulate providers toward bankruptcy so that the gov’t is forced to prop up the service through nationalization.
The foot is now in the door, hopefully it will get squished.
Jim G.
He’s gone back on several things and will continue to do so. I think the new congress will stop some of this “monarcky”. We are turning into sheep and lemmings-at least some in this country are.
How anyone can believe that Obama should be running the US is simply beyond me. Has he done a single thing good for the country?
Unless you’re a control-freak bureaucrat who loves to take away freedom from individuals tell the sheeple it’s for their own good, I would wager the answer is no.
What kind of person elected this guy?
There should be a lawsuit shortly.
They just can’t stand to have something so powerful that they cannot control. The answer is to lay more fiber.
This is great, netflix and bit torrents are dictating national policy. Of course none of this would be an issue if the govt. aggressively went after real cyber-criminals. How hard is it to block a known trojan from Moscow? “Click here to clean your computer!”
This is one of the main things I worry about the govt from doing because it suggests that they have reason to hide something or as you said Anthony, limit the amount of information available to all of us.
This question isn’t as easy as saying “they already promised to do the right thing” or “the new congress will legislate to keep the internet unregulated”. The question isn’t simple. The telecoms at the base of this have a long history of killing as much innovation as they can. OTOH they need to be allowed to prioritize traffic. Real time (voice, video) traffic has different characteristics from intermittent non-Real Time traffic (for example surfing this site). Guaranteed you give either some government agency or the telecoms the keys and we end up with a rats nest. About the only real shining moment going that direction is that it is unlikely the telecoms or the government will stay ahead of the innovation of the open tech community.
And given the US response to wikileaks (which should be “oh shit, we let our stuff get away” instead of “we should force them to think like the rest of the morons and do what we want them to do”) I think the fear that this will get hijacked by the US government to nefariously provide other controls is real.
This was actually a very simple matter to fix. All they had to do was revisit the decision which said “high speed” providers, such as DSL or cable, were not common carriers. I don’t understand why something so clear and simple was bungled so badly.
Was a change needed? It most certainly was. My provider started redirecting bad domain queries to a search site in exchange for some payment from the search engine. Within a few months, a sizable portion of queries (we’re talking about well-known sites like Gmail and Yahoo news) were redirected to that page. When a number of people switched to OpenDNS, the provider started threatening to block them. I’m not paying the provider so that it can sabotage what I’m doing in order to collect another payment from someone else. I’m paying the provider to provide an uninterfered-with connection to what I want to see and hear.
Other providers were blocking VOIP (telephone-like) services such as Skype, Gizmo5, and Google Voice, in order to force people to pay for their higher-priced / less-useful competing services. And, yes, some providers are believed to have blocked access to sites critical of the provider’s actions.
I doubt that anyone is happy with the outcome. Personally, I hope that the next iteration goes back and reverses the mistaken FCC decision which allowed this mess to come up in the first place. One thing that would do is put the FCC on firm ground in dealing with actions like Comcast’s former behavior (e.g., poisoning bittorrent connections, including those used for things like downloading Linux distributions), where a court decided there was no legal basis for the FCC to punish such misconduct.
It’d also mean that sites like this one would be protected the same way any other site would be. Think about it. Your landline is not arbitrarily blocked from calling or receiving calls just because the other party uses a competing carrier. That’s the way the Net should work. Common carrier would assure this.
What will be fought out in court is whether the FCC has the POWER or RIGHT to regulate the Internet. They do not, but…
Thin edge of the wedge.
In the last week, the GOP have:
1) Caved on the tax bill.
2) Caved on DADT.
3) Caved on the ‘Food Safety Bill’ led by ME-Chelle Obama.
4) Caved on START.
So that’s bad news right there for freedom. But this FCC thing…
WHY would the FCC do this if they KNOW that they’re going to get dragged into court? Are they confident that Obama’s stacking of the Supremes is going to go in their favor? What are we missing here?
We were told about the staggering effect that the first automobiles had on the population. So a law was passed requiring a man with a red flag to walk in front of each motor car. It then took a long time to get rid of this law, which impeded commercial development.
Similarly the real answer to these Net problems is more bandwidth. Could someone give a thumbnail of the technologies out there that will make this kind of problem disappear? Then maybe these legislators can be apprised of the technical and commercial and cultural disadvantage that will be inflicted on countries that regulate internet services for their citizens.
Anyone here who thinks the FCC has good intentions here, go back and do your homework.
ANY TIME both Rush Limbaugh AND the Huffington Post come out against something, it’s truly horrible. And this is straight from the heart of dictator-in-chief Obama.
I’m always amused when leftists are Shocked Shocked Shocked to find their politicians are just as firmly enslaved to the Wall Street Casino as the Republican politicians.
And you Republicans who are expecting your politicians to consider the quaint little antique concept of national interest … you’re going to be Shocked Shocked Shocked too.
It’s all about the Casino. Nothing else counts.
I admit I do not understand what this is about. ( but I don’t like the doublespeak)
So far my cable-internet-phone provider has been very good.
But they do have a tiered service with tiers higher than the one I get.
It isn’t a complete wreck like Veriszon DSL was ten years back. That was a nightmare unless you had a business account for mucho bucks.
The shared space of the neighborhood never gets in my way .
One way or another this will cost me more. I am sure.
I am not certain if it is understood that this site is likely one of the biggest thorns in the side of those that seek to control by deceit. It would not surprise me to find out that shutting this place down is high on the list of those that are governing through deceit. We must all of us be prepared to defend this place with everything we have.
“We can only hope the new Congress stomps on this camels nose before it gets any further in the tent.”
-The REPUBLICAN Congress is going to protect net neutrality? The GOP is opposed to the government controling every breath citizens make? I didn’t think anybody over the age of five could be that naive. . .
Anthony,
You do realize, I hope, that the Huffington Post piece and the conservative media are attacking the ruling for opposite reasons. The H’Post piece argues that the regulations are too toothless to prevent internet providers from undermining NetNeutrality while the conservatives are attacking the ruling because they want the internet providers (AT&T and Comcast in particular) to have free reign to control our access to the internet as they see fit in their infinite wisdom.
Unfortunately, one of the lessons that many have not learned from the latest financial crisis is that insufficient regulation doesn’t bring freedom…rather it brings corporate control and economic disaster.
REPLY: I’m simply pointing out that people on opposite ends of the political spectrum think it is a bad idea too. But you can read anything into my words that suits you, everyone else does. -Anthony
This is VERY Bad for a number of reasons yet it makes sense for a few reasons.
When I first got on the net, in 1994, I used AOL. After exploring the net for a while I realized there was an UnderNet (IRC etc.) I couldn’t reach from AOL because the AOL service, at the time, was designed to keep members within their service. I ended up dumping AOL and got an ISP that allowed me to surf freely. LOL, freely on a 28.8 modem.
FCC pushes again for 100Mbps Internet, wants it by 2020
http://dvice.com/archives/2010/03/fcc-pushes-agai.php
The reason this is so bad, it has nothing to do with freedom of speech, is because it forces us to buy the crap speed the various US companies offer.
Example: a town in the US South East decided to offer a municipal connection to the Internet for its residents. It offers (1:1 — up/down) 100Mbps for about $100/mo. This is nothing compared to the service you’ll get in Hong Kong but the way the US town did it turns out to be very easy to do. The Internet providers in their State have spent and enormous amount of lobby money to force the town to close municipal service so they can downgrade it to their “norm”.
If America was fully aware that they can eliminate Internet providers and simply connect to the Net at 10 times the rate for the same ISP provider cost — a Municipal Service like Water, Sewer, and Trash … ; )
Just by the ugly historical fact of him being a pathological promise-breaker (read: “pathological liar”), Obama will go down as one of the worst presidents the United States has ever EVER seen.
Chris
Norfolk, VA, USA