Telcos Move Net Neutrality Fight To Congress 52
Presto Vivace writes: "Public Knowledge is rallying its supporters after learning that some House members plan to try and add an amendment to H.R. 5016, the Financial Services and General Government Appropriations Act to block funding of FCC network neutrality rules. H.R. 5016 is the bill that keeps funding the government and whose failure to pass can shut it down. The White House has already said it opposed the existing FCC budget cuts and threatened a veto of a bill it says politicized the budget process." Public Knowledge is asking citizens to tell Congress to stop meddling with net neutrality. In a way this is a good sign. It is an indication that the telcos think that they will lose the current FCC debate.
Meanwhile, the FCC's deadline for comments about net neutrality has arrived, and the agency's servers buckled after recording over 670,000 of them. The deadline has been extended until midnight on Friday.
You can find your member's contact info (Score:5, Informative)
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on the House of Reppresentatives [congress.gov] website.
Thanks for that. It would be doubly helpful if we knew which congressmen were supporting this, I'm sure that it's more than just R's that are getting big campaign contributions. The article only says "some House members." I'd like to know if mine is supporting it. A quick Google search finds another article that says it's being introduced by Marsha Blackburn (R-TN). There's another one, HR 4752 being introduced by Bob Latta (R-OH) that would prevent the FCC from regulating ISPs under Title II (common c
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Sounds domesticated to me - when's the last time you saw a horse pull a plow without being asked?
Can we extend corporate rights to individuals? (Score:5, Interesting)
As opposed to now? They read all the data on Google's servers without taking them.
The problem is that powerful corporations appear to have even more rights than individual people.
People managing powerful corporations do illegal acts, and other people (the shareholders who had no knowledge or control) are punished.
Personally, I'd love to re-incorporate my soul in a zero-tax offshore jurisdiction and subcontract out my physical body to earn income another country but not have to pay tax.
Since a corporation is not a natural person, but a particular structure created by legislative activity, there is no legal or moral reason that rights of such constructed entities cannot be legally constrained in ways impermissible for natural humans.
Re: Can we extend corporate rights to individuals? (Score:2)
You know you can already do all of that and plenty of people do it. The problem is that the cost to do so is prohibitive unless you make more than a few million a year and can pay your own set of accountant and lawyers.
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Re: Don't worry, according to Citizens United (Score:3, Informative)
A corporation is a legal entity, not a "collection of people". Your entire argument (flawed though amusing) is based upon an incorrect assumption.
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Citizens United, and now Hobby Lobby, stand for the worryingly advancing proposition that corporations are identical to people and must be afforded all the same rights... in spite of the fact that they're fictitious legal entities. They're bad decisions which have made worse law, and your strange argument in favor of the
article summary didn't really summarize... (Score:1)
let's imagine that a majority of Slashdot readers is in favor of net neutrality -and- typically doesn't want to click to grind through to get the gist.
"House members plan to try and add an amendment to H.R. 5016 the Financial Services and General Government Appropriations Act to block funding of FCC network neutrality rules. so since the "FCC's (current proposed) network neutrality rules" suck, then we -want- this plan to add an amendment to succeed? or... since "Public Knowledge is asking citizens to te
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Net Neutrality seems to have went from everything open and no restrictions to no fast lanes or some shit. You can pick any side you want without too much confusion because while this is called net neutrality, I do not think it actually is any more. It might be part of it, a part I would not agree with, but it is more likely something else.
To note, I find there is nothing wrong with a fast lane as long as no customers are getting less than what they purchased in order to have it. (No slowing me down to deliv
Net Neutrality has always had a clear meaning (Score:3)
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well, you know that isn't going to happen as the ISPs over sell their bandwidth in order to make a profit and charge less to get customers. This typically isn't a problem because most people will not be using all their available bandwidth at one time so it can be shared reasonably well.
I don't know any such thing (Score:4, Interesting)
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The throttling began long ago, when we let carriers give us asymmetrical connections, e.g. (ex:) 80% download and 20% upload. This is how FIOS, and many other schemes will come unraveled. Upload speed is important if for this fact: pooling web services is now done via ISPs/MSPs and other data centers, instead of a distributed pattern of symmetrically-supplied carriers-- like your own home. It requires us to host our stuff at ISPs, and even more-- if you're delivering streaming content-- via specialized prov
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Just like our phone calls go thru no matter who we call or we is calling us, that is how our internet should work.
Apparently the internet scrambles a letter or two. And the phone system? Well, I have memories sonny. Calls didn't always go through... And a quarter for the first three minutes just to call out to the suburbs. Ah, but we had it good, only had to dial seven numbers, none of this area code crap. KLondike-5 3825
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I find there is nothing wrong with a fast lane as long as no customers are getting less than what they purchased in order to have it. (No slowing me down to deliver NetFlix at 30megs).
You are confused. The "fast lane" means normal speed, and anything else means deliberately throttled. There is nothing wrong with a "fast lane" for prioritizing particular TYPES of traffic, such as real time voice, but no ISP with monopoly power (almost all of them) should be allowed to discriminate based on the source or destination of the data.
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The "fast lane" means normal speed, and anything else means deliberately throttled. There is nothing wrong with a "fast lane" for prioritizing particular TYPES of traffic, such as real time voice, but no ISP with monopoly power (almost all of them) should be allowed to discriminate based on the source or destination of the data.
Basically this. But the problem with even that kind of throttling is that it would be abused and distorted to do the other kind as well. So the overall best solution is no "fast lanes" (which in reality means slow lanes) at all.
Imagine if the telephone companies made commercial TYPE calls better quality than calls to grandma or to the kids. No matter how you slice it, in the long run it's a bad idea.
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No, I didn't say that at all. I said something specific so pay attention.
I said there is nothing wrong with a fast lane as long as no customers are getting less than what they purchased in order to have it. If the ISPs can do that, a fast lane is perfectly fine. If they cannot, then there is a problem which likely is already covered by consumer protection laws (bait and switch possibly).
You see, I'm not saying that is how they work, I'm saying that how they have to work if we are going to have them.
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And that can be done. There is typically available bandwidth outside what is used for internet service and the fast-lane can use that and be switched to your specific leg of the drop at the last moment.
In effect, the fast lane would be carried outside the regular service and combined right before it hits your house or building sidestepping the service congestion. and if it cannot, then they cannot have a fast lane.
Like I said, there is nothing wrong with a fast lane _as_long_as no customers are getting less
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The problem is what the customers purchased is generally a connection to the internet with no particular gaurantees about performance. If you want connections with service level agreements coverting performance to defined locations (e.g. major peering connections) you can get them but expect to pay a hell of a lot more than you would pay for a regular "broadband" connection.
Since they never agreed to provide any particular ammount of bandwidth in the first place there is little to stop them taking away some
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First, a service level agreement is essentially what third party providers purchase when thry buy a fast lane. And they do pay a lot more for it (normal access fees and a fast lane fee).
Second, if the ISP is purposely limiting your connection speeds, they are defrauding you as a customer as the up yo or best effort speeds will have to be lower than what they represented and you purchased. There simply is no way around it. If the premium service is being paid by a third party, the incentive will be for servi
Little hope for Net Neutrality. (Score:3)
we will see about that (Score:5, Insightful)
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clearly the money is nervous, or they would not have gone running to congress.
Nervous or not, they're hedging their bets. If they win at the FCC, they'll try to get Congress to enshrine the decision into law. if they lose, they live to fight on; either way the lobbyists make money.
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Let's face it - money always wins.
There is big money on both sides of this issue. Sure, big ISPs like Comcast, and TWC, want to kill NN. But big content companies like Netflix and Amazon are on the other side. Google used to be a solid supporter of NN, but now that they are getting into the ISP business, they have flip-flopped on the issue.
Generally, content companies donate to Democrats, and ISPs donate to Republicans. So Democrats oppose IP reform, and Republicans oppose NN. Pick your poison.
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this is the new tactic: don't like something? bar any funding frm being used for it.
They don't like global warming, so they passed a bill barring hte military from doing its job and making plans to study and deal with emerging security threats as a result of it...yes, Republicans directly harming national security over global warming, because of their corporate masters.
They don't like global warming, so they also passed a bill barring the Army Corps of Engineers and Department of Energy from doing its job a
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again. clearly not a troll post.
Lost cause (Score:2)
Freedom lost even before the battle begun.
Well, of course. (Score:4, Funny)
Meanwhile, the FCC's deadline for comments about net neutrality has arrived, and the agency's servers buckled after recording over 670,000 of them.
That's because they didn't pay extra for the bandwidth. What did they expect?
politicizing the federal budget (Score:4, Insightful)
Whoever complained that this is "politicizing the federal budget" loses. I didn't pay attention to which side said that, but if that's the best argument you have, clearly you have nothing. Yes, deciding how to spend OUR money is a political process, and always has been. If you're position requires pretending that isn't the case, you're obviously living in fairy tale land.
did you not get the memo? (Score:2)
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Besides, we also have recent precedence on this. There are laws which prohibited certain anti-competitive behavior for newspapers. If you stifle the channels of communication, say the printing press in the 1800s, then you control the narrative(s). Today, the Internet is uniquely in that very same position. If you allow a privately owned organization to take self-serving priorities, with no competitive alternatives available, then you are again in a position where the narrative is dictated. Let's say Co