FCC Moves Ahead With Title II Net Neutrality Rules in 3-2 Party-Line Vote (arstechnica.com) 68
The U.S. FCC voted Thursday to advance a proposal to reinstate landmark net neutrality rules and assume new regulatory oversight of broadband internet that was rescinded under former President Donald Trump. From a report: In a 3-2 party-line vote, the FCC approved Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel's Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (NPRM), which seeks public comment on the broadband regulation plan. The comment period will officially open after the proposal is published in the Federal Register, but the docket is already active and can be found here. The proposal would reclassify broadband as a telecommunications service, a designation that allows the FCC to regulate ISPs under the common-carrier provisions in Title II of the Communications Act. The plan is essentially the same as what the FCC did in 2015 when it used Title II to prohibit fixed and mobile Internet providers from blocking or throttling traffic or giving priority to Web services in exchange for payment.
The Obama-era net neutrality rules were eliminated during Trump's presidency when then-Chairman Ajit Pai led a repeal that reclassified broadband as an information service, returning it to the less strict regulatory regime of Title I. The current FCC likely would have acted much sooner but there was a 2-2 deadlock until last month when the Senate confirmed Biden nominee Anna Gomez to fill the empty spot. After the comment period, the FCC is likely to finalize the rulemaking and put the 2015 rules back in place. The broadband industry will likely then sue the FCC in an attempt to nullify the rulemaking.
The Obama-era net neutrality rules were eliminated during Trump's presidency when then-Chairman Ajit Pai led a repeal that reclassified broadband as an information service, returning it to the less strict regulatory regime of Title I. The current FCC likely would have acted much sooner but there was a 2-2 deadlock until last month when the Senate confirmed Biden nominee Anna Gomez to fill the empty spot. After the comment period, the FCC is likely to finalize the rulemaking and put the 2015 rules back in place. The broadband industry will likely then sue the FCC in an attempt to nullify the rulemaking.
Re:Good move but who? (Score:5, Informative)
The law was made by Congress. The law is broad and has different sections based on the type of communication business. Specific decisions are supposed to be made by the experts employed by the Executive Branch Agency created for this purpose.
This decision is made by President appointed, Senate approved agency heads as to which section of the law applies to the specific business model. It is done after consultation with the public, industry, and research done by the expert staff -- technical and legal -- at the Agency (FCC).
Pepperidge Farms needs to cut back on snorting whatever fumes come from their industrial factories and maybe their brain cells could function better.
Re:Good move but who? (Score:5, Insightful)
Specific decisions are supposed to be made by the experts employed by the Executive Branch Agency created for this purpose.
You're not wrong, however, there does some a point when a policy is so far reaching that it is better done as an Act of Congress, both so there's political involvement/accountability, and so the underlying policy is better equipped to survive judicial review.
In this instance, they're playing with fire, by the time this goes through the rules making process and is finalized we'll be looking at another election. If Biden loses (side note: We'll have bigger problems than NN) we'll likely be within the timeline provided for under the Congressional Review Act, meaning, these rules can be killed for good with a simple majority vote in Congress + Presidential signature. That's how privacy regulations got killed, the Obama Administration finalized those rules just in time for Trump + GOP Congress to strike them down for good. Now the only way for that to happen is via an Act of Congress and our Congress seems completely unable to do anything except name Post Offices, hell, they can't even do that right now because House is paralyzed.
I'll repeat myself too by saying that NN is a solution looking for a problem. No wireline ISP has ever done the actions it proscribes. Unless it's going to apply to wireless without exempting all the bullshit they do, like charging more for HD video, it will change nothing, and wireless was deliberately excluded the last time we did this.
If you want to fix American broadband, you need to do something about the last mile monopoly. That's the reason why broadband prices have increased at many times the inflation rate while bullshit anti-consumer policies like caps (i.e., additional price increases) go unchallenged. Most Americans have exactly ONE choice of provider, while those that have a second choice frequently find it's no choice at all, e.g., ADSL, only the lucky few have two viable providers (usually cable and GPON/FTTH)
If it does apply to wireless without exemptions, I will wholeheartedly support it, but will remain skeptical the FCC will actually enforce it. Ask Verizon customers how well they've done at enforcing the Block C Rules [cornell.edu], which also proscribe a lot of the behavior that NN seeks to stop. Hint: Verizon and the FCC just pretend they don't exist. Verizon at least paid them lip service during Obama years, afraid to risk rocking the boat, and less than a month after Trump/Ajit Pai took over they immediately released a bunch of plans that constrain different apps (e.g., video) in direct violation of the Block C rules. Why isn't the FCC enforcing these existing rules right now, today, and given that they're not, why should I believe NN will be any different?
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You must like 40+ year high inflation
Price increases have been high but the rate of increase for the USA is not out of sync with the entire rest of the world and the rate of inflation for the US currently is actually much lower and back on pre-2019 track, so how do you go about squarely blaming Biden in particular for this when in fact the US is doing better than contemporaries in Europe and Asia?
paying off foreign terrorist states
If Biden didn't get those hostages back his critics would just call him weak, this is a no-win scenario for him but at the end of the day the only fu
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>>7+ million new illegals in 2 years
>this isn't necessarily a "bad thing"
I wonder if people realize that our birth rate is down significantly, so we actually need immigration in order to
sustain our country? A lot of these immigrants, especially the younger ones, are going to be the people taking care of us when we're old and senile.
It's like people see "illegal immigrant" and think that means it's a bad person. No, it's a desperate person looking for a better life, which they will likely find and c
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I think you've failed to notice that the same people whining about immigration have no problem with Melania Trump getting an "Einstein visa". But they are very very upset about brown people, for some reason. Can't imagine why.
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Ooooh, yeah, I heard that argument when I was in college. The other college kids said we needed illegals to pick crops to keep our prices down. Ya know, having a underclass is important to keep the price of a head of lettuce 2 cents lower, right? The only difference is in your version you want someone cheap to wipe your ass and clean up your drool when you're old but same argument.
If we needed 7m people we can start a program to legally let more people in. What's wrong with that? Why do we let foreigne
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Because the business owners want cheaper workers who have limited rights. If we really wanted to reduce illegal immigration, we would go after the business owners who are employing them. Republican talking points about illegal immigrants are generally bad faith populist/racist rhetoric meant to drive their base, not fix the supposed problem.
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If we need slave labor to pick our crops then we need to restructure our economy and society. The fact is labor is a pretty small percentage of the cost of farming, anyway. Your argument is simply false. And immoral.
You are making the EXACT same argument slave owners in the south made before the American civil war.
You are definitely standing on the wrong side of history on this one.
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AC promotes a 2 tiered society with serfs to pick vegetables so he can have cheaper salad. Got it. You know we have had a work visa that allows migrate farm workers to come in during picking season for many decades? With that in place, tell me again why we need random illegals? If there aren't enough lettuce pickers to keep your sandwich prices a nickel lower then increase the number of legal seasonal migrant farm workers. The solution is already in place, you just don't like it.
Thanks for joining us t
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I am way smarter than you!
You walked right into that one, dumb AC.
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No, I just know English.
I also oppose having a serf/slave labor class of undocumented people with no legal protections so your vegan sandwich costs a few pennies less.
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I think everyone would be be far better off if there were less people. We wouldn't have this insane unsustainable pressure on housing prices and so many people living their lives in debt if demand was lower and the demand for more people would probably correct the population without fucking over other countries.
America doesn't get to say "too many people is why housing is expensive in cities" when Tokyo exists. The demand is the demand, one the things we expect from capitalism and market is when demand goes up supply should increase. It's certainly possible to build more housing units, if that's not happening we have some sort of market failure.
Simply desiring a "better life" doesn't justify committing crimes to achieve your aims.
This is true, I can't disagree but here we are. I don't think making crossing the border super-super-double-illegal is helping or has ever helped. In this case it's only
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I should be happy that Europe and Asia are even more poorly run than the US? Uh, yay?
The Iranian hostages have been there for years. No one gave a shit besides their families. At least one has been there since Obama and no one said fucking boo about it then or during Trump. Nonsense.
A peace deal with a terrorist stake? Really? Was it with honor, too?
Your southern border view directly contradicts reality. We've been told for a decade+ that there are 11m illegals. Suddenly 7 million more come in. And
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I should be happy that Europe and Asia are even more poorly run than the US? Uh, yay?
"I like pancakes"
"Oh so you hate waffles?"
"No, that's a whole new sentence"
A peace deal with a terrorist stake? Really? Was it with honor, too?
It was a groundbreaking agreement that gave everyone what they want (unless you want hostile relations with Iran), they wound down their nuclear program and allowed inspections, they get some sanctions lifted and the path was paved for improving relations. It's pretty much on the whole a "bad move" to kill that deal, it was clearly done in big part out of spite for Obama. Seriously, what did we gain materially gain from killing it
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Short of another pandemic and Biden regularly making an ass of himself on X at 2AM, I'd say it's a fairly safe bet that he's getting a second term. The incumbent advantage is real.
It's pretty funny how many right-wing folks seem to think Biden's re-election chances are doomed because he hasn't moved mountains during his administration. What they're overlooking is that most of us who voted for him did so solely because he wasn't named Trump. In 2024, he'll still meet that same qualification.
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Meh. Troll score rating: 2/10. You're trying way too hard and come off way too stupidly.
Good trolls are the ones where people can't tell if you're trying to be serious or not.
Re:Good move but who? (Score:4, Insightful)
The incumbent advantage is real.
Ask George H.W. Bush what the incumbent advantage is worth during an economic downturn. If you're President during an economic contraction, or even a perceived bad economy, that incumbent "advantage" is better analogized as an anchor chained to your waist. It doesn't matter if the economic factors are outside your control. It doesn't matter if your predecessor is to blame for them. Biden is swimming upstream right now, with inflation being the biggest anchor around his waist, and inflation is the reason why people perceive the economy to be in the gutter despite this being the best labor market I've seen in my adult life. In virtually every industry right now, you can probably grab yourself a fat pay increase, just job hop or threaten to job hop, employers literally can't fill jobs fast enough right now. Of course, that raise is, best case, going to tread water with inflation, and worst case, you still come out a net loser.
Trump can win, don't kid yourself, all it takes is a few thousand votes in a few key states. If the GOP pulls collective head from ass (or, more likely, if Trump drops dead) and nominates almost anyone else, Biden is toast. I say this as someone who actually likes the guy, Biden wasn't my last choice in 2020, he was my first, I've always liked him, but Nikki Haley will crush him. Tim Scott would crush him. Ron DeSantis would probably crush him (although that dude has less charisma than a slice of burnt toast). Biden likely beats Ramaswamy but that dude isn't serious anyway, he's running to be Trump's VPOTUS, he won't be the nominee even if Trump does drop dead tomorrow. (Please Health Gods, give us this, the dude is morbidly obese and lives off diet coke, fast food, and well done steaks, do us all a favor and end it already....)
If it's not Trump, the sole hope the Democrats have, is that the Republicans disqualify themselves with unpopular opinions on abortion and the rest of the culture war. DeSantis might just do that, but Haley won't fall into the trap, and the culture war cuts both ways. Democratic positions on immigration are broadly unpopular. Without Trump driving left-wing turnout, any move Biden takes to tack to the Center on that or other hot button issue, will cost him votes on the left. He's damned if he does and damned if he doesn't.
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Ask George H.W. Bush what the incumbent advantage is worth during an economic downturn.
Whether his loss truly came down to the economy or Ross Perot being a spoiler (he won 19% of the popular vote and largely appealed to the right-wing portion of the electorate) is still a matter for debate.
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Most exit polls suggest that Perot drew equally from the left and right. He was very nearly a single issue candidate -- NAFTA sucks -- and you may recall that NAFTA was (and remains) extremely unpopular with both the populist left and right. Looking at the map [wikipedia.org], I only see two obvious candidates (CO & MT) for States Clinton would have lost in a two-way race. Remove them from his column and he still has an electoral college landslide. It looks weird today seeing blue in the South but Clinton was a Sou
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Or another example, the Federal Marshalls service used to have something like a 99% conviction rate, com
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No wireline ISP has ever done the actions it proscribes.
No, this is false. Comcast frequently had and I have to assume still does illegally restrict bandwidth of certain encrypted traffic. My own ISP (AT&T) has repeatedly leaked my private data to organized crime. NN is absolutely not "a solution looking for a problem" but I will concede that you're right that any enforcement will have diminishing returns if they don't stop exempting wireless traffic from the law.
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Re: Good move but who? (Score:1)
SCOTUS recently rejected the power of these agencies to take these actions. Democrats donâ(TM)t care about the law though and will just keep doing this and then it gets struck down and then they try again etc etc.
We settled the NN debate a long time ago, the market seems to have handled better without it, no major increases in carrier costs like what we saw under the Obama admin and more small ISPs have sprung up as a result to fill the gaps Comcast and co have in the prosumer space.
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It's presumptuous to assume that the market has "handled better without it". I can't see any improvements. That being said, actual net neutrality never required FCC regulation of ISPs under Title II either. It required a basic understanding of agnostic packet routing and how it contributed to the healthy functioning of the early Internet.
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I've seen many improvements in my area, but it also hasn't gotten much worse. Under the Obama NN rules, small ISPs couldn't survive due to the regulatory overhead and were being gobbled up by larger entities. Small regional ISPs were blocked from operating and in my area the only fiber company stopped rolling out due to cost. The fiber companies have started rolling out again after the regulations were lifted, things are slowly getting better. FCC is still a major blocker for much of the country, but that's
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In fairness the rules making process isn't 'a whim'. It takes months of public comment, internal debate, more public comment, etc., before you can finalize a rule.
I do hear what you're saying though and I'm not sure why people get so excited about this. NN doesn't change anything. What is the FCC going to do about my broadband bill that keeps increasing faster than inflation? What are they going to do about caps? What are they going to do about mandated equipment rental fees?
Jack and Squat are the an
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Pretty sure Verizon engaged in some per-service throttling for their DSL customers. And they aren't the only ones.
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No they didn't. I was a Verizon ADSL customer for many years. What they did, for a while, was stop selling speeds higher than 3.0/768 due to congestion in their ATM [wikipedia.org] cloud. I lived stupidly close (<2000 feet) to the Central Office, I had rock solid 15/1 fast path service for many years. When the ATM Cloud got oversubscribed (right around the time Netflix streaming went mainstream) my service would top out around 5.5Mbps during peak hours.
They never applied any sort of QoS or per-service throttling, i
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T-Mobile, AT&T, and Verizon break NN as a matter of course, they literally charge you more money for streaming video and nobody comments on it, imagine the righteous outage if Cox or Comcast tried that....
Wireless spectrum is a limited resource, so it makes sense that mobile data hogs have to open their wallets wider. It's really not much different than paid express lanes on the highway, where you can choose to spend money to zip past everyone who isn't willing to pay.
Re:Good move but who? (Score:4, Interesting)
Wireless spectrum is a limited resource, so it makes sense that mobile data hogs have to open their wallets wider. It's really not much different than paid express lanes on the highway, where you can choose to spend money to zip past everyone who isn't willing to pay.
Everything you just said is a violation of both the letter and spirit of network neutrality. I won't give you the wall of text on why you're wrong on modern wireless networks. All I'll say is if the rationalization was network management, they would simply block HD video, and not offer the option to remove the restriction via paying more money. Amazing how that spectrum scarcity no longer applies when you give them more money, ain't it? And here I foolishly thought greenbacks couldn't change the laws of physics.....
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The wireless carriers are degrading your network performance so the people who pay more do have the bandwidth available to have a better experience.
It works the same way when you go to a theme park and don't pay for the Lightning Lane/Express Passes. Your wait is extended because the regular line is delayed while people who have paid extra are being sent through the attraction. If the theme parks didn't delay the entry of the folks who didn't pay, those who did pay wouldn't get the superior experience tha
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It works the same way when you go to a theme park and don't pay for the Lightning Lane/Express Passes
As I said, this is a violation of the letter and spirit of network neutrality. NN doesn't prohibit reasonable network management practices. It does prohibit charging more to establish a "fast lane" and that is 100% what the wireless carriers are doing. If this was network management, they'd simply block HD video for everyone, or (more likely) let the deprioritization scheme they all use handle the "data hogs". Neither of those approaches violate NN. This approach, it's not application agnostic network
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If this was network management, they'd simply block HD video for everyone, or (more likely) let the deprioritization scheme they all use handle the "data hogs".
The problem with mobile carriers treating all data as equal and deprioritizing everything is that it will provide a bad end-user experience for people who don't want to shell out for the premium experience. When your entire service is deprioritized, everything runs slow. From the perspective of the carriers, selectively throttling only videos provides the greatest reduction in bandwidth utilization with minimal impact to the user experience. Most people won't even notice the difference on a 6" screen.
the only mystery to me is why you're defending it.
Bec
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You either have a really old/shitty device unable to leverage modern networks or are using the wrong carrier for your city/region. I carry both T-Mobile and Verizon, travel all over CONUS for work, and it's rare for me to pull speeds less than triple digits. I can certainly FIND bad spots for both. Neither is likely to deliver kickass speeds in a basement with one bar of low band LTE at -108dBm RSSI, but in the aggregate, both are handling the load just fine.
Regardless, you are not going to convince me
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There is nothing wrong or illegal about charging more money for streaming video. That's a TYPE of service that consumes more bandwidth. NN just ensures that the upcharge is the same regardless of the source.
That is charging more for AMAZON streaming video, but not for COMCAST streaming video is where the neutrality breaks down.
For a real-world example, it is like Comcast throttling third-party VoIP but not COMCAST VoIP. Throttling to the point of breaking their competitor's service.
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I agree. That is the very essence of Net Neutrality.
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The law was made by Congress. The law is broad and has different sections based on the type of communication business. Specific decisions are supposed to be made by the experts employed by the Executive Branch Agency created for this purpose.
This decision is made by President appointed, Senate approved agency heads as to which section of the law applies to the specific business model. It is done after consultation with the public, industry, and research done by the expert staff -- technical and legal -- at the Agency (FCC).
Pepperidge Farms needs to cut back on snorting whatever fumes come from their industrial factories and maybe their brain cells could function better.
Sounds nice in theory, but when "stuff is bad" who does the public blame? Congress who wrote the law or the Executive branch that implemented it? Or worse, Congress that didn't write the law because they couldn't agree with the Executive branch on what the law should contain.
Democracy has two requirements, the ability to change governments, and the ability to hold governments accountable. The US system is decent at the first (bit more worrying after Jan 6th 2020) but terrible at the second.
You don't need a
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Sounds nice in theory, but when "stuff is bad" who does the public blame?
The other side, invariably. For example the current complaint that the Executive is spending money in ways Congress didn't want. Congress should have more power to be specific on how much and for what. Yeah...those are called "earmarks". We did that and people complained.
Congress does not need the Executive's input on what a law should contain. Congress does that all on their own. Laws are left with a little wiggle room because things change over time and flexibility is needed. They also frequently realize
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Sounds nice in theory, but when "stuff is bad" who does the public blame?
The other side, invariably. For example the current complaint that the Executive is spending money in ways Congress didn't want. Congress should have more power to be specific on how much and for what. Yeah...those are called "earmarks". We did that and people complained.
Congress does not need the Executive's input on what a law should contain. Congress does that all on their own. Laws are left with a little wiggle room because things change over time and flexibility is needed. They also frequently realize that they're not experts in everything and an Agency needs created to hire experts because the devil is in the details.
People complained about "earmarks" because it had a catchy name and sounded kinda like corrupt legislators diverting money to their districts.
When it comes to a law not working well, is it the fault of the party controlling congress for passing a badly written law, or of the opposite party executive for how they implemented it? As you said, the implementation takes expertise so it's not really possible for the voter to tell who's to blame.
That's why when they the US wrote a constitution for Iraq the Preside
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Your premise is wrong, "net neutraliy" is not at all important, and it matters not one whit that it first got passed, then repealed, nothing consequential changed either way.
Re: Good move but who? (Score:5, Informative)
Yes, it did. When NN was in trouble the public stood up and made their views known. We came damned close to all the broadband providers rationing data and upselling "warp speed" lanes to useful sites. They still want to do that and we don't have enough competition to avoid an effective internet cartel.
Information Service (Score:3)
Broadband internet is an information service? Pfft. Every knows it's cable TV when it comes to taxes, and a telephone service when it comes to network neutrality.
Telecommunications or Information service (Score:1)
NN can only regulation telecommunications, not information services. Therefore, 5 unelected people keep flipping the designation of the internet between the two terms. However, the law actually defines an information service and a telecommunications service. It is clear that the internet is an information services that happens to be delivered over a telecommunications system (be it cables, telephone lines, satellites, or fiber). NN should not be applied to the internet by a regulatory agency without an
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So far the precedent is the FCC does have the authority to decide but this is getting litigated in a court case coming up
Net neutrality’s court fate depends on whether broadband is “telecommunications” [arstechnica.com]
Re:Telecommunications or Information service (Score:4, Insightful)
Back when consumers started getting on the Internet in the 1990s, we had dial-up. We used the local telephone company system (telecommunications service) to connect to our own ISPs (information service). The separation was clear.
With the way broadband services are typically delivered, the separation is now only sometimes clear. In many cases, the same company provides both the telecommunications service and the information service, and no distinction is made. But those companies tend to be exactly the ones doing all the shady stuff that needs to be regulated.
FCC is wrong agency. NN should be handled by FTC (Score:5, Interesting)
(I've posted this in more detail before.)
Essentially all the real problems the Network Neutrality proposals try to address are misuses of technical capabilities (which were designed to enable improved network performance) to implement anticompetitive or consumer fraud schemes.
The FCC is good on technical issues, but is generally rotten on consumer protection. This is not a technical issue, and technical tweaks to address it also tend to re-break the network issues it was built to fix. Expect trouble if you try to fix this stuff via FCC regulation.
The FTC is a consumer protection agency with a track record of taking on large companies (including technical ones - AT&T, IBM, Microsoft, ...) often imposing serious beatings that mitigate or solve the problems or at least mitigate them for years or decades. IMHO they are the agency that could handle the job.
They'd also like to handle it. But right now there are two issues: They read the law as blocking them from ruling on the Internet, and they are currently underfunded and understaffed for the task.
IMHO the FTC seems the right agency to handle the job, while the FCC seems like to break it worse rather than fix it once they're turned loose on it. It would just require a legislative tweak to make it clear they have a go-ahead, and perhaps a bit of appropriation to staff them up.
Much as I hate to encourage government interference of any sort, if you intend to pass and enforce laws to turn the dogs of law enforcement loose on miscreants, you should turn loose the breed of dog that has a track record doing the right thing.
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Essentially all the real problems the Network Neutrality proposals try to address are misuses of technical capabilities (which were designed to enable improved network performance) to implement anticompetitive or consumer fraud schemes.
With the irony being that the established players already have enough other anticompetitive tools in their toolbox that they haven't needed to resort to throttling competing services.