FCC May Tweak Broadband Plan 52
adeelarshad82 writes "Despite a recent ruling that said the FCC did not have the right to interfere in Comcast's network management issues, the agency is pushing ahead with its national broadband plan, though there might be some tweaks. Since the case was won on the fact that the FCC based its decision on its Internet Policy Principles, a set of guidelines the agency developed internally several years ago regarding broadband Internet service and not actual rules that went through a formal, open rulemaking process, they are invalid, as is the enforcement action. FCC general counsel Austin Schlick acknowledged that the court's decision may affect a significant number of important plan recommendations. The commission is assessing the implications of the decision for each recommendation to ensure that it has adequate authority to execute the mission laid out in the plan."
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>>>the US won't remain *first* in the technology race.
We're actually 2nd right now, behind the Russian Federation (~10 Mbit/s) but ahead of the EU (~7 Mbit/s), Brazil, Australia, Canada, China (~2 Mbit/s), and other continent-sized federations.
And if you look at individual states, Delaware is #1 at almost 20 Mbit/s (average) with other northeastern states taking 2nd, 3rd, 4th places. Washington State also offers high average internet speed.
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... behind the Russian Federation (~10 Mbit/s)...
Russia does not end beyond MKAD, you know? And I highly doubt that they have average 10mbps inside MKAD either. Maybe only in media, which is beholden by Putin by the balls.
Re:Sad to see that (Score:4, Insightful)
There are many nuances to these kind of metrics that can be exploited to make things look one way or another. For example, measuring "availability" without regard to cost, which is almost meaningless.
The number that matters is adoption - for each country, a histogram of what percentage of the population has each speed of connection. Adoption is what matters because that determines the actual impact of the infrastructure.
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OK, I found the page [speedtest.net] you may be referring to, but what does that ranking actually mean? You said "we" are second, but that's a list of continents (North America is 2nd of 6 continents - sorry Antarctica).
But if you then click "top countries ranked by speed," the US is 29th.
Even so, what do those numbers mean? Is it just the average speed test result for people from that country? That
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We're actually 2nd right now, behind the Russian Federation (~10 Mbit/s) but ahead of the EU (~7 Mbit/s), Brazil, Australia, Canada, China (~2 Mbit/s), and other continent-sized federations.
EU Politician: "Our Internet runs at ~7 Mbit/s
Russian Politician: "Ha! Our Internet runs at ~10 Mbit/s!"
EU Politician: "Nonsense! Nobody can watch pornography that fast!"
US Politician: "Speed doesn't matter! The girth of your tubes is important!"
So broadband Internet infrastructure is now the key to world domination?
Things were simpler when countries only had to worry about Mine Shaft Gaps.
"We have the best internet infrastructure in the world! It's just too bad that most of our citizens are so und
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Yeah, its a shame that our federal government decided that keeping our national currency, which materially affects international currency, might be slightly more important than getting our national internet structure slightly faster yet in no way more useful than Russia.
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Yes, this outcome is vastly preferable to collapse of an economic system.
Nice try though.
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Incorrect.
Inflation is slated for 3-6% annually, not 17%. This is only slightly elevated from historical trends. Not a big deal. Furthermore, Ford, Apple, and Microsoft are not banks, financial institutions, etc. They are not in competition with these types of organizations, and in fact, rely upon their existence for their own profitability. The failure of large financial groups means that ford, apple, and microsoft also take huge hits. Are you really of the belief that if AIG fails, I'm gonna buy a second
nope (Score:1, Informative)
Wrong. Your cult member response is just slap wrong.
That system needed to crash and burn, the sooner the better so we can rebuild around fairer ways and sounder economic policies. That three headed ultimate conjob scam bankster gangster criminal cartel of the Fed, Wall Street casino bank parasites and so called government regulators-who come from the first two, then go back to them at big bucks after their alleged government "service"- *needed* to collapse. The sooner the better. Pure scam ri
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Cult member?
You are the cult member. Responding with tons of quotes, run on half thoughts, and meaningless rhetoric.
We don't have a real free market (hence why we have an economic system), therefore you need to invest under the market rules and enforcement that in fact exists. No sense in forum spamming worthless crap when it won't change a damn thing.
By the way, there are no moral issues to my response, so you should have said that I was incorrect (which I was not), rather than wrong.
voodoo junk economic science (Score:1, Insightful)
Crap. And you are a cult member because you "believed" in their fairy tale threats and extortion and other lies, just like a good cult member "believes" in whatever his or her cult leaders tell them to believe. This is the sort of system we have
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/32906678/looting_main_street/ [rollingstone.com]
THAT is what would have crashed, and it deserves it. The other system, the one where people are honest and just go to work and make useful things and similar, would have been just fine i
Well if 200 billion didn't work.... (Score:2)
Too bad the Feds decided putting hundreds of billions of dollars into Wall Street was a bigger priority.
That's a funny point. While we're all aware that $200 Billion won't even get 768k to every home in the country, [pbs.org] just how many mega(giga?)bits do you think it could have gotten us?
I've seen "estimates" for Gbps FTTH setups and do understand that it would cost a lot of dough, but one really does wonder.
I'm quite certain that anything that's overall cheaper than a complete backbone through last-mile overhaul, though orders of magnitude more expensive per bit/second gained in capacity, will be the repeated s
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>>>$200 Billion won't even get 768k to every home in the country, [pbs.org]
This article is repeated again-and-again by Slashdotters, but it has no citations. Without citations which I can double-check and verify his numbers/claims, it has even less value than a college student's paper.
As for cost, we could have dug-up a couple million miles in the 1980s and wired the country for 10 Megabit/s fiber at a cost of 1-2 trillion dollars, but we would have simply wasted a lot of money (because 10 Mbit/s
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It didn't require trillions of dollars then, and it doesn't require trillions of dollars now.
The last mile is apparently cheap and can be laid down accidentally/coincidentally.
Add an amendment to the constitution... (Score:4, Interesting)
...granting power to Congress to regulate commerce INSIDE the states. That appears to be the only way they (and the FCC) can regulate a company like Comcast of Baltimore, or Comcast of Oklahoma, or other wholly intrastate companies.
Otherwise without that amendment, the regulation responsibility falls to the Maryland Government's Public Utility Commission, Oklahoma's PUC, et cetera...... the same way electricity and natural gas companies are regulated.
IHMO.
Please don't mod me down if you disagree.
Re:Add an amendment to the constitution... (Score:5, Insightful)
That would be against the very foundation of our country and the concept of state sovereignty, and would have far reaching consequences as it would instantly give the federal government direct control over *every* aspect of your life.
Might as well shut down all state government if that should happen.
In practice... (Score:2)
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So you want an agree/disagree button regarding moderation score? That just seems unecessary, considering that we already have meta-moderation...
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And arguably everyone not just those with mod points should be able to contribute to this one metric.
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then the pragmatic thing to do is ignore it and browse at -1.
Once you realize you don't agree with moderation system, why not go all the way and simple "hide moderation scores" while browsing at -1? That allows you to make up your own mind for each comment without any consideration of what others think.
I been reading /. this way for a few months now and I highly recommend it, even compared to browsing at -1 and leaving scores on. I find it hard to think so many browse at the default of 2 or whatever... just a bunch of disjointed comments and replies to words you ca
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>>>Booth *WAS* a patriot but just not a patriot of the united states. But a country that did not exist anymore.
Bzzz. Booth was a patriot of neither country (north or south), but of the U.S. Constitution, which specifically guaranteed the right of habeus corpus and free speech and trial by jury, all of which Lincoln abolished during his term. Lincoln was like an 1860s incarnation of George Dubya Bush.
IF (key word) you consider Bush to be an evil president, then you should consider Lincoln evil as
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That would be against the very foundation of our country and the concept of state sovereignty, and would have far reaching consequences as it would instantly give the federal government direct control over *every* aspect of your life.
Sorry, we've already lost that battle in the War on (Some) Drugs. If what you plant in your backyard is a matter of interstate commerce, so is what Comcast plants in your backyard.
Re: (Score:2, Informative)
Well, your point might have some merit if the FCC's enforcement action against Comcast had been overturned because it wasn't Constitutional.
But that simply is not the case. The FCC was smacked down based on administrative law, not Constitutional law.
Please try to understand the actual issues involved before you advocate for extreme positions.
KTHXBYE
Re:Add an amendment to the constitution... (Score:4, Informative)
We already have an amendment about this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tenth_Amendment_to_the_United_States_Constitution [wikipedia.org]
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The 9th and 10th Amendment has been nullified by the 9 old, unelected farts on the U.S. Government's court.
Re:Add an amendment to the constitution... (Score:5, Informative)
Add an amendment to the constitution granting power to Congress to regulate commerce INSIDE the states. That appears to be the only way they (and the FCC) can regulate a company like Comcast of Baltimore, or Comcast of Oklahoma, or other wholly intrastate companies.
The FCC can regulate intrastate companies, especially when they're subsidiaries of an interstate company. To be more accurate, the FCC could regulate those intrastate companies if Congress empowered it to. The fact of the matter is that Congress chose not to preempt state public utility commissions. The interstate commerce clause has been interpreted so expansively that there is very little economic regulation that Congress can't enact or delegate to an agency (the only examples that come to mind are gun restrictions in/around schools (US v. Lopez) and enabling women to seek civil remedies under the violence against women act (US v. Morrison)
Anyway, the FCC's net neutrality order against Comcast wasn't slapped down by the DC Circuit because it lacked constitutional authority. It was because the FCC's action wasn't reasonably ancillary to a specific grant of jurisdiction. In other words, the FCC can't enforce net neutrality unless it can better explain which of its specific powers authorized by Congress net neutrality would fall under. Let me reiterate - the problem isn't that the FCC lacks the power to enforce net neutrality, the problem is that the FCC hasn't given a sufficient, consistent explanation of why it can enforce net neutrality.
The easiest way for the FCC to respond to the DC Circuit's ruling, assuming it still wants to enforce net neutrality, is issue a new rule that finds internet access service to be regulated under Title II of the Telecom Act. That would enable the FCC to regulate ISPs as common carriers.
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thanks for that explanation. i was one of the folks who was under the impression that FCC had no jurisdiction.
now, since it seems they do have jurisdiction, assume that FCC wants to maintain net neutrality, it seems like the death knell that many headlines were announcing earlier is not the case. since FCC has jurisdiction, if they establish the policy correctly, net neutrality could be alive and well, correct?
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This is somewhat simplified, but:
The FCC doesn't currently have jurisdiction over internet access service, because of the way it interpreted certain definitions [slashdot.org] in the telecommunications act. A pretty good argument could be made that it interpreted those definitions in a certain way in order to prevent "open access" requirements on cable ISPs (i.e., requiring cable providers to allow third party ISPs to use their cable infrastructure). But, now the FCC wants to enforce net neutrality, and those interpreta
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... The interstate commerce clause has been interpreted so expansively that there is very little economic regulation that Congress can't enact or delegate to an agency (the only examples that come to mind are gun restrictions in/around schools (US v. Lopez) and enabling women to seek civil remedies under the violence against women act (US v. Morrison)
Indeed. In Gonzales v. Raich (previously Ashcroft v. Raich), 545 U.S. 1 (2005), it was held that the Federal government had the right to ban growing medical marijuana by the patient herself, with no money or cannabis changing hands, because it involved interstate commerce. How you say? Well, the decision NOT to buy or sell marijuana affects the interstate trade in said product, according to the court!
It seems with interstate trade anything goes today, unless it is some specific policy that the right wing o
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Not a chance in hell.
The best one could hope for from the FCC is for them to provide the same expert guidance they used to prevent payola, make sure that ClearChannel didn't homogenize and monopolize radio, and champion the causes of localism and diversity.
Fortunately, unlike electricity and natural gas, radio isn't that important to our survival. It's been replaced by the Internet, over which the FCC has no authority yet. Even if they ever
formal, open rulemaking process (Score:5, Interesting)
So the true ruling is that the FCC really DOES have this authority, they just have to put the rules in black and white before they run off enforcing them. Nothing new here, just that they didn't follow procedures ( DOH ! ). And you can bet when they do, Comcast will regret calling them out on it. ( of cousre even if they do go down, their board already made their millions )
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So the true ruling is that the FCC really DOES have this authority
The Court didn't say that. The FCC may or may not have that authority. The presence or lack of that authority was simply not used by the Court to make this decision. If the FCC follows the proper rule making procedures, it would still be possible for a future court to rule that the FCC does not have that authority.
Even if the Court did say that, it would be nonbinding dicta, meaning that a future court could simply ignore it.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
If the FCC follows the proper rule making procedures, it would still be possible for a future court to rule that the FCC does not have that authority.
Under NCTA v. Brand X [google.com] and the Chevron Doctrine [wikipedia.org] courts have very little power to overrule agency interpretations of vague statutes. Under Brand X itself, the Supreme Court found that the telecom act was vague on whether internet access service was or was not a "telecommunications service" (versus a "information service"), and therefore, the FCC's interpretation was valid unless it was not a reasonable policy choice. It seems pretty clear that if the FCC changed its mind, and enacted a new policy that fou
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"And you can bet when they do, Comcast will regret calling them out on it."
I hope they get hammered. Just look at how they treat customers in their home state, in between where they're headquartered and the state's capital.
I'm in Pennsylvania, which is home to Comcast corporate. The state legislature pretty much kisses Comcast's derriere and passes whatever the company wants into law, as seen with the cable box law they passed several years ago. Assembly hearings on trying to break the monopoly on PCN in
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So the true ruling is that the FCC really DOES have this authority, they just have to put the rules in black and white before they run off enforcing them. Nothing new here, just that they didn't follow procedures ( DOH ! ).
Correct, it is only the DEA it seems that can ignore its own rules, administrative law rulings, and science and set regulations that contradict all of these at once.
The scheduling of marijuana as Schedule I when pure THC is Schedule III directly violates its rules on scheduling, and was actually ruled in violation by an administrative law judge. The DEA simply ignored the ruling. Laws don't apply to the lawmen apparently.
About Law, not "right" (Score:2)
The FCC lost the case because the Court said they lacked "statutory authority" only. It had nothing to do with "rights" as was alluded to in the article summary.
That means Congress can pass a law giving the FCC that statutory authority; the FCC's statement about looking at various aspects of their "Broadband Plan" to discern where they have "authority" and where they do not, is a bit on the disingenuous side, no? It's as if they're saying, "We'd like an open/fair internet access situation, but we just can't