Free Press Sues FCC Over Discrepancy In Net Neutrality Rules 71
hypnosec writes "The Free Press has filed a lawsuit against the Federal Communications Commission, challenging the net neutrality rules laid out by the regulator. The lawsuit (PDF), which was filed in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit in Boston, claims the rules are different for fixed line and mobile wireless broadband. According to the rules, mobile wireless carriers are not allowed to block voice and other applications that compete with their own services, but other than that, they are free do to what they want."
Not a problem (Score:3)
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Or just lower the QoS... routing data over satellite links instead of terrestrial ones, inserting lag or 'losing' packets.
There are many ways to make a service unusable without blocking it.
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If you sell a tiered service, as cell network operators do, it's important to make sure your lower-cost tiers suck. If you provide those customers with too good a service, you'll remove the incentive to upgrade so something more expensive.
FCC recognizes that made unusable = blocked (Score:2)
Making the service unusable is blocking it, according to the Report & Order, at para. 66:
Re:Not a problem (Score:5, Interesting)
No, instead, they raise rates for everything else and discount their own. That's the "fair" way to do it.
It reminds me of something a particular apartment management company has been doing ( these bastards [apartmentratings.com] ). The law says they cannot charge ridiculous late fees to people and has limited what they can charge for various things. But, the law did not prevent them from offering huge discounts for paying rent "on time" and so that's what they did. But now it's worse than it was before! How? Well, first is the very large effective late fee (which is the loss of $100+ discount + the normal late fee) but then here's the fun part -- these 'discounts' accumulate and they can be made to blow up on you like a giant usurious bomb! So, let's say you need to move because your job is relocating you. Well, you can usually give the customary 30 days notice, but they don't subscribe to that policy... they are more like 60 to 90 day notice is required! And then they want to charge you lease breaking fees which is equal to the remainder of the lease + all discounts previously applied or something like that.
Apartment dwellers almost never have enough money to get legal representation and people without money don't have the ear of the government either. So these abuses will continue until something reaches a breaking point.
Seems I went off topic? Well kinda -- the practice of "raising prices + applying discounts" would likely be the approach the wireless carriers would take... you know, just like "friends and family" plans they use to get entire groups of people to move to their service who then become reluctant to change to other services because all of their friends and family are on the one service.
Gotta love the clever ways they use and abuse their customers...
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The point is that there are laws in place to limit them from taking advantage of people in a bad or difficult situation. They are skirting the law by offering large discounts for on-time payment.
FWIW, I never paid late. Not once. However, I did get relocated for work. And they did try to take advantage in the way I described. Once I got the company attorney involved, I hadn't heard back from them though...
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There is a such thing as too much, and there is a law that defines what too much is. These bastards re-structured things to skirt that law on technicality.
You have apparently never heard the word "reasonable"
You are also apparently unaware that sometimes "guano occurs"
Please tell us your real name so we can make sure never to do any sort of business with you.
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Making the usual price include "discounts" and then charging back those discounts on early termination is a bastardy thing to do. However...
A lease is a lease. If you terminate early having to pay out the remainder of the term is pretty standard. So if there' this "giant usurious bomb" you just keep the lease and pay it each month while not living there, no bomb goes off.
Surely the real estate agent you got to read it pointed out this ridiculous term and advised you not to sign it?
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If you got into college you should be able to read the thing yourself. If you are dumb enouh to sign the terms mentioned above then you can't afford not to pay one (or choose an area where the landlord pays it)...
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Different states, different rules and laws.
I never suffered much from this place but I know there are plenty who have. *I* have learned long ago to pay attention to those details. The new rules were put into place while I was still there. I left not long after.
I hope people read the reviews and comments I linked to above. Those people need to be brought to justice and held to account. The $300/mo electric bill there was pretty common and without good reason. The apartment management always pretends to
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Yep....in New Orleans...really bad.
For one thing, if you rent here...you pretty much count on never seeing a penny of your deposit back. Even if you clean, do everything well...or even if your landlord sell the place out from under you, it is gone.
That's the first thing. Tenants really have virtually no rights....the one exception is that of eviction. It basically takes a landlord 3-6 months to get your fully out of the place once proceedings start. So, you have
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For one thing, if you rent here...you pretty much count on never seeing a penny of your deposit back.
Back when I was a renter I always assumed I wouldn't get my deposit back, so when it came to moving I was finished as soon as the stuff I wanted was in the new place. I didn't clean anything. Didn't even throw away the stuff that I didn't want to move. If you're taking my deposit you can work for it.
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Just because they are using a sneaky way to get around a law or regulation doesn't mean that you can't hire an attorney to file a petition to bring it to a court's attention. A judge may decide that what they are doing is logically equivalent to disobeying the law and render a judgment against them anyway. It comes down to having the money for the legal representation.
You may be able to get an attorney to take your case with a low retainer if they feel strongly that you would win the case and be awarded s
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Or I could just leave... which I did.
That said, I did try to take action and I did speak to an attorney and got similar advice -- get a petition together. LOTS of people refused to sign the petition and some later requested to be removed from it. There were and are a lot of people living there that shouldn't be for "various reasons." I relocated for my job before I could see justice through.
As for the high lease-breaking fee? Well, that matter hasn't really been addressed by me... last I heard, a letter
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Wireless is a competitive market so carriers are permitted to do what they want with the presumption that if the customer doesn't like it they'll go to another vendor.
Wired broadband typically suffers from a monopoly or duopoly. There typically isn't a lot of choice available to the consumer, so there are strong restrictions on what the vendor is permitted to do.
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You don't have to, if you're buying the phone, it's just that some carriers like AT&T don't offer any discount if you don't accept their subsidy.
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Re:Not a problem (Score:5, Insightful)
Wireless is a competitive market so carriers are permitted to do what they want with the presumption that if the customer doesn't like it they'll go to another vendor.
Yep, locked phones, multi-year contracts with punitive termination fees, incompatible networks, rampant collusion in pricing and services. Real vicious competition there.
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Yep, locked phones, multi-year contracts with punitive termination fees, incompatible networks, rampant collusion in pricing and services. Real vicious competition there.
I don't know in the US, but here in France they also have a very well shared list of 'bad customers'. Say you refuse to pay a 4000$ bill because you forgot to turn off data roaming when you were on vacation in some other country. Then no other carrier will sell you another contract. How do you spell 'collusion' in french ?
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Immature, not competitive (Score:3)
This is false in three ways:
First, the Open Internet Report and Order distinguishes between fixed and mobile broadband, not wireless and wireline; fixed includes many wireless services.
Second, mobile broadband providers are not "permitted to do what they want", there are several restrictions placed on them (there is a transparency rule, and an
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no no no.
THEY DO IT LIKE THIS!!: they sell you a data package with some ridiculous limit.
THEN, they introduce their own garden apps which bypass that limit(use different ap settings, or route just real 'voice' to voip or whatever like that).
this is actually the old "good" way how they have been behaving since forever, it's the normal playbook for them since wap days.
no need to throttle competing services as you'll be billed to moon for going over the data limit by using them. this is how operators saw th
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This appears to be allowed, although the transparency rule requires them to disclose exactly what they are doing in this regard and why.
No wonder (Score:2)
Good (Score:3)
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Hate to point this out, but the FCC is a *government* entity. Ergo, they are in someone's pocket. Our entire government is a wholly owned subsidiaries of the corporations doing business in the US. It's no longer 'Of the people, by the people, for the people'. It is 'Of the corporations, by the corporations, fuck the people'.
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Yup, the entire reason we revolted from England in the first place was that a small collection of rich merchants didn't like the way England taxed trade and favored English merchants over those in the colonies.
Those same rich guys formed the continental congress and later one them invented the corporation via the first trust.
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The ENTIRE reason? I seem to remember there was a tyrannical king involved, one who refused to assent to laws "most wholesome and necessary to public good;" one who purposely "called together legislative bodies at places unusual, uncomfortable, and distant." One who arbitrarily dissolved Representative Houses because he didn't like their results, and refused to allow others to be elected. And other affronts, such as restraint of trade, and withholding the right to trial by a jury of peers.
You go on about
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Which pretty much made up the "founding fathers". Who, naturally, restricted the club to themselves and their peers - only land owners (of the right gender, age, color and creed, of course) had the right to vote, and who could be elected was even more restricted. All to keep power where it belonged with the Good Ol' Boys.
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Or maybe those with the most to lose if govt. should grow to big and cumbersome. Rather than just become a massive bureaucracy whose sole purpose is to direct transfer payments.
PUtting the brakes on business (Score:2)
Business is built (and grows) from innovation on top of infrastructure.
This is the infrastructure part - by allowing companies to ration the resources and block new business models as they see fit, it allows them to put the brakes on growth.
This then reserves the "growth" for the carrier if, at some future time, they should decide to add new business models.
For a concrete example: by making the barrier to entry for streaming video very high it becomes impossible to start a streaming video company. The carri
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They didn't.
First, the rules don't distinguish between wireline and wireless, they distinguish between fixed and mobile, which isn't the same thing. (See, e.g., 47 CFR Sec. 8.11(b), as added by the Report and Order, "Fixed broadband Internet access service. A broadband Internet access service that serves end users
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Insofar as IRC is neither a website nor a competing voice or video application, Verizon (when acting as a mobile broadband provider; they also provide fixed services) could block it, though under the transparency rules they would have to disclose details about how and what they were blocking that would take much of the guesswork out of dealing with the blocking.
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One of the problems in avoiding the blocking that has been practiced by both fixed and mobile internet providers in the past is that neither has announced what they were blocking, making it unnecessarily difficult for consumers to make purchasing decisions informed by accurate facts. So, I'm going to say lots of people probably care about being able to get accurate information on the services actually provided.
Further, requiring accurate reports of what is being block
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I think the bit about telephony should say "nor shall such person block applications that compete with the provider's voice or video telephony services or with the provider's text and multimedia messaging services, subject to reasonable network management."
That is, providers are not allowed to block things that compete with SMS and MMS in the same way they are not allowed to block things like Skype or FaceTime or other voice and video call applications.
The FCC is all political (Score:2)
Tethering (Score:1)
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Just a guess, but the Free Press lacks standing. Therefore, the lawsuit will be dismissed.
I would imagine it's quite easy to have standing in this case. Just have a fixed line broadband for your home and a wireless internet for your phone. If the carriers start disconnecting litigants to prevent you from having standing, they'd be stepping into some deep shit.
The suit could be dismissed for other legally valid reasons (especially for not contributing sufficiently to the right election campaigns).
I've heard this arguement before... (Score:1)
The line based ISPs lost their battle, their bandwidth is cheaper than dirt. Wireless carriers have to build and use expensive towers so their per GB rate is much much higher.
The thing they are trying to avoid is terminating user contracts because they went over their cap limit. I remember when wireless carrier internet was first starting, Verizon termed mine for torrenting down a few linux distros in a day. A year later I got a check for $50 from a class action lawsuit paying for my termed broadband car
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It's made sense to the court system so, you are vastly underestimating what wads of $ and legal can do for a company. It's definitely unethical, if they have a problem w your account, they should term it after showing you violated TOS, not throttle it to the point where u can't use it, BUT are still paying for it, make sense?
However, terming accounts doesn't make them any $, while the customer getting throttle is still paying AND getting shitty service for their alleged abuse.
Torrent traffic doesn't have a
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The whole solution is for everyone (wired and wireless) to forget about trying to detect if its torrent traffic or otherwise and just charge by the megabyte or gigabyte. For congested wireless cells, you just rate limit the total amount of data any one customer can transfer over the given cell
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ALL wireless carriers are capped now, I don't think anybody in the states offers unlimited cell phone data as of very recently.
For land based ISPs in the states its a little different, they would lose money. They currently charge like $50 (median like average from mine and friends experience), most people don't use $50 worth of bandwidth, maybe the torrenters do, but they are not the majority of an ISP's users.
Also the RIAA would not appreciate not being able to detect torrent traffic, and they have lobby
There is a difference between wired and wireless (Score:1)
Wired spectrum from the local service provider to the customer is limited only by money and the time, effort, and politics of laying new wires. Barring local political obstacles or the rare geographical obstacles, companies are free to invest and lay more fiber to their customers.
Wireless is another matter. Even if additional spectrum were auctioned off and radio towers built every other block, there is a practical limit to wireless bandwidth. There's also the issue that there's not a lot of spectrum to
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That argument would have merit if they weren't selling 5-Laptop hotspots.
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Presumably they're only selling what they believe their infrastructure can support. If the data bandwidth required were two or three times their capacity model and they didn't have funding or spectrum to increase capacity, not only are they screwed, but so are all their customers.
We can't have it both ways. Either a few pay for tethering and large data usage, or we all pay for tethering and large data usage whether we need/want it or not. What everyone seems to want is all you can eat data with unlimited te
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If only there was some way to keep the hoards from screwing it up for the rest of us.
Like a per-arranged set of rules that the majority of us found to be fair enough.
REGULATIONS
Wired and wireless ARE fundamentally different. But the fact that wireless has a limited resource isn't a good argument to make EXCEPTIONS to the regulations.
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Anybody remember all the hype about 5 years ago when we heard how much cheaper it is to deploy wireless bandwidth and how much cheaper it was to maintain?
Can someone remind me then how much cheaper mobile networking is compared to cable or DSL?
Summary reverses facts and claims (Score:2)
That's not a controversial claim, its a fact which is explicitly noted with a justification presented in the Report and Order.
(Report & Order, para. 8: "Mobile broadband is at an earlier stage in its development than fixed broadband and is evolving rapidly. For that and other reasons discussed below, we conclude that it is appropria
some caveats though (Score:2)
For instance, there's nothing keeping them from saying "streaming video via our paid app doesn't count towards your tiny data caps". This is in fact reasonable for them since it means that they don't need to increase their upstream connections.
It kind of sucks for the end user though since if everyone in a given area does it the effect is chilling.
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Given the rule in paragraph 66 of the Report and Order which equates rendering content unusable with blocking it, establishing very low caps in general or specific to competing voice or video service which acted to render competing voice and video services unusable in