FCC Chairman: Net Rules Will Withstand Court Challenge 84
An anonymous reader writes with this story about FCC chairman Tom Wheeler's confidence that the net neutrality rules the agency passed last month will stand up to upcoming challenges in court."Now that the FCC is the subject of several lawsuits, and its leader, Chairman Tom Wheeler, was dragged in front of Congress repeatedly to answer the same battery of inanity, it's worth checking in to see how the agency is feeling. Is it confident that its recent vote to reclassify broadband under Title II of the Telecommunications Act will hold? Yes, unsurprisingly. Recently, Wheeler gave a speech at Ohio State University, laying out his larger philosophy regarding the open Internet. His second to last paragraph is worth reading: "One final prediction: the FCC's new rules will be upheld by the courts. The DC Circuit sent the previous Open Internet Order back to us and basically said, 'You're trying to impose common carrier-like regulation without stepping up and saying, "these are common carriers.'" We have addressed that issue, which is the underlying issue in all of the debates we've had so far. That gives me great confidence going forward that we will prevail.""
Optimist (Score:2, Interesting)
Is Optimistic. It is his position to state as such, Statists always do, then are often smacked down in court due to interest of business, aren't they learning anythjng from the TPP? The governmentnis in bed with business, its all a show of smoke and mirrors used to confuse and misdirect the citizens on whos turn is it to put us over a barrel, either the government or big business or is it time for being dp'd by both. To think otherwise is exactly what they want.
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This has been going on 40 years, there's no reason to think common sense broke out now just because we wanted it to. Hopefully the same people who flooded the FCC site months ago are going to be ready to keep doing this until we can get some concession sufficient enough to weaken the monopolies.
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You lost me at "Statists"
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You lost me at "You lost me at 'Statists.'"
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Can we get over the penis envy of who's packet has priority? If you are a politician it is obvious the mob packets will always beat yours if this comes to fruition. -dorks.
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What's a "statist"? The definition I have (someone who believes the state is more important to the individual) does not seem to apply here, as the FCC is clearly siding with the individual here, and optimism has nothing pro or con with statism.
Re:Optimist (Score:5, Insightful)
"statist" is an insult used by the kind of people who who call obama a muslim socialist
it's an inaccurate, hysterical, and unintelligent smear
Re:Optimist (Score:5, Insightful)
As far as they're concerned Obama is a brown-skinned foreign socialist who gives away free healthcare.
I think they got him confused with Jesus...
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Don't be silly, Jesus was this white dude from America who voted for Goldwater.
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No, no, wrong Jesus. I was talking about Ron Reagan, he is the son of god right?
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I'm pretty sure Jesus is the Mexican dude that mows my lawn.
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no that's hay-zeus
jee-zuz is the proper pronunciation of the anglosaxon founder of christianity
us civilized folk need to teach his compassion to dirty brown people like mexicans and middle easterners
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it's an inaccurate, hysterical, and unintelligent smear
Why? It seems that Obama has sought to expand the power of the state, although to be fair so did Bush. The only question is who is the bigger statist and while Obama has expanded government power less than Bush did, he did none the less still expand it beyond the levels of Bush.
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"statist" is an insult used by the kind of people who who call obama a muslim socialist
Quite right, he's a Baptist Corporatist, they need to get their facts straight.
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That being said, Tom Wheeler's actions to reclassify cable as Title II was not seen coming. Most from the executive level feel it as a bit of betrayal and honestly this decision won't help th
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Statists
Stopped taking you seriously right there.
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That stuff gets published weekly, so they have to chose whether to hoax too early, or too late.
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News like that just feels like an April fools joke to me and I would assume it would to others. I mean, the systemd developers don't operate like that at all. That people would think it to be true at all shows how strange of a perception there is around the systemd project (take that as you want, one way or another people think the systemd devs would be crazy enough to do a full out fork of the
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To be fair, most of systemd has sounded like an April Fools joke to me. For that matter, most of freedesktop has read that way lately.
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I'm sure it is a hoax. If it were done by the official systemd team, it would have been deployed to all distros by now, overnight.
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Apparently DistroWatch's source is "Ivan Gotyavich", a developer on the systemd project. A Google search for his name returns no other results, and it's suspiciously a corruption of "I got you", as one would exclaim after successfully perpetrating a hoax.
The AC commenting on every story trying to manufacture a systemd-centered argument is definitely a troll.
In short, Linux fans still have nothing to worry about. A new package provides several new utilities, some distros are choosing to include those utiliti
Re:Only Republicans are too stupid... (Score:5, Insightful)
This isn't government control of the internet, and government control of the internet would be a very bad thing. How long do you think unbreakable encryption would last if the government had control? The FBI is already starting to take up a position that they want to ban it entirely.
http://www.theguardian.com/com... [theguardian.com]
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First of all, those laws only apply for export and not usage. Second of all, those laws basically became moot after Phil Zimmermann argued (and prevailed) that all he would have to do is print his code to a book and then just mail it overseas. Since the book itself is protected by the first amendment (free speech) no laws can restrict its distribution.
The only way I could see the FBI getting anywhere with their case is if they were to forbid companies from selling devices domestically that included unbreaka
Re:Only Republicans are too stupid... (Score:5, Insightful)
it's kind of like the concept of the free market
without rules, enforced, all markets quickly devolve into oligarchies and monopolies: customers and smaller players squashed and abused
so a free market requires government regulation
likewise, without rules enforcing net neutrality, large market players start fucking with the status quo to siphon off more cash. simply because they can
but there exists certain idiots in the world, a lot in the usa, who only see the government as a threat. the government IS a threat, in many avenues of life
but in the market place, the government is usually your only friend when it comes to real abuse from large market players
there does exist regulatory capture
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R... [wikipedia.org]
but again, this is an argument against corruption, not against government. again, the problem with regulatory capture is large market players corrupting the rules. so you want to heal your sick government, not weaken it further, thereby giving large market players yet even more ways to abuse you. and they will
but certain people, they just utterly lack the awareness that the government is not the only evil bogeyman in the world. many times in fact, like regulatory capture, the government isn't really the ultimate bogeyman, but just the front for the real villains: plutocracy
we need strong anticorruption rules in the usa. badly. the people are losing to big money. this will be our downfall
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In essence I agree with everything you say. Do try to understand, though, that the U.S. Government has given people ample cause to be suspicious of their intentions and skeptical of their performance. I don't think they see .gov as the only bogeyman, just the one that happens to have an army and taxation authority.
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the problem is that we do not have strong laws against corruption
1. corporations and the rich buying congrescritters with election funds (supported in 2010 citizens united)
2. revolving door employment between regulator and the corporations they are supposed to regulate
other countries have clear laws against this type of thing. we can have that too (not easily, but we should, and we should try)
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so a free market requires government regulation
No, a free market requires regulation, but it can self-regulate as well.
but again, this is an argument against corruption, not against government. again, the problem with regulatory capture is large market players corrupting the rules. so you want to heal your sick government, not weaken it further, thereby giving large market players yet even more ways to abuse you. and they will
This argument doesn't make sense. Corruption happens because governments and their agents have power that they can readily monetize. So it is better to give them more power that they can monetize further? Or perhaps convert to even nobler coin such as establishing a tyranny?
but certain people, they just utterly lack the awareness that the government is not the only evil bogeyman in the world. many times in fact, like regulatory capture, the government isn't really the ultimate bogeyman, but just the front for the real villains: plutocracy
They are by far the biggest, evil bogeymen out there.
Re:Only Republicans are too stupid... (Score:4, Interesting)
It seem you are implying that corruption cannot happen in the free market without government involvement. The government is a tool, just like guns. The biggest evil bogeymen are the ones that use that tool to do evil, which are typically corporations.
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It seem you are implying that corruption cannot happen in the free market without government involvement. The government is a tool, just like guns. The biggest evil bogeymen are the ones that use that tool to do evil, which are typically corporations.
Government agencies are corporations with sovereign immunity.
Re:Only Republicans are too stupid... (Score:4, Interesting)
it can self-regulate as well.
so company {X} dominates a market for widgets. any smaller companies try to compete, they undercut the competitors prices to starve them out, then jack prices way high when the smaller companies fold, consumers having no real choice
tell me how this problem is "self-regulated" by the market to correct for the abuse
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(facepalm)
you're trolling right?
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History suggests otherwise, especially in a market with significant barriers to entry.
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No true Scotsman?
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But wait, that's not happening at all, is it? Could it be that entering a market, blowing millions on building up your infrastructure (whether it's internet switches, laying cable, or building widget-factories), costs a lot of money, and only a total dumbass would invest like that when their competition is a g
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Deregulating banks wan supposed to free up capital and introduce more-efficient financial structures that would more properly react to market needs. What happened instead? A massive implosion of wealth that wipes trillions of dollars in assets off the books and resulted in the single biggest transfer of wealth (and that from poor to rich) in US history. And here we are again, fighting any kind of regulation whatsoever, like none of that happened.
Let's note that deregulating banks did do that. That need still exists. We still want capital "freed" up. We still want more-efficient financial structures. And the rich lose more proportionally than the poor do in these bubble bursts IMHO. Capital is just a better return on effort in genera
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You mean like they did in 2008? The self-regulation that resulted in a massive taxpayer-backed bailout?
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The self-regulation that resulted in a massive taxpayer-backed bailout?
"Massive taxpayer-backed bailout" implies it wasn't a free market.
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Only if by "it" you're just talking about the bailout itself and not the crash.
No, I speak of both.One can't consider the crash in absence of the bailout.
Car analogy time: a car crashed. The cops (government) showed up to investigate, the politicians bicker, and somehow they ended up writing more laws (regulations) as a response. That there was a government response doesn't say anything about whether the car crash was caused by free markets or lack of it.
Car analogy time: a car crashes and the driver gets the local government to pay for any damage he does. He then crashes again a few years later and gets the government to do it again. This pattern repeats for the past century or so of this guy's driving record with him getting more and more aggressive with his driving as the years go on.
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so a free market requires government regulation
What requires government regulation isn't a free market, it's a fair market. Some of us would argue that a fair market is more important than a free market for achieving the stated goals of capitalism.
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well yeah. in which case a "free" market is simply anarchy, in which a monopoly and oligarchy comes to dominate and "govern" in a sense: decide how much consumers pay and that no one competes. truly "free" in the sense there is no government, but a much worse place in actuality
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What I find interesting is that an un-regulated market is indistinguishable from 100% regulatory capture. So those who oppose regulations are essentially proposing 100% regulatory capture in order to avoid regulatory capture.
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exactly
they oppose government when they should be opposing corruption
the idiots are actually helping the corruptors. the corruptors would rather not have anyone to corrupt as an extra expense, and the idiots oblige by insisting on the same: remove the corrupted position, rather than fix it. because they apparently like shoddy, expensive, manipulated, inefficient markets
it's like someone robs the bank because they paid off the bank guard
the intelligent response is to fire, prosecute, and replace the guard, a
It may survive a court challenge... (Score:5, Informative)
It may survive a court challenge but it wont survive the new legislation Comcast, Verizon, AT&T etc are getting ready to submit to Congress via their bought congressmen and senators.
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I'm personally not so sure about it surviving a court challenge anyway - the FCC decided suddenly to substantially change the regulatory system for an established, massive market, bring in a huge swathe of new rules and regulations for existing major players. I don't feel comfortable where a government agency can something of that scale to an established market without any new laws passed.
Re:It may survive a court challenge... (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't see it as a sudden change since they had been fighting this war for a number of years. Sure, the FCC had come down on the side of the cable companies most of the time but the fact that the issue of network neutrality came and kept coming up year after year shows that this isn't some sort of massive change out of nowhere. It was a clear reaction to the cable companies refusal to work with the FCC as they clearly kept saying 'I'm not going to do what you want and you can't make me.' This is just the FCC stepping and saying that they can make them do what they want.
Given what the courts have said in the past I don't see a challenge to the FCC rules coming from the courts. Congress is another matter.
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8 pages or rules that in essence just say, you cannot discriminate on packets, is considered a huge swathe?
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the FCC decided suddenly to substantially change the regulatory system for an established, massive market, bring in a huge swathe of new rules and regulations for existing major players.
Is this any different than when the telephone companies were first regulated? If not, I don't see how the courts can overturn this decision without completely getting rid of the common carrier regulations.
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Consider, in the last court case the judge pretty much spelled the current regulatory changes as a winning move.
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During the Bush years, the GOP has sidetracked itself with it's own gerrymandering. By pursuing said strategy, they created a bunch of safe districts, allowing only the most extreme, conservative people to get elected. This works extremely well on the local level, but the Constitution of the US prevents them from gerrymandering all the democrats into a a few states.
This forces the majority of the party to kowtow to the extr
We didn't get our waaaaaaaay (Score:1)
so now they'll mange, crangle and finagle every angle, they'll try, cry and lie, play, replay every day until they get their way.
I wish they would just fuck off and accept that, just for once, that capital didn't get it fucking way like it does every single other time.
Re:Actually, no they won't. (Score:5, Insightful)
Courts have already agreed they have the authority, so I am not sure where you get your information from.
Re:Actually, no they won't. (Score:4, Funny)
Courts have already agreed they have the authority, so I am not sure where you get your information from.
From that area between the lower back and the upper legs.