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AT&T Government Verizon Businesses Communications Network Networking The Internet Wireless Networking Technology

FCC Rescinds Claim That AT&T, Verizon Violated Net Neutrality (arstechnica.com) 197

Posted by BeauHD from the back-and-forth dept.
jriding writes: The Federal Communications Commission's new Republican leadership has rescinded a determination that ATT and Verizon Wireless violated net neutrality rules with paid data cap exemptions. The FCC also rescinded several other Wheeler-era reports and actions. The FCC released its report on the data cap exemptions (aka "zero-rating") in the final days of Democrat Tom Wheeler's chairmanship. Because new Chairman Ajit Pai opposed the investigation, the FCC has now formally closed the proceeding. The FCC's Wireless Telecommunications Bureau sent letters to ATT, Verizon, and T-Mobile USA notifying the carriers "that the Bureau has closed this inquiry. Any conclusions, preliminary or otherwise, expressed during the course of the inquiry will have no legal or other meaning or effect going forward." The FCC's Wireline Competition Bureau also sent a letter to Comcast closing an inquiry into the company's Stream TV cable service, which does not count against data caps. The FCC issued an order that "sets aside and rescinds" the Wheeler-era report on zero-rating. All "guidance, determinations, and conclusions" from that report are rescinded, and it will have no legal bearing on FCC proceedings going forward, the order said. ATT and Verizon allow their own video services (DirecTV and Go90, respectively) to stream on their mobile networks without counting against customers' data caps, while charging other video providers for the same data cap exemptions. The FCC under Wheeler determined that ATT and Verizon unreasonably interfered with online video providers' ability to compete against the carriers' video services.
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FCC Rescinds Claim That AT&T, Verizon Violated Net Neutrality More

FCC Rescinds Claim That AT&T, Verizon Violated Net Neutrality

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  • No such thing as Net neutrality (Score:3, Insightful)

    by NotInHere ( 3654617 ) on Friday February 03, 2017 @11:33PM (#53800543)

    its a fake like climate change!

    • its a fake like climate change!

      Fake News! You posted FAKE NEWS!

      • its a fake like climate change!

        Fake News! You posted FAKE NEWS!

        Don't worry, the FCC is okay with that too.

        • Don't worry, the FCC is okay with that too.

          Who knew we were going to reach the stage where "Everything I say is a lie!" has become a true statement?

        • The FCC will ban everything it considers to be fake news. Like those websites that spread the golden shower video rumors, or the newspapers that claim that the "BREITBART NEWS" website is fake news.

    • The FCC is alot like the Lard Ass and Chief; deaf, and no balls.

  • Sold out (Score:5, Insightful)

    by zieroh ( 307208 ) on Friday February 03, 2017 @11:34PM (#53800547)

    Well, gentleman, we've been sold out.

    • Re:Sold out (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 03, 2017 @11:44PM (#53800575)
      Trump begins to prove he is just another liar in office. Any claim of any desire to "make America great again" is now revealed to be nothing more than a ploy to acquire the power to help the rich get richer, and everyone else get poorer.
    • "It's like people only do these things because they can get paid. And that's just really sad." --Garth Algar

    • Re:Sold out (Score:5, Insightful)

      by acrimonious howard ( 4395607 ) on Friday February 03, 2017 @11:55PM (#53800607)

      Well, gentleman, we've been sold out.

      What do you mean? If you like net neutrality (something that obviously has helped small companies and the internet grow all these years), then you should already know Republicans have always been against it, and you should have been against Trump especially [gizmodo.com]. There should be no surprises here. But it should be a wake up call: Republicans are on track to kill net neutrality soon [wired.com].

      • > something that obviously has helped small companies and the internet grow all these years

        Huh? We haven't HAD net neutrality regulations "all these years". The FCC rule on network neutrality was issued in mid 2015 and the first enforcement letters sent in the last couple of months. If you think what we've been doing "all of these years" has helped the internet and small companies grow, that's an argument AGAINST Wheeler's new net neutrality regulations.

        The argument FOR network neutrality is that ISPs mi

        • How about the following type of net neutrality (Score:5, Insightful)

          by presidenteloco ( 659168 ) on Saturday February 04, 2017 @02:48AM (#53801051)

          Perhaps the best compromise is to allow differential treatment of TYPES of packets / packet streams, but not allow differential treatment of packets /streams FROM particular source IPs / identities / organizations nor allow differential treatment of packets / streams TO particular IPs / identities / organizations.

          • That sounds good at first, for a second or two, any is a reasonable *general concept*, a one-sentence summary of a 500 page policy.

            Let's look at "differential treatment". I've got three connections in rural Arizona, microwave, copper, and satellite. The microwave connection has the most *bandwidth*, it can send the most packets per second. It also drops the most packets - data sent over that link may or may not arrive. The copper is reliable, and packets get there soon, but it has the lowest bandwidth- i

            • Nope. You're pretty much missing my point.

              It would be ok to have your network engineers or machine-learning system or whatever figure out that there was a particular "style" of connection happening over your network, and then optimize toward that.

              What would be illegal would be to only provide that optimization for the benefit of the Netflix corporation to the detriment of substantially similar packet streams coming from "MyFunnyHomeVideos.com" or whatever. See the difference? One is a protentially commercia

              • I understand your point, I believe I know what you want.

                I think what your missing is that the *majority* of peak traffic is from two *known* sources - Netflix and Youtube. Very well known sources. We *do* know the bitrates that Netflix uses, and we know the bitrates that Youtube uses. We even know that both are buffered significantly by the client, so jitter does not matter for these flows. We know they are pre-precorded, not live, so a delay of even 1000ms or more doesn't matter. We know that alotting more

            • Re: (Score:2)

              by MobyDisk ( 75490 )

              Why would network jitter matter on a buffered Netflix stream? When people are talking about jitter on streaming video, they are usually talking about their devices ability to render fast enough or the quality of the source material, rather than the network.

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by jon3k ( 691256 )
            You would really need some pretty advanced deep packet inspection, otherwise people will just run their webservers on ports that have a better DSCP value [wikipedia.org].

        • Re: Dafuq? All thesev years no net neutrality (Score:2, Informative)

          by Anonymous Coward

          Huh? We haven't HAD net neutrality regulations "all these years".

          You're confused, raymorris, we had ânet neutrality' as a condition, a state of being, without regulation, but things started to change.

          It's like the old song, they paved paradise, and put up a parking lot.

          Maybe we need some parking lots, but they do cause problems in many cases.

          So they are regulated too.

          PS, the issue of spamming is another one we'd like the FCC to handle. Or the FTC. Or Batman.

        • Re:Dafuq? All thesev years no net neutrality (Score:5, Interesting)

          by Anonymous Coward on Saturday February 04, 2017 @03:07AM (#53801097)

          > Huh? We haven't HAD net neutrality regulations "all these years"

          We had it until 2005 when the SCOTUS ruled in Brand X that the republican-controlled FCC could reclassify ISPs as "information services" instead of "communications services." Which promptly killed all of those companies like Mindspring that relied on the right to lease telco lines. So lack of net neutrality basically killed competition in the ISP business.

        • As an example, one sender, a major mailing list, sends emails to 35,000 of your customers. Then another sender, Bob, sends an email to *one* of your customers, an email from one person to another. It'll take your mail server an hour to churn through the 35,001 emails and deliver them all. Should Bob's person-to-person email sit in the queue for an hour while you first process the 35,000 copies of the "Deal of the Week" email?

          You know that's a completely bullshit example, right? Email takes almost no bandwi

          • > Email takes almost no bandwidth these days.

            Let's talk about what the majority of bandwidth *is* for a residential ISP. Netflix. Not "streaming video", Netflix (and Youtube is huge too). We know the source of traffic, and we know which mix of latency, jitter, packet loss, and bandwidth will provide a clean Netflix stream for our customers. We know exactly which bitrate each flow needs, hell we even know how much the CLIENT is buffering, which tells us how much jitter and delay is acceptable, and when

            • Re: (Score:2)

              by jon3k ( 691256 )
              I'm not aware of any Net Neutrality law that prevents path selection by ISP. This is about equal treatment of packets on an individual link. But I'm not an expert, do you have a source?

              I'd really like to see a list of books that equal 10,000 pages that you think you "have to study" to configure policing/shaping and dynamic routing. I know plenty of very competent CCNP and CCIE who haven't read anything near that. You're talking 15-20 books specifically on routing and traffinc shaping. Seems excessive

              • > I'm not aware of any Net Neutrality law that prevents path selection by ISP.

                I'm pretty sure that most people who say "all video packets must be treated the same", they would *not* be happy with selecting the "best" link for Netflix and the "worse" link for a no-name video stream from a random source. Maybe they need to say what they mean, but that's difficult because any of the three links is the "best", depending on what you measure.

                You say "this is about ...". We all know what it's *about*, writing

        • HOWEVER, modern carrier networks are exceedingly complex, and getting more complex all the time. "A packet is a packet is a packet" is a recipe to create horrible service for everyone.

          Repeat after me: Quality of Service control is not the same thing as Net Neutrality.

          Both can exist at the same time.

          • In theory, you can have the general concept of network neutrality, and also have QoS. Heck, in theory you can have network neutrality and still have a quality *network*, but writing a net neutrality LAW that doesn't seriously damage efforts to provide quality service is very, very difficult. Carrier network is just complicated. For more information with an example or two see:

            https://slashdot.org/comments.... [slashdot.org]

            • Re:In theory. A workable law would be very difficu (Score:5, Insightful)

              by thegarbz ( 1787294 ) on Saturday February 04, 2017 @06:41AM (#53801493)

              In theory, you can have the general concept of network neutrality, and also have QoS.

              In practice you can too. Net neutrality is about the source of the data. QoS is about the content. They are very easily distinguished by law.

              • > In practice you can too. Net neutrality is about the source of the data. QoS is about the content. They are very easily distinguished

                Okay so I've got some packets from 45.83.129.42. I can tell it's some kind of video. Maybe it's a live teleconference, meaning delay would be really bad and any late packets need to be dropped - they won't be used anyway. Or maybe it's a pre-recorded video and the client is caching 30 seconds, so delay doesn't matter and late packets should be delivered and even retrie

                • Re: (Score:2)

                  by zieroh ( 307208 )

                  Hey, raymorris -- rather than barrage us with an unending series of bullshit examples, why don't you volunteer to write the legal text that would enable the objectives of net neutrality (and everyone here, including you, knows damn well what those objectives are) and post it for review? I mean, you've got a good grasp of the technical details, but your stance that carriers ought to be able to do anything they want with the traffic ignores the fact that AT&T, Verizon, and several other behemoths have alr

                  • > your stance that carriers ought to be able to do anything they want with the traffic

                    I've said the exact opposite several times in this thread. I've said I think we need specific rules directed at specific issues.

                    > why don't you volunteer to write the legal text that would enable the objectives of net neutrality
                    (and everyone here, including you, knows damn well what those objectives are)

                    I note you used the plural objectiveS. That's insightful given that other people posting in this thread

                • Maybe it's a live teleconference

                  Why maybe? It's a video conference. If it's important it would be a H.323 stream using something like RTP to send data via specific ports. As for netflix coming over HTTPS maybe they should use one of the established standards for identifying their traffic *type* via QoS. How should you treat traffic? That depends on how it has identified itself, no based on who has identified it.

                  Maybe some services are stupidly tunnelled in ways to look like standard traffic. Drop them at random and let the end user see th

                  • > Drop them at random and let the end user see the stupid design decision made by their company of choice.

                    You could do that, but Netflix or Youtube doesn't work well on your ISP, the customers don't yell at Youtube. And when the server retransmits the packets you dropped at random, it makes the network more congested for *everyone*.

                    "Just make it worse for everyone" doesn't sound like the best idea to me.

        • It'll take your mail server an hour to churn through the 35,001 emails and deliver them all. Should Bob's person-to-person email sit in the queue for an hour while you first process the 35,000 copies of the "Deal of the Week" email? Intelligent management of your service says that you deprioritize the bulk sender.

          First, you should perhaps upgrade your server. Second, are you sure you can't, e.g., pick an e-mail at random?

      • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

        by Darinbob ( 1142669 )

        Politicians have sold out across the board. This is not a republican problem, it is a problem for every politician that accepts campaign donations from corporations.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by zieroh ( 307208 )

          I never said it was a Republican problem. I simply pointed (to an audience that is concerned with such things) that we have been sold out. The fact that you read partisanship into the equation says much more about you than it does about me.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by geek ( 5680 )

        Well, gentleman, we've been sold out.

        What do you mean? If you like net neutrality (something that obviously has helped small companies and the internet grow all these years), then you should already know Republicans have always been against it, and you should have been against Trump especially [gizmodo.com]. There should be no surprises here. But it should be a wake up call: Republicans are on track to kill net neutrality soon [wired.com].

        Under your definition of net neutrality my cell phone and cable bills have tripled. I've seen no increase in coverage and in fact have seen my coverage shrink in my state. There's been no new rollouts, no new providers and the market has been stagnant for the better part of 10 years.

    • What did you expect? When Ajit Pai was named FCC chairman, the former VERIZON counsel who has never voted for any pro consumer FCC action, was certainly NOT going to do anything for the consumer. Fellow FCC commissioner O'Riley doesn't see any reason to provide subsidies for Broadband [arstechnica.com]. They are cutting subsidies to low income consumers [arstechnica.com]. You really didn't believe that the new FCC chair would look out for the consumer, the general public or those who can least afford it. [arstechnica.com] We can look forward of four years o

      • Re: (Score:2, Troll)

        by Dutch Gun ( 899105 )

        Well, we said the same thing about Wheeler, who had similar credentials, and he ended up being a pretty decent consumer advocate. Pai is not interested in net neutrality, but in removing regulation and barriers to actual competition - or so he says. That could work as well as FCC regulation in theory, or maybe even better.

        Let's face it, not much had improved with the telco/ISP situation, after all, and there are a lot of problems beyond net neutrality that more competition could fix. Here's my simple lit

        • Re:Sold out (Score:5, Insightful)

          by dgatwood ( 11270 ) on Saturday February 04, 2017 @03:23AM (#53801145) Homepage Journal

          Well, we said the same thing about Wheeler, who had similar credentials, and he ended up being a pretty decent consumer advocate. Pai is not interested in net neutrality, but in removing regulation and barriers to actual competition - or so he says. That could work as well as FCC regulation in theory, or maybe even better.

          Only if you're in a major city, at best. Everywhere else (and even in many parts of major cities), the biggest barrier to actual competition is the cost of actually running the lines. In rural areas, the cost to run fiber to a single customer could easily be $50k. If an ISP can only make $600 per year, a second ISP would have to be utterly insane to try to compete.

          What we really need—and what I suspect no Republican would ever even consider doing, unfortunately—is for the government to build out the infrastructure and create a permanently government-owned nonprofit a la TVA to maintain it, then lease access to that fiber to any ISP that wants to provide service. Once you eliminate the need for competitors to provide independent, expensive infrastructures, suddenly the barriers to competition in the ISP space become almost nonexistent.

          • Republicans have never been for competition or free market principles. They want to go back to the early days of the industrial revolution. While they are gutting this stuff, they are putting in a national right to work law to put the final nail on the coffins of unions. So the little guys handled the keys to the nation to a bunch of people who are actively working against them for a nebulous sounding promise of "Make America Great" again. So yeah, the Republicans are going to use Trump to put every bi

          • Well, I'm a Republican, and I'm fine with local governments, maybe even state governments deciding to create universal fiber infrastructure. I think that, going forward, we'll want to consider this as critical infrastructure, just like power, water, sewer, and street access. My only caveat would be to let people decide regionally how they want to handle this, rather than making some mess of a Federal bureaucracy to decide these things for everyone, and probably do it badly and expensively, just like the g

            • Re: (Score:2)

              by rbrander ( 73222 )

              This very news should be telling you that personally supporting local or state governments building the fibre infrastructure, and supporting the GOP in the voting booth, are contradictory positions.
              You may, on the balance, prefer the GOP despite their Internet Infrastructure positions, because of their other policies; but please be assured with certainty that the federal GOP will never, ever, EVER support public Internet infrastructure. They will always, always support it being built for a profit by privat

            • Re: (Score:2)

              by dgatwood ( 11270 )

              Well, I'm a Republican, and I'm fine with local governments, maybe even state governments deciding to create universal fiber infrastructure. I think that, going forward, we'll want to consider this as critical infrastructure, just like power, water, sewer, and street access. My only caveat would be to let people decide regionally how they want to handle this, rather than making some mess of a Federal bureaucracy to decide these things for everyone, and probably do it badly and expensively, just like the gia

          • Or how about we just stop rolling out physical lines to individual houses in rural areas and migrate them all over to wireless technologies. Saves tons of money and is far easier to repair and upgrade.

            One fiber trunk to each tiny small town and end-mile over wireless. Quick, painless, modern and economical for all parties.

            • Re: (Score:2)

              by dgatwood ( 11270 )

              Or how about we just stop rolling out physical lines to individual houses in rural areas and migrate them all over to wireless technologies. Saves tons of money and is far easier to repair and upgrade.

              I would argue that replacing the transceivers on either end of a fiber is a lot easier than replacing antennas on a tower, though that is arguably easier than pulling additional fibers for tens of miles, so which one is easier depends on the nature of the upgrade.

        • Pai is not interested in net neutrality, but in removing regulation and barriers to actual competition - or so he says.

          And if anyone thinks that he is sincere in that, I have a bridge to sell them.

    • They aren't THAT stupid...
      Leased out at best... at worst...
      Rented Out!

      Sell the sheep, lose the wool...

    • Hey you all voted for Trump thinking he will be our IT hero for jobs.

      Live with your choices?

    • Well, gentleman, we've been sold out.

      No, he's doing exactly what he said he would do. Unfortunately people where so distracted by the whole "grrr hillary email server" nonsense they failed to actually look at what Trump was actually saying he'd do.

      The chickens have come home to roost people. Perhaps next time folks wont get so hung up on manufactured outrage and pay attention to whats really going on.

    • Did you seriously ever think we wouldn't be?

  • Well.. (Score:3)

    by bmo ( 77928 ) on Friday February 03, 2017 @11:38PM (#53800561)

    It was good while it lasted.

    Will the last one out please turn off all the lights?

    --
    BMO

    • Re:Well.. (Score:5, Interesting)

      by nmb3000 ( 741169 ) on Friday February 03, 2017 @11:50PM (#53800595) Journal

      Agreed. This is a sad first turn -- Trump's FCC may as well have sent a letter to the major ISPs saying "Hunting season on American Internet consumers is open! No tag limit!"

      I was very skeptical when Wheeler was appointed to chair the FCC, given his corporate background, but he ended up being one of the most consumer-focused and practically progressive people in Obama's government.

      And now? May as well say goodbye to net neutrality.

    • I tried, but my carrier doesn't support IoT traffic unless I pay extra.

  • They also announced (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Snufu ( 1049644 ) on Friday February 03, 2017 @11:52PM (#53800599)

    they are changing their name to the Ministry of Communication.

  • What happens next? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by subk ( 551165 ) on Saturday February 04, 2017 @12:15AM (#53800663)
    Do we start peering a new Internet to steer around The Matrix? Routers of The World Unite? Or worse.. HAM radios and QPSK modulators? One can only hope it won't to that point. We shall see.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by sims 2 ( 994794 )

      AFAIK all the licensed HAM bands forbid the use of encryption so HTTPS is a no.

    • Re:What happens next? (Score:4, Interesting)

      by AHuxley ( 892839 ) on Saturday February 04, 2017 @01:34AM (#53800875) Journal
      Short term
      Lots of new data caps and slowness, p2p slowness. Streaming providers get made new offers to pay to reach users with unlimited deals.
      Over the next few years:
      Slowness, profit making, caps and lack of network options will start to trend and users will loot for a better city or community network.
      The US can then open its cities to more open telco network builds, open existing telco networks to all other telcos or build a new nation wide optical network open to all and any provider.
      re ' Routers of The World"
      More community and city networks will face state courts. If a telco is not longer really special under federal law, then any city can build a network to support any provider.
      If existing telcos want a free for all on their own networks, then the ability to become a new telco in towns and communities will be more open :)

      • The US can then open its cities to more open telco network builds

        I'm not sure which US you're talking about - the one I live in, led by conservatives [wikipedia.org], passes laws [arstechnica.com] forbidding cities to compete with telcos. When the FCC tries to stop states from enacting such regulation (though of course, when enacted by Republicans it's not called regulation - rolls eyes), conservative states - specifically North Carolina and Tennessee - sue and win [salisburypost.com] the right to block municipal broadband via regulation (sorry, via "competition enhancing legislation").

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by AHuxley ( 892839 )
          Re " forbidding cities to compete with telcos"
          If been a telco is now not that legally special? If net neutrality no longer exists then all the protections of needing to be a telco to protect net neutrality are not as persuasive.
          The years when only a big telco could afford to comply with complex, expensive federal net neutrality regulations kept a lot of new entrants out.
          The legal cost to define what a network is just got a bit cheaper. Thats the change. As over regulation is allowed to change so is t
  • Wha-a-at?

    Did anybody here believe that President Trump (nee: Drumpf) would ignore all of those intartubes in his efforts to control (or at least neutralize) the media?

  • Trumpistas will defend this (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday February 04, 2017 @01:52AM (#53800921)

    As they defend anything the cheeto insurgent does. Oh, you cry about Democrats, the corruption and how they forget the little guy, and give your vote to the guy that was already price checking stuff like this for his corporate buddies during the campaign. But this is really what you wanted, isn't it? As long as you can fuck over the liberals in your head, as long as you can stomp on people that do nothing to you, you will readily sell down the river all the principles you claimed to stand for here on Slashdot. Net neutrality? Fuck that! Who cares about that nerd shit as long as Trump does the MAGA song and dance?

    You certainly don't. And we are paying for your incompetence as voters.

  • ... and mud in the eye of greedy corporations, just like Trumpty dumpty promised... right? I can't wait to see more such tremendous initiatives from Pai.
  • It seems that customers are still 'paying' by watching advertisements. While the customer is not sending cash anywhere, it is clear AT&T and Verizon are still making profits when they push their own video services that serve ads, which advertisers do pay them for. T-Mobile is a little bit different in that it doesn't own the video services so it isn't directly making revenue from offering say youtube to not count towards data caps. AT&T and Verizon do make money from their own video services and pa

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