US Appeals Court Won't Rehear 'Net Neutrality' Challenge (reuters.com) 32
A federal appeals court on Monday declined to rehear a challenge to the Obama administration's landmark "net neutrality" rules requiring internet providers to guarantee equal access to all websites. From a report: The decision by the full appeals court in Washington not to reconsider a three-judge panel's decision that upheld the ruling comes days after Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai proposed to undo the 2015 net neutrality that reclassified internet providers like public utilities. The 2015 order bars internet providers from blocking, throttling or giving "fast lanes" to some websites. Pai has proposed reversing the reclassification and scrapping internet conduct standards, and has asked for comment on whether the FCC can or should retain any of the rules barring blocking, throttling or "fast lanes." Judge Sri Srinivasan said in a written opinion reviewing the decision "would be particularly unwarranted at this point in light of the uncertainty surrounding the fate of the FCC's order."
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Seems like it
It is neither a good nor a bad thing. It is a meaningless thing. This was about Obama's NN policies. Since Obama is no longer president, and the new guy is changing those policies, a court challenge to the old policies is pointless. Which is why the court declined to hear it.
Re:Good thing? (Score:4, Funny)
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Quit it, yer killin' me. lol
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The government spends billions of dollars on a massive money pit called interstate highways. The roads your car drives on are government-funded with more-or-less equal access to any qualified driver. America's Internet is like if we had private roads everywhere instead of government-funded ones. You'd have to pay more (since it wasn't being subsidized elsewhere), there'd be no roads outside of major cities, and you'd be refused access to certain businesses if they refused to pay fees to allow you through.
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Just posting to kill my accidental -mod.
(They really shouldn't have funny and overrated next to each other on the mod list.)
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This is a bad thing for mustache-twirling villains everywhere. They're probably yelling things like "Curses!" and "Foiled again!" and stomping on their stovepipe hats.
Finally some good news (Score:3)
Non-neutral "Internet" is a mislabelled product (Score:5, Insightful)
One could reasonably make the case that TCP/IP was not designed to elevate one customer's packets over another. Application layer protocols (video + voice over web and email) certainly, but even then, the original intent was to set those priorities for each user's own network.
When consumers purchase "Internet access" (for home use or a commercial server farm), they expect to have equal access to all of it, subject to the traditional limitations of how much bandwidth the other side has purchased, how many hops it takes to efficiently route the traffic, and any weak spots along the way. Deliberately degrading certain destinations (the "slow lane") and still calling the service "Internet" is IMHO selling an adulterated product, just as a product labelled "ground beef" is expected to be made from beef instead of soy.
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Damn right I'm entitled. I pay monthly for a service. I expect that service to be fulfilled, not monkeyed with.
Re:Non-neutral "Internet" is a mislabelled product (Score:5, Interesting)
You got it spot on. Unfortunately the internet is more sporadic than this due to tyrannical regimes, terrible internet service providers, and similar.
Ideally we'd simply have real competition, but the government has ensured that isn't possible. To give people an idea on just how terrible it is listen to this. So this past summer I got hooked up with fiber internet access. The install wasn't cheap. It was $3,000 to run fiber 8/10 of a mile. A neighbour and good friend got a quote to do a connection between a junction box and his home that was less than 1/10 of a mile away from multiple junction boxes. You could practically spit and reach it. His quote? $17,000. Why? Cause the cost of licensing poles is insane and the poles to reach my place were already licensed. Who do you get this license from? The city. Want to solve the problem? Stop inflating the costs of running fiber. The city likes it because they get a huge $$$ and the incumbent competition likes it cause it stops competition.
Ultimately with more competition we probably wouldn't need net neutrality.
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As soon as one network peers directly with another network, it is not equal. The Internet is not made up of transit links. It is a complex interconnection of networks (inter-net). Most end users don't see all the peering that goes on, but they benefit greatly from it. Some remember when Robert Metcalfe stated that the Internet was going to collapse in the late 90's. Why didn't it? There was a concerted effort to improve routing and peering. Instead of the bulk of Internet traffic traversing small set of bac
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Blame the scumbags in telecomm. We have already seen examples of implementing slow lanes by slowing everything down and then adding "fast lanes" that are simply what existed before the throttling. Kinda like in cartoons where someone "volunteers" when everyone else takes a step back.
Likewise there's sharply limiting a peering point, then trying to double dip by charging a fee to someone who isn't even your customer to remove the otherwise unneeded bandwidth limiter.
Btw, the peering crisis in the late '90s w
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Would you rather have every packet coming into the ISP's network through transit links only?
There is no double dipping. There are two ways to get connectivity for Internet. One way is transit. Transit can be expensive especially for companies like Netflix. Transit is pretty simple, you pay for x-bandwidth or port speed. The other option is to peer. For peering, one com
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You're confused. If peering involves payment, there certainly is double dipping. Lets say there are 2 providers A and B. I am a customer of A and the server I want to talk to is a customer of B. If the server is sending me a packet, B should not need to pay A to deliver it to me because I have already paid A to deliver that packet. Likewise, A should not pay B because the server's owner has already paid B. Transit would be a 3ed company C that is contracted by A and B to carry traffic between them.
A and B c
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I am working my way down through the comments and, so far, this is the only one posted by someone who knows the difference between bullshit and wild honey.
Well said.
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When consumers purchase "Internet access" (for home use or a commercial server farm), they expect to have equal access to all of it,
To most non-gamers, "the internet" is the web. They will become cross if they cannot access a website, or if some application they have purchased (frequently via the web) fails at online activation, but they're doing everything else through their browser.
Court: "who cares, the Obama rule is dead anyway"? (Score:5, Insightful)
>> Judge Sri Srinivasan said in a written opinion reviewing the decision "would be particularly unwarranted at this point in light of the uncertainty surrounding the fate of the FCC’s order." The FCC is set to hold an initial vote on May 18 on Pai's proposal but Srinivasan questioned why the full court should review "the validity of a rule that the agency had already slated for replacement."
Forget the context and look again.. (Score:2)
On this logic, So-And-So can talk loudly about changing a law, and the courts will treat said law as toxic and not even hear a challenge, as said law is "on its way out" Seems legit.
1. To hell with income tax!
2. Raise income tax 50%.
3. Laugh as courts refuse to hear challenges to my new tax as its on its way out anyway....
4. Profit....
5. Repeat.
Let's fix it (Score:3)
On this logic, So-And-So can talk loudly about changing a law, and the courts will treat said law as toxic and not even hear a challenge, as said law is "on its way out" Seems legit.
1. To hell with income tax!
2. Raise income tax 50%.
3. Laugh as courts refuse to hear challenges to my new tax as its on its way out anyway....
4. Profit....
5. Repeat.
Context matters in this instance, and in most of the political articles on Slashdot.
The net neutrality law was a standout overreach by one department, essentially making up regulations that are outside the purview of that department. If this is allowed to continue we'd have lots of other departments declaring themselves the regulator of fact of anything and everything and a mishmash of ill-considered, overreaching, and contradictory laws.
As an example of this, the FAA decided that they were the regulator of
Let me just say... (Score:3)