>AT&T 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.
But I don't think that we're going to see many successes in net neutrality at the federal level anytime soon - the fight really has to be carried out at the state level.
Yes, it certainly seems to violate the Open Internet Order. The FCC is stopping enforcing the order because the new FCC leadership intends to rescind the order and opposes the order's goals and mechanisms. Net neutrality is dead.
I see no violation of the net neutrality. LAN traffic is completely free. Wired traffic is cheaper than wireless. Local traffic is cheaper at AWS than WAN traffic. CDN traffic is cheaper than hoster traffic. And so on.
Yes, different modes of transportation cost more. The problem is charging different services a different rate on that mode of transportation.
Sure, a wireless network can cost more, and people can pay more. What net neutrality is about protection from being charged more for bits coming from a competitor. This protection is both good for the customer and the market competition. Without it in fact you can't have market competition. All you will end up with his monopolies. I personally think it is high time that internet access be regulated as a utility and decoped from any secondary media businesses.
A wireless customer is paying for wireless access and should not have any bill charge difference for the bandwidth they paid for regardless of the backend source.
The best analogy I can come up with is this. There are 2 major stores in your town that sale widgets.
Company A owns a single widget store.
Company B owns a single widget store and a toll road.
This toll road is the ONLY way to get to company A's and company B's widget store. This is mostly due to lobbying and unfair protracted company B takes part in to ensure that there are no other roads. The problem is that company B stops and ask each driver where they are going when they enter the toll road. They charge one price to cars who are going to company B's widget store and a higher price to cars going to company A's widget store. Both drivers will be on the toll road for the same time as its only a small strip of road, but still the only road.
I think you're incorrect, but happy to hear arguments against.
The phrase I quoted says that the big companies allow you to use their service free of any caps, but if you want to use a 3rd parites same service you are going to be capped. Therefore it's not neutral. The 3rd parties can pay to have cap removed, which puts it into the non-neutral territory.
In this narrow case, I believe there may be a claim that those bits are not “Internet” service. They are private network traffic, within their respective networks.
They are still TCP/IP and/or UDP/IP packets running over the "internet protocol". At what point do you draw the fences between "private network" and the rest of the internet?
He was general counsel for Verizon, which is typical for regulatory capture stooges as far as career choices go, but worked for Jenner & Block, who's primary public record is heavily left-leaning. He's an Obama appointee, but on the recommendation of McConnell.
My guess is that Jenner & Block probably fronts a lot of left-leaning legal cases outside of their bread & butter, which is telco, giving them a good face across the board with Congress. Meanwhile, his prior appointment to the FCC was almost certainly a horse trade between McConnell and Obama.
Pai has been more or less a telco puppet for the last 15 years in one role or another.
The interesting thing about this is that regulatory capture is generally in support of further regulation rather than against. This implies that net neutrality is actually either a grass-roots regulation (highly unlikely), or there is an inversion of concern over the general case. My guess is that the monopoly positions that telcos hold has inverted the normal regulatory capture process at the FCC, and that the primary consumers of the content (Amazon, Netflix, etc) are very shrewd operators who can see through regulatory rhetoric.
> He's an Obama appointee, but on the recommendation of McConnell.
By law the FCC can have no more than three of the five Commissioners from the same political party, so it is quite normal for a President to appoint two Commissioners from the major party that the President is not a member of. It is not required, but I believe most or all Presidents (so far...) have picked their "not my party" appointees by asking the other party's Senate leadership who to nominate.
This only matters - voting in the presidential elections - in the red states. If you're a liberal, progressive, futurist, etc, and you're living in states like CA or NY or OR, then statistically speaking, those states are pretty much gonna go democrat regardless. So your vote counts 'less' there.
What is needed is a bunch of these people to move to swing states where the vote really matters. Places like OH, FL, etc.
But, the blue states people have built their own little comfortable enclaves in their respective states and there's little chance they'll be moving to places like AK, TN, or MS.
Now, why does this matter? Well, because it's clear the republicans are pro big business and in the case of net neutrality, pro locking up the internet for the few (the few being, big media/telecom companies). There will never be a pro-citizen net neutrality policy as long as the republicans/big-business types are running the show.
So, living in CA, for instance, doesn't matter much in this case. Having a progressive, pro-net mentality will make much more difference in swing states.
There's also the fact that voting Dev or living in California don't always equal "good for the net."
We're very aware of how much Hollywood and the RIAA/MPAA want their claws in as much of the internet as they can to "protect the entertainment industry." They were drooling over SOPA/PIPA/COICA/etc.
The democrats will happily lock up the internet in favor of their own big media/telecom interests too. That's something I think people often forget. Remember, one of the first things Obama did was hire five former RIAA lawyers to the DOJ.
Perhaps someone needs to organize a movement of large populations of progressive future thinking utopian philosophers moving to different states to more effectively rig elections in the way of a more enlightened future.
Alas, I don't think there are enough of these types to actually effectively hack elections like that.
Or here's a crazy idea, the democratic party can start actively addressing the real economic issues of the lower class directly, and ease up on social issues / identity politics.
I really think that the American left (and I say this as a pretty far left guy myself) is still caught in a hangover from the civil rights era, where we're fighting for the rights of increasingly smaller groups of people so we can still be seen as the liberal / progressive party, while ignoring economic issues that are so hard to fight for in our version of democractic government.
I'm not disagreeing with you about Net Neutrality, but to assume your opinion is enlightened or progressive for a people you've never met is very narcissistic.
Narcissism would imply that my perspective personally is affected by the outcome and that I believe my opinion is superior to everyone elses, which I don't.
I'm talking about for the people in general. Net Neutrality within the U.S. has absolutely no bearing on me personally as I'm neither a U.S. citizen, nor a resident. I'm merely opining because I am interested in the well-being of my fellow humans... in this instance, Americans and residents affected by internet service providers looking to dishonestly gouge their customers.
I care about you guys and your struggles, I care when I see people being taken advantage of, I care about the erosion of your constitutional rights, I care when I see you having to struggle to have your voices heard by a system that doesn't give a fuck about you except for how quickly they can part you from your money. I care because I see your struggles every day, I listen to your complaints, I follow your news, I read and I watch. I speak from a place of wanting to fight your causes. I live on the internet and it's hard to stand by and watch your internet gradually being taken away and used to exploit you.
So to assume I'm narcissistic without knowing anything about my background or my motives for comment is slightly er... I don't even have a word to finish that sentence.
> This only matters - voting in the presidential elections - in the red states.
Wrong, you mean swing states.
> If you're a liberal, progressive, futurist, etc, and you're living in states like CA or NY or OR, then statistically speaking, those states are pretty much gonna go democrat regardless. So your vote counts 'less' there.
Just as it counts less if you're a Republican in one of those states. Or a Democrat in Mississippi.
> But, the blue states people have built their own little comfortable enclaves in their respective states and there's little chance they'll be moving to places like AK, TN, or MS.
But when they want to escape the tax climate they'll move to Colorado or Wyoming or Austin, TX.
It really doesn't matter very much what opinion the President has of the electoral college, the President doesn't have much say in the matter. Perhaps the President could use their position to push for change, but that would be the extent of it.
I'm aware that it would require a constitutional amendment to get rid of it. Was just taking an easy jab at his absolutely blatant hypocrisy between 2012 and 2016.
An alternative might be a collection of states banding together to solve how they send members to the electoral college. "First past the post" versus "representative" (versus fancier, better options, like run-off voting) is a state's right under the constitution.
Current first-past-the-post states are incentivized under the current regime to stay that way because it makes for more opportunity to be treated as a "ballroom belle" ("swing state") each election cycle, which brings money and attention to the state it might not ever see otherwise.
It's possible, though sadly unlikely, you could fix the current regime by fixing things from the bottom up at the state legislature level, one state at a time if need be.
You could still live in CA and have more of an impact on the elections by moving out to a more rural part of the state... House of Representatives districts matter as much as state lines.
At this point it isn't even really so much blue-state versus red-state: it's a lot closer to city versus rural/country.
Or how about the ones who actually think net neutrality is a terrible idea and think the Free Market (tm) should solve it, yet they refuse to put forward a workable solution for how this would happen.
If we publicize telco infrastructure and rent it out to various companies, that would solve much of the probl..."OH!! BUT then it's not free market! Each carrier should have to buy their own infrastructure otherwise it's not fair!! Blah blah" Right, even though much of the infrastructure was built with public funds. Ok, so back to net neutrality? "No! Government regulations are evil! The free market can solve this!"
How, exactly? Can someone tell me how the free market can deliver net neutrality with federal, state, and local governments in the pocket of the large telcos? I'm actually asking.
Nope. Not unless you can show that he did something a)unethical, b) immoral or c) illegal. Since he gets to define legality through what the FCC dictates, within reason, he can't really violate c on a policy level. If you got a and/or b, please let us know. You can even leak that information.
In general Congress has to pass a law declaring the ISPs utilities. Then net neutrality is a good thing. The problem is that none of the congress (obviously a generalization) really care about the topic. It appears to be too much for them to understand that AT&T made the claim that bandwidth over the wireless is limited. They went so far as to say that caps were needed. Now AT&T has changed it argument, "Our bandwidth is too limited for our users to use services from providers that we haven't made a peering deal with." Congress can't understand that peering or not, wireless spectrum is limited. Too complex.
If you write your representatives, you might need to use really basic language. Think Alan Shore explaining the pharmaceutical case to Denny.
Pai's position on the issue is in line with the President and the majority of Congress; even if he were to be fired for some reason, he'd be replaced by someone similar on this issue, unless his firing was because you had a massive groundswell of public support for net neutrality that was enough to convince a sufficient number of members of Congress that support for neutrality was essential to their reelection prospects.
There's an interesting workaround for the Net Neutrality problem that Netflix, Amazon, Hulu, et al can implement.
They could create a industry standard for testing mobile internet speed against CDNs of all major video providers, and then use their respective video services to ingrain it into customers minds that they have to use this when shopping for a mobile internet provider.
This might just create enough pressure on the cell providers for one of them to break the ranks and start treating all such traffic with respect.
That's pretty much what Netflix does with fast.com, only just for themselves. Opening that up so that other providers could use the fast.com name with their own backends is an interesting idea.
The next step, assuming that the ISPs start moving away from net neutrality in an egregious way, is for the EFF to sue them for criminal negligence in cases of child pornography. ISPs can't have their cake and eat it too.
Meanwhile, AT&T launched a traffic shaping program in December called Smart Stream that mobile customers are automatically opted in to. The program downgrades videos watched on their network to 480p quality.
So long as they do that with all videos regardless of source, what's the problem? It's annoying, possibly, but it doesn't really restrict the open flow of information that made the Internet great.
The FCC no longer handles communications. The part we thought of the FCC as being in charge of will be given to the FTC which lacks any enforcement authority and is inundated with millions of things to watch.
To everyone panicking in this sub, please remember that the communication from washington is that they want this to be fought at the state and local level. So, please engage your representatives about this.
I didn't say it was. My point is that you need to talk to your local representatives, because Washington is putting it on them right now. This includes your congressman and senators.
so, I'm still in favor of NOT Net Neutrality. Specifically, I think the system is rigged through the telecommunications act, but that the FCCs process for "fixing" it with NetNute was an attempted end run around bad legislation from decades ago.
Hopefully this will promote self-organizing mesh providers. There is (or will be) money to be made in cheap, fast, unfiltered internet.
Isn't that the anti definition of net neutrality?