Our republic isn't designed just to do what the people want. It's intentionally designed so that good people can sometimes do something unpopular in the public interest. For this to work, it's incumbent on the voting public to elect good people.
Where these popular ideas do matter is in the marketplace. The entire tech industry, including some of the wealthiest companies in the world, will most certainly rebel against any attempt by ISPs to threaten net neutrality. And there will similarly be a revolt by customers.
Google Fiber was created merely to promote the deployment of fiber, Net Neutrality is a far bigger issue than fiber to both the tech industry and ISP consumers.
Even without FCC rules it will still be very dangerous for any ISP to make any significant changes to how the internet works.
The most likely scenario is that a few mobile internet providers may offer niche small packages of limited internet to mobile users for $5-10/month (which so far is the only real world example of "net neutrality" being violated in the world, by a Portuguese ISP)... basically a way to offer cheaper packages to some users who can't afford full broadband. This is basically the only thing I could see ISPs getting away with. I highly doubt any ISP would risk limiting the internet for any average home broadband users. Most American ISPs are public companies who still have worry about their bottom line.
The backlash even without FCC laws will be a significant deterrence.
ISPs already do incredibly unpopular things, but it doesn't hurt their bottom line because their customers don't have other provider options. What are they going to do, go without internet?
Comcast is one of the most hated companies in the US, but you wouldn't know it by looking at their stock price. The free market is not a solution here.
That's not the problem. The problem is that this is not a free market. The ISPs have effective control of the federal government and many state governments, and use that control to block competition from e.g. municipal ISPs. If the free market were actually allowed to operate, it would very likely solve the problem.
However, like you said, it's not a free market and it won't be for the foreseeable future. Fantasizing about that changing isn't a solution either. At the moment, government regulations are the best tools we have to protect consumers.
Have they pissed off the entire tech industry and attempted to fundamentally change how the internet works?
Having poor customer service, high fees, etc seems like a far cry from completely changing how internet billing works and whitelisting websites/throttling the entire internet.
But first the ISPs have to actually do the things that we were warned they would do if the FCC scraped these laws. No ISP has yet announced or even proposed any specific future changes.
I'm not even sure what being "wrong" here will look like in practical terms:
- Are average home broadband internet plans going to have their internet filtered unless they pay more for 'unlimited'? With TV-style "grouped" packages?
- What websites (tech companies) will be included in these hypothetical filtered packages?
- Will they (Netflix/Disney/Facebook/Google/etc) let the ISPs include their brand(s) in marketing these new non-neutral plans? Will they let the ISP include their website in any throttled package in technical terms?
- Will ISPs be launching the new plans perfectly in sync with other ISP companies, for the 80% of Americans who have more than one ISP option, so they won't hemorrhage customers to competitors when they completely revamp their billing? Will they grandfather existing users?
...there are far too many questions to properly give you a answer about how the industry will respond.
When/if that actually becomes a reality then it will be easier to guess how the trillion dollar industry will react and if the ISP customers will sit idly by with no recourse... at the moment I'm confident there will be plenty to do to make business/life for Comcast/ATT shareholders uncomfortable if they ever were dumb enough to mess with how the internet works for the average American.
That's exactly why I'm not buying this idea that these FCC policies were what's stopping ISPs from disrupting 'net neutrality'.
If you actually dig into the details it doesn't make much sense and is extremely risky. Yet I seem to be one of the very few who is actually challenging this stuff on rational grounds rather than "herr derr I support republican policies and want to be a contrarian".
The reality is that not every situation calls for government intervention. Especially extremely hypothetical situations which have never even been tried in the market place.
This is equivalent to regulatory "pre-crime" enforcement...
The customers revolting is not a matter of influencing Comcast/ATT/etc, it's a matter of influencing Google/Apple/HBO+Disney/Netflix etc etc etc.
People love to trivialise this counter-point as merely "oh ISPs dont have competition therefore the market can't fight this problem", which is incredibly reductive and misses the forest for the trees.
It seems exactly the same as that widely-quoted Portuguese example, which also let you pay a data rate for sites that weren't in their special packages. This happened in the US because net neutrality was weak and never really applied to mobile carriers.
I'm pointing out that the Portuguese non-neutral mobile carrier is no different than our US non-neutral mobile carriers.
How would you describe Comcast's throttling of bittorrent or Rogers throttling of all encrypted traffic in Canada?
> Comcast's throttling of bittorrent
Were these FCC laws blocking Comcast from throttling Bittorrent traffic?
Canada was also the first country to throttle bittorrent traffic as well and the adoption of encryption in Bittorrent clients was largely able to bypass this issue AFAIK (I haven't experienced any slow downs in years in Canada since I toggled "force encrypted peers").
> Rogers throttling of all encrypted traffic in Canada
Source? I used Rogers for years and I've never heard of this problem.
""Comcast's practices are not minimally intrusive, as the company claims, but rather are invasive and have significant effects," the commission said, demanding an end to the practices by year's end."
This was under the Title I classification that was struck down by the verizon lawsuit, where the court said that the way to enforce these rules within the FCC's existing powers was via Title II.
As for Rogers, http://www.michaelgeist.ca/2007/04/rogers-packet-shaping/
[Citation needed]. Whatsapp has virtually no competition in Brazil because most carriers do not count it toward the data cap.
Have you noticed not many tech companies have complained? Did telecom win by attrition, or did they negotiate after the last failure?
It would be a lot easier to get behind the idea that we should elect "good people" if we weren't concentrating so many responsibilities to the one magic "good person" we get to choose.
No. I'm not trolling either. Raymond Smullyan's stories are meant to be like Zen Koan. My factual and historical observations are much the same. It's more like a Rorschach blot.
It would be a lot easier to get behind the idea that we should elect "good people" if we weren't concentrating so many responsibilities to the one magic "good person" we get to choose.
Our world is considerably more complex than it was in 1800.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ajit_Pai
I'm simply pointing out that we empower and trust the "good people" we elect to choose "good people" they appoint.
Obama could have rejected the nomination but anyone that the Republicans have a say in will be anti-net neutrality.
Obama won by ~5 million and ~10 million votes in 2012 and 2008, respectively.
Obama Designated Tom Wheeler chairman, and he put in place the regulations that Pai dismantled today - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom_Wheeler
EDIT: I am not factually incorrect, so could you please explain why you are downvoting?
But, in any case, Obama nominated him but did not choose him so much as he choose not to violate long-standing precedent as to how the seats that cannot (because the 3 members of one party limit has been reached) be from the President’s party are selected.
Now, he could have violated that precedent, but that wouldn't have likely gotten someone else into the seat, just given up any chance of Senate confirmation.
I really wish the Democrats had just started firing broadsides at Republicans in the last decade, given that the Republicans clearly can stomach the lowest of the low political gamesmanship.
It was an “olive branch” to Republicans in much the same sense as the British sovereign offering the leader of the party that has secured a majority the opportunity to form a government is an “olive branch” to that party; it is, through combination of law (limiting the number of members of one party, and mandating Senate confirmation before a nomination becomes an actual appointment) and established custom (as to how nominees that are not of the President’s party are chosen), a requirement that, if violated, would produce a major crisis.
- it's staffed by members of each party
- each party's leaders (typically in the Senate) choose the people who will be appointed
- the President typically rubber-stamps those appointments
- the President at the time really only gets to choose which member of the commission is the Chairman
So if you want to blame someone for Pai, you should be blaming Senator McConnell for telling President Obama "here's the Republican we want you to put on the commission".
> But it's predictable that one party would have appointed someone like him and not the other.
It is fair to blame this vote on Republicans, given that the vote fell along "party lines".
"Considering both distributional effects and changes in efficiency, it is a good idea to let companies that send video or other content to consumers pay more to Internet service providers for the right to send that traffic using faster or higher quality service."
I believe Netflix and YouTube and what-not already pay their service providers for the bandwidth they use.
What about this text did you find valuable? Please share.
Except in this case, it is not in public interest
Funny because I believe Ajit Pai is a corporate shill doing what his Friends at Verizon wanted and I am sure he is hoping the land a nice 6 figure job in the private sector in a couple years....
This move today for the FCC has absolutely nothing to with public interest
Key phrase. There is zero evidence that repealing Net Neutrality is anywhere close to the public interest.
The direct feedback mechanism is voting for those who determine the composition of the rule-making bodies.
The direct feedback mechanism is voting, for people who draw maps that determine who get's elected to have the power to determine the composition of the rule-making bodies.
You could even argue it's how people spend their money that determines who has money to chose who get's to draw the maps etc.
I try to engage in commerce with entities that do/make good things.
The only federal elections are for the President, Senators, and Representatives. This is not a direct democracy.
based on random choice or personal whim, rather than any reason or system.
"his mealtimes were entirely arbitrary"
synonyms: capricious, whimsical, random, chance, unpredictable;
(of power or a ruling body) unrestrained and autocratic in the use of authority.
"arbitrary rule by King and bishops has been made impossible"
synonyms: autocratic, dictatorial, autarchic, undemocratic, despotic, tyrannical, authoritarian, high-handed;
mathematics. (of a constant or other quantity) of unspecified value.
This is false both in mathematics and in everyday language.
His determination actually demonstrates the lack of arbitrariness. Arbitrary choices are held lightly and easily changed. This was the opposite.
AFAIK at no point during the process did Pai change much at all. He made it clear what he was going to do from the beginning and stuck to it the whole way through.
"The term arbitrary describes a course of action or a decision that is not based on reason or judgment but on personal will or discretion without regard to rules or standards."
Most of Pai's arguments are half-truths or out right lies. There have been several instances where his claims were fact checked against the data and proved to be false.
Furthermore: "In many instances, the term implies an element of bad faith, and it may be used synonymously with tyrannical or despotic."
I think there's a good case that Pai's actions and statements could be shown to be despotic.
Could you give examples of them "misrepresenting public feedback"?
[1] https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2017/11/why-the-fcc-igno...
And your link doesn't support your claim:
>The Pai staffer who spoke with reporters acknowledged that there were legitimate comments from both sides in the net neutrality docket. In Pai's draft order, the FCC comprehensively addresses all the serious comments that made factual and legal arguments, the official said.
Yes I am. My point is that they did a poor job at soliciting feedback--not that they didn't get a lot. The fact the volume was so high just shows how important it was for this issue. If servers are going offline, then you can show good faith by extending the comment period or addressing it in some other manor.
Being "required to solicit comments and to consider them" doesn't mean you only consider a subset containing legal arguments.
Looking at their mandate it seems pretty clear that they are there to serve the interests of American citizens and should be acting in citizens best interests.
I think that's pretty clear in the use of the phrase "the people of the United State" here:
The FCC's mission, specified in Section One of the Communications Act of 1934 and amended by the Telecommunications Act of 1996 (amendment to 47 U.S.C. §151) is to "make available so far as possible, to all the people of the United States, without discrimination on the basis of race, color, religion, national origin, or sex, rapid, efficient, Nationwide, and world-wide wire and radio communication services with adequate facilities at reasonable charges."[1]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Communications_Commiss...
Specifically, the paragraph which starts with "Another way they'll drop their deference" is roughly the section which covers the caveats.
[0] - https://www.reddit.com/r/politics/comments/6x0bdy/985_of_uni...
I'm not sure what you're trying to say here - that's exactly what happens in the US. People in rural Nebraska or Wyoming's vote is often up to three times more "effective" than someone in NYC or LAs.
> Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed
Also, all of these people are still humans. Meaning that they have their own closely held beliefs. If you are honestly expecting non-elected officials to violate their own beliefs based on public feedback simply because "majority rules", you aren't living in reality. That virtually never happens. When it does happen, it usually happens on issues that are not hot-button issues and those being hounded by the public don't have a strong opinion so they are willing to switch sides if necessary.
And the US is not and has never been a majority rule democracy. It's a constitutional republic and that's a critical difference. Part of that structure is ensuring that in some cases (like the electoral college), the majority don't get to make the rules simply because they decided to band together or live close to each other. The electoral college exists precisely for the situation the US is currently in - where the more liberal areas are all clustered in relatively small, high density areas. They now account for more than 50% of the population but far less in the electoral college because the system was built to prevent that density issue where these small areas by land mass could force feed laws upon the rest of the country, enabling those areas to effectively have control over money and resources which they otherwise would not.
USA is not a democracy, thank God. A democracy is mob rule.
- P.J. O'Rourke in Parliament of Whores (1991)
Dunno. Fighting institutional <word that ends in 'ism'> is pretty popular on the left.
Is it? Republicans were voted by the public into Congress, into the presidency. They are acting just as anyone voting for them could expect. In that sense they are representing the will of the people who duly elected them.
The FCC ignored the will of a small % of technology-oriented, predominately liberal voters. Just because all the media that you might tend to consume and the people you tend to converse with are vocally against this repeal, doesn't mean that that represents the will of the majority. That same sort of ideological bubble is what caused everyone to be so shocked when Trump actually won, despite all the polls and predictions to the contrary.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2017/12/12...
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/monkey-cage/wp/2016/05/2...
Voter support (a couple of instances here, but there are many), (PDF): https://na-production.s3.amazonaws.com/documents/American_Pu...
In an ideal world, people vote in the government they want, and the elected representatives follow the will of the people. We all know such a world doesn't exist [1]. In practice:
* Most voters don't even know what net neutrality is. How will they care if they don't understand that they should care? It's a complicated, nuanced subject even for tech people.
* It wasn't part of the Trump/republican platform at the time of the election. As far as I can recall, it didn't even come up during the presidential debates. Voters might want net neutrality, but they might not have known that voting for Trump/GOP would cause a repeal.
* The last couple of decades show that Congress (and politicans in general) overwhelmingly goes where the money is. There's a huge amount of money and lobbying power on the pro-repeal side, and the current FCC is a classic example of regulatory capture [2], with every indication that the FCC (and the Trump administration) is now stocked with industry insiders.
Even this claim is arguable, given gerrymandered congressional districts and inherent overweighting of low-population rural states in the Senate.
We only have (had!) net neutrality and other important regulatory protections because the FCC exists.
Something needs to exist as a protection against corporate abuse. If it's not a centralized agency, then what? There's no self-correcting mechanism in capitalism that magically prevents companies from screwing with consumers.
As for your statement and question;
> Something needs to exist as a protection against corporate abuse. If it's not a centralized agency, then what? There's no self-correcting mechanism in capitalism that magically prevents companies from screwing with consumers
Couple points...
First, "There's no self-correcting mechanism in capitalism that magically prevents companies from screwing with consumers" gave me a solid laugh. Little thought experiment: let's say there are two alternate realities. In one of these realities, somehow, Starbucks is the ONLY way for you to get coffee. Somehow, they've completely ensured other coffee shops can't open (it's either too expensive for them to open or literally illegal). In the other reality, opening a coffee shop is easy! Starbucks hasn't colluded with any government agency to make coffee shop ownership too expensive or difficult to pull off. In which one of these realities do you think (the) coffee shop(s) would abuse their customer base(s), charge inflated prices, or provide lackluster serviced that rarely if ever are innovated on? I'm hoping for the sake of discussion, you understand my point. Scenario 1 is hardly a far stretch from exactly what has happened over the years in the ISP industry. The FCC is HARDLY innocent in creating our current dismal ISP situation. Open markets are THE system that prevents abusive actions towards consumers.
The second point, I am far from against the government protecting consumers from abuse by corporations. Fraud or anti-competitive behavior should be met with a stern legal response. But when the government played a huge role in creating an environment where we can't protect ourselves, I'm extremely dubious of any power grab attempted in the name of "we'll protect you". In an open market, I have a perfectly good mechanism for protecting myself which also happens to stimulate innovation, lowers prices, and improves the product/service.
So yea, an artificial monopoly has now been given more leeway in how they provide services to an already abused customer base... it's a bummer. However, I'm not keen on providing more power to the very people who helped get us here so that they can control the problem they created. Let's fix the root of the issue. Decry crony capitalism always - not just when it's 'the other guys' doing it.
And one last point... ISPs provide an extremely expensive and complex service to their customers. In what world are price controls and artificial monopolies a good idea? We need innovation in this space, not uniformity of service and centralized decision making. It's the internet, not the DMV. We should make it so ISPs have to win our usership by providing the best most valuable service, not by wielding the legislative process more effectively then there would be competition.
[1] https://splinternews.com/the-long-lucrative-right-wing-grift...
Well color me pink.
> Multivariate analysis indicates that economic elites and organised groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on US government policy, while average citizens and mass-based interest groups have little or no independent influence.
http://fightthefuture.org/videos/does-voting-make-a-differen...
it's: short for "it is".
its: possessive version of "it". E.g. its worse -> worst belong to "it"
EDIT: The original misguided pedant has now changed "worse" to "worst" in both instances; after downvoting me, of course.
https://www.macmillandictionary.com/dictionary/british/at-it...
[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2017/12/12...
There is no candidate that does not hold policy positions contrary to at least some my own.
What they've done is decided that this issue is less important than others, and based their votes on that.
Of course not. As you say, it's clearly not a significant issue for most Republican voters.
However, I think a lot of voters assume that the party reflects the values of the voters though - clearly that is not always true.
And this is at best -- it assumes your elected representative even holds their campaign promises, which is maybe a long shot.
Stupid gun rules, like magazine size limitations, sure, but they almost never "come for my guns." Often the suggestions are perfectly reasonable in my mind - national gun registry, for example.
Another scenario - the FBI is monitoring radicalization in a small community. They check the gun registry to see which of the people in the community becoming radicalized are actual potential threats and zero in their investigation on those individuals, to prevent a shooting.
Etc. Basically just makes law enforcement's jobs more feasible.
The government doesn't have the resources to "confiscate" every registered gun owners' guns at the same time, and so we would be well aware if a confiscation by a tyrannical government is coming, and all of us weirdo militia folk and preppers would already be putting the sandbags out. Trust me, some of these guys are practically wishing for it.
Similarly, police who are serving an arrest warrant might be able to serve the warrant with the knowledge that person of interest has several firearms on the property. Sometimes police know this today, but not because of government records.
(I'm not arguing a personal position one way or the other, just explaining the rationale.)
Support for Net Neutrality was overwhelming and bi-partisan, yet Ajit Pai just plowed forward without consideration for what the citizens demanded.
This is government at its worst.