President Obama has come out in support of reclassifying internet service as a utility, a move that would allow the Federal Communications Commission to enforce more robust regulations and protect net neutrality. “To put these protections in place, I’m asking the FCC to reclassifying internet service under Title II of a law known as the Telecommunications Act,” Obama says in a statement this morning. “In plain English, I’m asking [the FCC] to recognize that for most Americans, the internet has become an essential part of everyday communication and everyday life.”
Good news, but for now, these are nothing more than mere words – which politicians have in abundance – and not an actual law or policy. The FCC is free to make its own decisions, and could just as easily toss all this aside. With the pendulum of American politics currently firmly in the Republican camp, it just seems unlikely that this will actually become policy.
Terrible news, it is a first step in turning over the control over the internet to the FCC, that particular agency has not exactly had a good regulatory track record.
Politicians in the US seems to think of the internet as mostly a content provider network.
Hope the excercise of free speech on the internet will not suffer because of this, but time will tell.
In a marketplace with many competitors, there is an argument for reduced regulation. But once there is only a monopoly/duopoly situation, I think history indicates that they need to be reigned in.
For instance, in the US, comparing the mobile internet market (with four major competitors) against the cable internet market (with one or two) illustrates the point.
judgen,
Well, it’s hard to blame them for this. I’d point the finger at the googles, netflixes, facebooks, etc. They are the ones who’ve transformed the internet into bastions of centrally controlled content. ISPs are guilty as well, and if not for the pressure coming from net neutrality I think we’d be in a far worse position now.
For all the mistakes our governments make, they still play a key role in ensuring fair access to network resources, otherwise private companies can and will negotiate bandwidth rights with content providers on behalf of internet subscribers with dubious interests at heart. New startups won’t have the same access as large incumbents.
I think the ISPs are far more guilty for it due to their historical insistence that their typical customer (e.g home customers) don’t serve content, only retrieve content.
This has changed a little in that they now allow gaming services; but they still don’t like it when you try to host a website, IRC, or anything else from your home connection unless you pay more to get the static and SLA services.
TemporalBeing,
I agree, these are serious impediments. Slow upload speeds, filtered ports, DPI, carrier grade NAT, etc all push consumers towards centralized services over peer to peer ones. Some of these problems are obviously deliberate, with others it’s debatable.
The internet provider at my parent’s house was always causing problems due to blocked ports. Even SSH was blocked. There was no alternative service provider, and I didn’t believe in paying more for something that should just be allowed, so I made do by routing everything through a VPN. I’m sure this would have given others trouble.
A long time ago in our apartment, we couldn’t remotely connect to remote X11 sessions in the computer science lab due to port blocks by RoadRunner (our ISP). The entire 6000-7000 range used by X11 was blocked, among other things.
Thankfully I haven’t seen such draconian ISP policies recently. I believe the attention to net neutrality has helped. No ISP wants to be labeled as the reason regulation is needed.
Because further control and regulation of internet access by the government won’t come with any unintended consequences.
Can’t say as I like it but the current situation is beyond dysfunctional. Asking these companies to play nice isn’t going to work either.
good luck trying to pass that through congress, maybe in 10 years
Not so fast…Prez 0 has a pen and a phone and an electronic shredder and scissors for that “living” piece of paper that is always getting in his way.
You mean the one the previous administration gutted?
This would certainly be an improvement.
It is possible that the FCC would have made this decision anyway, and the President’s support certainly increases the odds. But it is a big change, with heavyweight opponents (and supporters), and I just don’t know how likely it is.
I think this overstates the case. “Mid-term” elections almost always swing away from the President’s party – that’s just the nature of the US voting public. I don’t think it shows any kind of actual shift in public sentiment.
(But it is true that we can probably look forward to two years of “gridlock on steroids” heading into the next presidential election.)
Very unknown, and the courts have essentially been pushing the FCC that way. So it likely would get there at some point; this might hasten that.
True.
Well, may be gridlock between Congress and the President… but you’ll likely see a lot more active Senate.
The House of Representatives has since 2010 been very active in passing legislation; only to have a lot of it die in the Senate because it didn’t meet what Obama or Reid wanted. It certainly wasn’t for a lack of effort on the part of the Republicans.
So you’ll likely see a lot less of that and a lot more of stoppage at Obama’s desk; and may be a number of veto overrides occurring where they can get them; but it’ll likely be a continued obstructionism on the part of the Democrats to keep the veto overrides from happening.
Here’s what the new Senate will do:
– Turn every executive branch or judicial confirmation into a circus — oh wait, they do this already.
– Hold a dozen or so fruitless hearings on Benghazi, chasing controversies
– Repeal Obamacare 50 or 60 more times, because fuck it, let’s waste time.
– Use parliamentary processes to override Filibusters (which they bitched about endlessly in 2010) that they themselves also made commonplace (more Filibusters occurred since Obama took office than ever have before)
Of course, our electorate, the citizens of Dumbfuckistan, have deemed these clowns worthy of majorities in both houses.
Ah well, there’s always the veto pen.
Which was previously controlled by the Democrats.
Senate has yet to do anything on any of those as Reid (the Democrat majority leader) has refused to.
Now whether McConnell (the likely Republican Majority leader that will be taking over) will do anything in that regard has yet to be seen. He’s already stated he doesn’t want to do certain things.
Filibuster doesn’t apply to the House, only the Senate. And as I stated earlier, the Senate was until now controlled by the Democrats, which were also the ones that changed the parliamentary rules regarding Filibusters – which they may come to regret having done.
Funny since you don’t seem to even understand who was running what.
I think you’re seriously confused. I’m referring to the new Congress, and commenting on what I think they will do.
Wrong. Through the use of a filibuster, Republicans already gum up the process by objecting to trivial bullshit and blocking routine nominations to the executive branch.
McConnell doesn’t strike me as someone who has a hard time deviating from a promise or the truth. Not if you witnessed the mental gymnastics he had to perform in order to justify his wish to dismantle Obamacare in his home State, where the State Exchange is wildly popular.
The rules regarding Filibusters weren’t changed in any meaningful way, you can still block a good chunk of bills from ever coming to a vote. Which is wrong. Wrong when Republicans did it, wrong when Democrats did (and will do) it.
I do. Democrats controlled both houses until 2010. We got Healthcare Reform, Financial Reform, a Stimulus package, Student Loan reform, etc.
Republicans took over the House in 2010 which meant that they spent 2 years dicking around with appropriations and endless hearings due to their newly acquired subpoena power (And BOY did those idiots make use of that).
In 2012, Republicans kept the House (despite Democrats winning the popular vote) because of gerrymandered Districts, which are a function of Republican Governors / State legislatures.
In 2014 Republicans took the Senate (and retained the House) giving them complete control of both houses, but not the Presidency.
This means they can continue to demagogue, grandstand, and obstruct (albeit in different ways) for the next two years.
Did I miss anything? Because this seems pretty straightforward.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bTbLslkIR2k
Those who live here in the USA may have noticed that the Democrats haven’t exactly been the champion of the little guy these past few years, either. *sigh*
Texas brought what looks suspiciously like competition to our electric power market in 1998 despite the extremely high cost barrier to entry under the traditional one-company-does-it-all approach. Power rates have dropped 10% in absolute terms since, though we are still #5 among states in terms of average power cost. (http://www.eia.gov/state/ is a good source of power cost and generation data.) But service has improved a lot since the government-granted monopoly days, and I can fire my company at will – something I can’t do effectively for my Internet provider under the AT&T DSL / Time-Warner Cable duopoly.
Here’s how power works. The power distribution network remains a heavily regulated monopoly, but power generation companies and the end-point sales-and-service companies compete for business based on a set of government-specified rules. They even set up powertochoose.org as a sort of power exchange for comparing options (yes, it sounds very ObamaCarish, but most people actually like the health care exchanges).
What this looks like to me is that I can choose from several dozen plans from dozens of companies for my old ranch house – 100% wind or solar, all natural gas, dirt cheap and to heck with the climate, contract or no contract, etc.
The great thing is that when I call my power company, a human being answers who at least pretends to care – because if they don’t, I have plenty of other options! And that’s my biggest complaint against government-run or government-granted monopoly services – I can’t fire their butts for bad service.
Here’s how it might work for Internet services. A city-owned fiber network would sell last-mile bandwidth to local ISPs, who would contract for bulk Internet bandwidth from the telecom giants and resell to end users under a variety of plans, contract terms, prices, etc.
Not perfect, but 1000% better than my current effective lack of choice.
Just my B⃦0.000054.
ricegf,
I agree with the rest of your post, but this didn’t make sense to me. Are you suggesting that private internet provider monopolies across the US were government-granted? That seems backwards to me, it’s the lack of oversight that resulted in ISP monopoly/duopolies.
Agree this would be better, but we got to this state through laissez faire policies. Private companies are not going to voluntarily open up their last mile networks, it’s the keystone to their monopoly power. That would need to happen through more government involvement.
I wasn’t very clear, sorry.
No, ISPs were never granted a monopoly, but similar services such as wired telephone (the old “Ma Bell”), water, electricity, and gas have often been government or government-granted monopolies – and are very often excoriated as epitomes of awful, uncaring service.
Come to think of it, the break up of Ma Bell into regional “last mile voice carriers”, while opening up long distance to any company that wanted to compete, was quite successful and rather analogous to what I’m suggesting.
Exactly, except that the USA has pitiful existing last mile networks. They can keep ’em. I’m suggesting that we ignore those and run new fiber at taxpayer expense, owned by city and county governments, which would then sell bandwidth to competing ISPs to recoup the costs.
Not very libertarian of me, I know, but high cost barrier to entry services don’t work very well with laissez faire competition. The government can better manage the high capital cost part of public utilities, and open the low capital part to competition. That was the point I was trying to make.
Net Neutrality is merely a power grab dressed up as “for the people” nonsense. Once the government nationalizes the only remaining bastion of free speech and open communication, the end of liberty is at hand. I hate the cable monopolies, but Nationalizing the infrastructure with overbearing regulation is not the way to fix the current state of affairs.
johjeff,
Wow… you might have a fair point if you were talking about municipal internet services (ie the municipality is in cohoots with big brother), but net neutrality has nothing to do with “Nationalizing the infrastructure”. The infrastructure is still private, it merely ensures we have equal access to it.
This is a dangerous and risky move for internet freedom and equality.
The FCC has a very bad history of mismanagement and heavy-handedness. If you’ve ever had to deal with them, you know how dangerous they can be.
They already censor speech anywhere they have control, next up will be internet porn, chat rooms, and much more.
While I’m all for an honestly neutral internet, regulatory frameworks must exist to permit (unpaid) traffic shaping and prioritization otherwise media streaming services will end up slowing down more important aspects of internet performance (even more so than they already do).
The FCC will prevent profanity in chat rooms and regulate how you get to adult content (games, porn, etc.) in addition to regulating advertising, data collection, and much more effectively purely by the whim of whomever is currently in power (and their current freedom of regulatory movement – the only meaningful constraint on the FCC).
If you ignore the downsides, there are only a few upsides (namely prevention of content filtering by arbitrary ISP rules, preferential content treatment, and the like – it will level the quality of content access – but the FCC will now be able to regulate the content nation-wide – bad trade, IMHO).