FCC Downplays Net Neutrality Changes In New Document

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Stop fearmongering, you seem to not realize that the real solution to the potential throttling issue is the fact that most areas have only one ISP, and "Net Neutrality" did nothing to solve that, in fact, it just exacerbated the issue, making startups jump through so many hoops and deal with Government regulations. If we're truly talking , about net neutrality why no mention the fact that Google, Twitter, Facebook, Reddit and more regularly censor for political reasons. Doesn't seem very neutral to me, yet these big companies are the ones pushing for "Net Neutrality." Kinda strange dontcha think?
 
I think it's funny they highlight "telehealth applications", yet net neutrality never applied to commercial customers such as hospitals. They were always free to negotiate special traffic policies with their ISPs.
 
Those are unrelated topics. A group/company/entity censoring their own content is one thing. Having the provider of the data be able censor or limit access/speed to any site is the core issue.

I'm a little surprised they used the term heavy-handed so many times. What are they, children? I would take them a lot more seriously if they just used the name of the law with no adjectives.
 
The point is that if you don't like Google or Facebook you can go to other sites for your politics... if your ISP doesn't make that something else available because they've decided to exclude them from your access then you CAN'T go somewhere else. Net Neutrality means keeping ISP's from making those calls for you - it doesn't mean any of those sites you CAN get to need to follow your political leanings.
 


It's even more disingenuous when you realize that under the old rules things like telehealth (anything medical related that for some reason uses the internet) and VOIP telephone service were always treated with priority access rules. Under the assumption that these devices if interrupted could create or worsen an emergency situation. So removing Net Neutrally changed absolutely nothing in regards to these kinds of services.
 

It's not fearmongering. ISPs have long blocked end-user apps, like bittorrent (which I use for legal distribution of open source OS images), and have engaged in head-end throttling. The concerns aren't theoretical.


Just because it didn't solve one problem you care about isn't a good reason to do away with it. One solution doesn't need to address all problems. If we care about improving competition, then a real understanding of the issues should lead to a more focused solution to that problem, which can quite likely co-exist with net neutrality.


I would like to see this impact quantified. I'm sure its effect is hardly comparable to the anti-competitive practices big cable companies & telcos have used.
 
So, the FCC chairman, who is a former Verizon employee claims that things that didn't happen Pre-Net Neutrality won't happen after it ends? Verizon fought Net Neutrality on the grounds that they believed they had a right to control user access to data, as well as the right to charge users for access to services that compete with services they provide, and the right to charge competing companies for access to Verizon customers. I wonder how much Verizon stock Ajit Pai owns.... AT&T also tried to charge NetFlix for access to AT&T customers.... Removing regulations has NEVER increased competition in any market. Removing regulations actually DECREASES competition. Removing regulations has NEVER benefited consumers either....
 
It is important to note that it is the Republicans blatantly lying to the public, enough of this false equivalency. For gods sake they created a whole presidential convention around an intentionally misquoted sentence by Obama. Since "you can keep your doctor" is the obvious rebuttal here, Obama did not make that statement to deceive, Republican amendments and the refusal to accept (for intents and purposes, free) money from the Medicaid expansion, purely on so called principal (which conveniently fall to the wayside once they are in power, deficits anyone???) caused that to be false. Hypocrisy of the highest order.
 

In charged threads, like this, it's a good idea to try to stay on-topic. Even if you're correct, over-generalizing isn't going to change any minds. So, if you have a case to put forward on the topic at hand, I'd stick to that.
 
The US is behind in almost every field PERIOD. Either Americans step up and demand better by boycotting all greedy crap companies and their garbage products or we just fall in line like sheep with dogs nipping at our heels. I do not feel US will go backwards in the regards of networks they are working on building a faster network so it is easier to monitor and track everyone. I know there are area's where DSL is the only option and DSL is dead in the water technology it has wasted billions on something that can physically NEVER keep up with wireless and Cable options.

Docsis 3.1 is about to be the next standard for Cable which will allow UP TO 4 times the speeds and stability over the same cables. Eventually fiber optics will be in more then 10 or so cities for the average US citizens.

It's not like fiber isn't ran all over the country because it is, it is the fact that corporations want to maximize profit for as long as possible and remarket the same crap under a different title, to deceive the consumer into believing they are getting better when most don't know how to really verify if in fact it is or isn't.
 


Your comment is heavily politically biased and from a viewpoint of someone trying to rationalize the situation as to not be on the losing side of an arguement. The fact is, the ACA was always going to pay out less to doctors, this was known before it went into effect. This, in effect, creates smaller networks of doctors within your plan level. This is all based on the basic economics of health insurance, nothing the republican's amended or defunded was going to change the payout dollar amount to doctors, that price was figured out before it passed through congress. Many doctors decided not to accept insurance from the ACA plans due to the low payout, the networks ended up being even smaller than originally thought. Some doctors decided to group up to help share the ancillary costs of billing, scheduling, paperwork etc.... So instead of having 1-3 doctors at an office, my old doctors office switched to having over 8 doctors, and service went downhill alot, with zero personal attention. They can't even remember me, or my name without looking at their computer. Luckily I have insurance through my company, and opted to supplement it with a health savings plan. Now I go to a new doctors office with 2 doctors, that can actually schedule me within a reasonable amount of time, and know me everytime I visit. But from an unbiased and objective standpoint, I do believe it was a bald faced lie. Also, part of it you didn't mention was also "you can keep your plan" which was also not true. It was known, since before the ACA passed into law, that all health plans would have to have certain minimum requirements, like yearly doctors visits, certain tests, and other coverage etc.... So people on lower plans, without those ala-carte options, wouldn't be able to keep their plans. That had nothing to do with republicans and was well known and argued, which is why Obama had to make that statement, which was also a bald faced lie. So I hope you caught a glimpse that Obama was just another politician, the same as the rest of them. Democrats and Republican's are all dirty liars, even Hillary is corrupt, just look at how she did Bernie Sanders dirty. She rigged the DNC in her favor. She's just much better at making people think she's a good person. I don't blame people for saying "I voted for the lesser of two evils" because that's what it feels like to vote for politicians.

The only thing Republicans affected are the viability of the exchanges, the risk to insurance carriers by defunding the fallback insurance for the insurance companies if a plan provider failed(Risk Corridors). This created less competition and perhaps increased insurance premiums and deductibles, even though they were going up anyways due to the lack of profits in the first few years of the ACA. They also I believe are removing the individual mandate, which will affect the insurance premiums again, however, this mandate was never enforced before anyways. There was even an opt-out checkbox on your tax paperwork that allows you to opt-out of the individual mandate due to "financial burden" which was very vague so it was meant to be unenforced. In any case, they never got enough young and healthy people to sign up for the exchanges to offset the older and sick patients. Many of the co-ops failed because of this, and having more risk corridor funds to help them mitigate the risk of staying on the exchanges wasn't go to help them stay. They're in business to make money, so until they can significantly offset the sick people with healthy people, they'll stay out. The ratio of enrollees have to add up before they'll come back to the exchanges. The only way to do that is to FORCE young and healthy individuals to sign up for $100-$150/month plans. And it has to be heavily enforced.

 
Ajit Pai thinks american corporations have good moral values.

In my experience an American Corporation would lobby for legalization of murder if it thought killing people would earn them $1,000 per kill.

Unfortunately jerks like Ajit would legalize it because of the massive bribes.
 
The FCC again hopes that ISPs won’t block specific websites when the new plan is in effect. However it can happen, and when it does occur, the explanation says that customers and the FTC will voice their concerns, which should persuade companies to change their policies (right?).
Click to expand...

This is based on the assumption that the FTC can only monitor, alert, and complain. Last I knew the FTC can do more than just that. It can file cases in court to mandate compliance with laws and regulations.

First:
The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) is an independent agency of the United States government, established in 1914 by the Federal Trade Commission Act. Its principal mission is the promotion of consumer protection and the elimination and prevention of anticompetitive business practices, such as coercive monopoly.

The FTC enforces federal consumer protection laws that prevent fraud, deception and unfair business practices. The Commission also enforces federal antitrust laws that prohibit anticompetitive mergers and other business practices that could lead to higher prices, fewer choices, or less innovation.

As with subpoenas, the recipient of a civil investigative demand may file a petition to limit or quash. Likewise, the Commission may petition a federal district court to enforce the CID in the event of noncompliance, although permissible venue is narrower in a CID enforcement action than in a subpoena enforcement case.

https://www.ftc.gov/about-ftc/what-we-do/enforcement-authority
 


The blocking of bittorrent apps is also because many companies only know of the illicit usage of such apps for things like piracy, or illegal indecent materials. It's what they are told it is about, and "any other used be ______ because it don't count/exist."



Correct, Net Neutrality did nothing in its promise to expand the availability, or competition to consumers. But, yet, when we the consumer was being told of the benefits of Net Neutrality, we was told about how Internet access was going to expand in availability.

It's hard to expand competition in areas where municipalities can and actually do, lock down the amount of lines and providers to one. (the mess of cabling being one of the reasons.) Other options are also insanely priced for what they offer, such as dish/satellite... in which also can be denied usage for "aesthetic" reasons. (i.e. apartments wanting clean roof lines and therefore no dishes allowed.) This leaves dial-up (S-L-O-W, and harder to find ISPs that offer the service) and DSL (also has limits, even with Fiber to neighborhoods, on range.) 4G providers? Yeah, I suppose, but still not all that cheap. Line-of-sight microwave/radio? Expensive too. Choices are rather limited, and Net Neutrality never dealt with pricing of the general services themselves.



To quantify, one needs access to records. despite FOI, there are gov't sources that react slow, balk, and even in cases, find excuses to not honor it. Even if that doesn't happen, it doesn't mean that many would-be start-ups even got that far, or have records to share publicly. Although... Gov't regulation tends to shut down more would-be businesses before they get started and shut others down in some arenas.
 


Seriously? Obama is on record, in his own voice, stating how we could keep our existing insurance if we wanted to. Only to have that insurance policy removed and no longer available, even to people already using it, all because it didn't meet the new ACA standards. Which by the way... ACA/Obama Care [Gov't Regulation in action] did more to raise prices, AND deductibles at the same time, than letting the market do its own thing. Oh wait... Obama must have followed Pelosi's lead and never bothered to read the huge page-count bill and just signed it into law, and then maybe read it afterwards. Is that it? Please explain what he meant. Please explain how he must have been deceived on "keeping your own insurance" instead of deceiving. BTW: I got news for you, Democrats are just as guilty when it comes to lying to the public.

Mind you, I'm not against legal and Constitutional regulation, it's excessive regulation that does more to hurt than help. Then again some groups out there fight and win against regulations like having sanitation and sterilization levels equivalent to hospitals and other clinics that do medical procedures.


Money for the Medicaid program isn't free btw, unless you have no job, are at such a low wage level you don't pay taxes, including FICA, or get paid under the table. Medicaid is paid for by taxes... and government debt, which costs extra. BTW: Medicaid AND Medicare don't pay what you see on your bill. Most of it actually gets written off, outside of your responsibility to pay.
 
Ajit keeps talking about the "heavy handed" regulations from 2015, but that is extremely misleading.

The actual Net Neutrality rules he's talking about went into effect in 2010 (coincidentally, internet access has improved A LOT since 2010) after repeated fines from the FTC proved utterly ineffective at preventing anti-competitive and privacy-violating practices of telecoms at the time. It turns out that the FTC is very toothless, and a $10,000 or $100,000 fine means absolutely nothing to a company who makes tens or even hundreds of millions of dollars more per year using an unethical and illegal business practice. At that point its just the cost of doing business.
After those basic regulations were passed, Verizon sued to have them withdrawn as they asserted that the FCC did not have the power to regulate the internet. The case was in courts for four years until 2014 until verizon finally won and it was determined that the FCC could not enforce net neutrality rules. My understanding is that the rules were still in effect for those four years whilst that case was being decided. In the very least ISPs were on their very best behavior as they tried to avoid doing anything that could tip the scales against them.
Coincidentally that period in 2014-2015 is when wired ISPs started rolling out previously-unheard of data caps, and there was a lot of drama about Netflix needing to raise their prices to double-pay every ISP "interconnect fees" to get the bandwith that they were already paying for.
When it was determined that the FCC could not create neutrality rules they began work to reclassify internet providers under Title II of the communications act of 1934, which would put ISPs in the same category as things like telephones and allow them to create rules to make sure all the service providers play with each other, once again like telephones.

The truly scary thing about all this though, is that once an FCC regulation gets overturned, it can -never- be reinstated by a future administration. A future FCC wouldn't be able to undo the damage, nor will there even be the threat of regulation to help convince ISPs to behave.
ISPs will be truly unaccountable, which is a situation we haven't actually seen before.
 
The only thing that i see them using as 'evidence' that these things such as blocking websites and speed throttling is that there was no evidence of this occurring before the Obama Admin. yes maybe not in the past, but this is now, not the past. we would be putting that power in the ISPs hands for very little to no gain. i don't trust that at all and neither does anyone else (except for those who are deceived by those who will only gain from it (yes im talking about you Verizon, Time Warner, Etc.)). not to mention it wasn't until the Obama Admin that Cat5e became standard (by force of course), that's the only thing that has kept the neck of the woods my friends and family live in to even be able to get anything greater than 2-5mbps internet connection. this is just another concern i have, will losing Net Neutrality limit peoples ability to upgrade or even receive an internet connection?? just my own thoughts, I'm just curious who shares these thought as well.
 

Unlike the FCC, the FTC can't make rules - only enforce existing laws.


The idea that FTC is a better place to regulate telecoms and cable companies is ludicrous. If you want them to go after a company, you need to show they're in violation of a law. So, now we'd a bunch of laws passed, if we wanted the FTC to pick up the slack left in the absence of net neutrality. FCC was created for a reason.
 
“The response doesn’t speak exactly to the original statement.”

Politicians and lawyers do this. It's called blowing smoke. It usually means that you're on to something they don't want you to be onto, they throw it out like a 'shiny red ball' and hope you'll let go and chase something else. Their kind doesn't deal in straight answers, and the harder you press, the slipperier they get.
 

I have no doubt that's what Comcast would say, but they know there are legit uses and surely rolled out throttling of it for their own economic reasons.


I don't recall any such promise about availability of internet access or competition among ISPs. You're either mis-remembering, or perhaps this is a willful bit of revisionist history.


What tends to happen (or so I've read) is that state legislatures get bribed by big telcos and cable companies to block municipalities from starting their own co-ops or engaging independent ISPs.


Since you don't have any evidence to the contrary, you're just assuming this must be true? You need to do better than that.
 
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