“The Federal Communications Commission has authority under current law to ensure that broadband access providers, today mainly cable and phone companies, do not discriminate against Web-based providers of content, search services, and applications, FCC commissioner Michael Copps said last Tuesday,” Ted Hearn reports for Multichannel News. “Speaking to reporters, Copps stressed that the agency needed to go beyond hortatory policy principles and adopt enforceable rules that guarantee network neutrality and shield Internet companies without wires into millions of homes from potential misconduct by companies that do.”
“FCC chairman Kevin Martin, in contrast, has favored a deregulatory approach. Last August, he won agency adoption of nonbinding principles related to net neutrality, but he has not endorsed the need for specific agency rules that Copps wants. The FCC has classified both cable-modem and digital subscriber line service as information services not subject to common-carrier rules that come with nondiscrimination requirements,” Hearn reports. “Although some have questioned FCC authority to impose network neutrality on information service providers under Title I of the Communications Act, the U.S. Supreme Court issued a majority opinion last June indicating otherwise. ‘The [FCC] remains free to impose special regulatory duties on facilities-based [Internet Service Providers] under its Title I ancillary jurisdiction,’ Justice Clarence Thomas wrote in National Cable & Telecommunications Association v. Brand X Internet Services.”
“The House Judiciary Committee was to vote last Thursday on a bill sponsored by its chairman, Rep. James Sensenbrenner (R-Wis.), that would punish network neutrality violations under federal antitrust laws. On June 20, the Senate Commerce Committee is likely to vote on bill sponsored by Sen. Olympia Snowe (R-Maine), Byron Dorgan (D-N.D.) and Daniel Inouye (D-Hawaii) that would, among other things, ban broadband providers from demanding fees from Web players in exchange for priority treatment of their traffic,” Hearn reports.
Full article here.
Don’t use your iISP’s email. Get a free one from Gmail,Yahoo, or the many others out there. This way it will make it easy to switch your ISP.
wow. something good happened. Keep internet access Free.
Unless you like how China controls the internet access.
I had to look up ‘hortatory’
yeah, but what about all that heavy breathing in the background of that video?
I would prefer providers to do as they like and customers to choose between ISPs.
All the government has to do in such a market is stoping monopolies and requiring ISPs to publicly state which sites they are blocking/slowing (for example, as a required part of their advertisements).
This will give people the CHOICE as in, the choice to choose the ISP they think is right for them.
Information and free markets, that’s what you need. Not some bogus net neutrality that only increases governmental influence!
Let the market decide!
I too had to look up “horatory”. For the rest of you:
hortatory |ˈhôrtəˌtôrē| – adjective – tending or aiming to exhort : the central bank relied on hortatory messages and voluntary compliance.
for some reason, MW <> horatory
Loved the MDN take, especially that part in the parentheses.
ak1808:
Great idea in theory. The problem is that in many areas broadband ISPs are a monopoly. Where I live, I cannot get DSL, so I have to have broadband from my cable provider. Yeah, satellite is always an option, but at twice the price.
Even if your DSL ISP is not the phone company, the DSL lines are still operated by the phone company. What is to stop the phone company from impairing all VOIP except their own?
Monolpolies suck. They need to be regulated.
i do like your idea about mandatory public disclosure of filtering.
Let the “market” decide, huh?
Like HDTV?
Like electrical power production and distribution?
Like natural gas?
Like toll roads? Yeah, why should one have to pay for roads they don’t even drive on?!
Get a grip–there is NO SUCH THING as a free market–and history is FULL of examples of how bad an idea such a thing really is.
Oh, yeah–health care. Almost forgot.
People with money (real money) who try to tell you about “free markets” are only trying to do one thing–steal a bigger piece.
Why is there only one decent way to get broadband?
Support net neautrality!
Yes on MDN’s take: MSIE is the antithesis of “net neutrality” in principle and in fact.
I don’t know how content providers get away with it.
If Net Neutrality had not existed 3-4 years ago, Apple could have been crippled in it’s launch of the iTMS. Your ISP, partnered with M$ could have easily directed you to a WMA site. It’s about greed by the ISP’s. The biggest pimp for this is AT&T (nee SBC).
ak1808:
“Let the Market decide!”
Precisely… which is why ‘Net Neutrality is so essential. An oligarchy of telecoms will NOT just sit back and “let the market decide”. They will influence the market to their benefit. The essence of fair play in the marketplace, essential for a free market to thrive, would evaporate without the protections of ‘Net Neutrality.
Free markets don’t just happen. There have to be rules in place. If ever there was an important turning point in the history of the internet and its potential, this is it.
What the fsck does this have to do with Macs or Apple? Nothing a fscking thing. MDN, stick to what you (supposedly) know about – Macintosh news.
Net Neutrality has more to do with network services being delivered across networks owned by different entities (http://www.lightreading.com/document.asp?doc_id=95707).
Would you want to be forced to push services of another company across a network you built at no charge? I don’t think so.
Get a fscking clue, MDN.
“hortatory”
All this time I thought it meant, “bring pain to a British loyalist.”
“Would you want to be forced to push services of another company across a network you built at no charge? I don’t think so.”
Hey zupchuck! They are not pushing anything for free. They are being paid by the the users to access the interent and by the content providers to use the internet backbone.
What net neutrality does is say that an ISP cannot control what packets go through their network and from where.
The market cannot be fair when ISPs are in both the business of the pipe and the content. This gives them and their strategic partners an unfair advantage.
Oh and another thing. If the ISP’s in a fair market want to charge more for more bandwith, that is fine. This bill will not keep them for charging fairly for bandwith. It will keep them from controlling the content running across their network.
This would be like the cable company charging NBC extra so that their signal comes in clearer than ABC. Or blocking your access to NBC at set times to increase the ratings for their own new startup network.
MacDailyNews should change it’s name to MacUsersDailyNews.
It is a news service for Mac users, not daily news about Macs.
Then again, if you don’t like the coverage, go somewhere else.
Net neutrality is absolutely ESSENTIAL. The Internet will be an absolute mess without it. ISP’s get pissed at companies like….let’s say…..iTMS because they have tens of thousands of their subscribers going to iTMS and purchasing/downloading music. This eats up bandwidth. What they want to do is charge iTMS (just an example) a fee for using up so much of their bandwidth. The same would go for Google as well. Your ISP wants compensation for it’s bandwidth. Some peoples ISPs already do something called packet-throttling. If you’re “tagged” as a heavy downloader, they start throttling you – slowing down your connection speed to save bandwidth. Not only that, but your download is not exactly a direct connection. The packets have to hop through the Internet to get to you. Well, the people at those “Hop Spots” that relay the data toward you (other ISPs) are also complaining about not being compensated for bandwidth usage. If net neutrality is not made into some form of law, things are going to suck – BIG TIME.
If we are going to need net neutrality who is going to pay for it?….
We are. One way or another, we will. But net neutrality is already going to kill our already very uninnovative networks. Compared to Asia and most of Europe, we are a backwater.
Who’s going to pull the fiber if they have to give up the revenue for passing the traffic on it? If you want more bandwidth, pay for it.
If you want to run your SlingWeb, pay for the pipe.