“The Federal Communications Commission approved the so- called net-neutrality rules by a vote of three to two today,” Shields reports. “Supporters argued that Internet providers, which also own some of the content they deliver online, may interfere with videos and services owned by others such as Google Inc. ‘Today’s decision will help preserve the free and open nature of the Internet while encouraging innovation, protecting consumer choice and defending free speech,’ President Barack Obama said in a statement released today by the White House.”
“Stephen Wozniak, the co-founder of Apple Inc. who traveled to Washington from his home near San Francisco to attend today’s FCC vote, told reporters after the meeting that the FCC should have passed more restrictive rules,” Shields reports. “For example, Internet-service providers may block online consumers from receiving movies streamed by Netflix, forcing users to watch movies owned by the telecommunications and telephone companies, Wozniak said. ‘Every normal person in the United States knows this,’ he said.”
“Commissioner Meredith Atwell Baker, one of two Republicans to vote against the regulations, called the rules an overreach. ‘There is no factual basis to support government intervention,’ she said. “The majority’s approach will inhibit the ability of networks to freely evolve and experiment,'” Shields reports. “Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the Senate’s Republican leader, called the vote ‘a first step in controlling how Americans use the Internet.’ Representative Fred Upton, a Michigan Republican who is to become chairman of the Energy and Commerce Committee when Congress convenes next year, said he would work ‘to strike down the FCC’s brazen effort to regulate the Internet.'”
Shields reports, “‘The FCC does not have the legal authority to issue these rules,’ Robert McDowell, the other Republican commissioner at the FCC, said during the meeting today. ‘This new effort will fail in court.’ Texas Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison, the top Republican on the Senate Commerce Committee, said in an e-mailed statement she would ask Congress to revoke the rules, calling them ‘an unprecedented power-grab by the unelected members’ of the FCC.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Note: Back in April of this year, a U.S. federal appeals court ruled that the Federal Communications Commission does not have the legal authority to impose so-called “net neutrality” regulations. Read more via CNET: Court: FCC has no power to regulate Net neutrality – April 6, 2010
Well now the gov’t has finally managed to get their hands on the Internet. The net neutrality thing is a red herring. This is all about control.
You know if Comcast pulls traffic throttling crap consumers can switch and boycott. You don’t have that option when the gov’t controls the pipes.
Bad day.
Hilarious, Fredo! You’re smart. Not like everyone says.
But the government would never do anything bad to the internet. They are here to protect and take care of us. They are going to pay my mortgage when I lose my job.
Some of you don’t get it. Even if we agree that NN is a good thing, after that what else do you think the gov’t could or would do? Once the gov’t has control they won’t give it up.
Ubermac
“If you give one government agency one little finger, soon they will have your arm and twist it.”
Exactly.
Urban B
“I swear whoever wrote the algorithm for autocorrect was just having fun.”
You are not the only one who believes that…
@Really
In a way yes. and its been that way for a long time. Legal immigrants though.. not illegal.
you CAN come to the US legally… and join the military, and you will gain citizenship from it.
What was mentioned above is that Republicans are against this process… not true. They are against illegal immigrants getting this same ability to enlist and become citizens.
Same type of perk California wants to do. Illegal immigrants break the federal laws and come to California.. and get IN STATE tuition rates for college. yet someone right across the border in Oregon lets say.. has to pay out of state Tuition rates.
The primary problem with letting market sort everything out is that, with the exception of very few large metropolitan areas, where ISPs may be competing somewhat against each other, in America, ISP business is practically a monopoly. If an ISP decides to throttle (or block) NetFlix traffic because they are selling you their own streaming service, there is pretty much nothing ANYONE (except few people living in large cities) can do about it. You’re pretty much stuck with your ISP, and even those who DO have an option, will more than likely face the same throttling from others. ISPs of today all offer entire packages (phone, internet, TV). They share interests, and compete together against Apple, Google and other companies offering streaming content. Since you can’t switch to Apple (or Google) as your ISP, you will simply HAVE to pay up to your ISP for decent speed from iTunes Store (or Apple, Netflix, Google will have to pay up to have throttling removed). And make no mistake, ISPs will be in the position to make that price high enough for you to make it cheaper to buy their own crappy streaming offering, rather than Apple’s.
Net Neutrality regulation will force ISPs to compete as dumb pipes, and not by leveraging their TV businesses. If it costs them more to provide enough bandwidth for streaming video, they’ll have to figure out how to cover that cost. I don’t mind paying for my bandwidth, as long as I know that what I have is what I’m paying for, i.e. 25Mbps down, 15Mbps up, regardless of who I’m getting that content from (that would be Verizon’s FiOS).
Thank you Predrag. Where I live, I have no choice in ISP providers. I have to use Cox. I can’t pick between several choices suck as Comcast, Verizon, etc. So, from where I stand, my ISP provider has a monopoly, and most other people are in this same situation as well. If Cox decides to throttle Netflix to make their crappy, expensive cable look better by comparison, I can’t go to another ISP to reflect my displeasure. I have to pay the extra charge to increase my bandwidth for Netflix, or buy their cable. The only way I could show my displeasure with them would be to cancel my internet, which is not as option. And if you think it won’t happen, just wait and see.
“FCC = Federal Communications Commission
Yeah, NO ONE uses the internet to communicate. Makes perfect sense.”
The difference is that in other communication systems, the government owns the airwaves. That isn’t the case with private networks.
Predrag
When you are right, you are right.
And when you are wrong, as in this time, you not only shoot from the hip, but you hit yourself in the balls.
Smaller towns that I service don’t have overlapping products. Some just have cable for video, phone for DSL, or maybe slow internet on the cable, no video from the Phone company but an agreement with Dish or DirecTV. If the small cable systems DO have decent internet (3 Mbps), they seldom have the system bandwidth to offer HD video. NN won’t change any of this. These systems are just happy to have the subs(scribers) they can get and WON’T do anything to lose them.
Not only that, but the bandwidth most smaller systems get are from their enemy, the Phone company. NN won’t affect their control over this bandwidth. In turn, Big Phone in smaller towns can’t afford fiber to the nodes to offer anything better than DSL. This is typical for towns under 5,000 people. There is not enough money to upgrade in this economy.
But to base a decision to regulate the internet on what a small percent of the country needs is ridiculous. This has nothing to do with helping small, rural systems. It has everything to do with getting votes in large, urban areas.
Medium size towns are just opposite. It is still easy to build out new plant (if the local economy is good) and make good money IF the subs are treated fair. These markets offer cable, DSL, some fiber, satellite, and wireless. Size is usually 10,000 to 75,000.
Larger cities can vary depending on location and demographics. Phil Fry may live in an area that has such piss-poor ROI that the ISP is scared to invest anymore until the tax structure, NN, and health-care are ironed out. Unfortunately, these are all thing that affect business decisions, which is why Democrats can’t comprehend their effects on the economy.
Seriously, this is nothing more than a populist witch-hunt used to get votes. What a pity.
Now, everyone who has had their internet service throttled, please raise your hand.
Two problems:
Nothing about net neutrality helps those in areas without choices for broadband. It may actually slow that down by requiring any new development to cover all content equally, so if that content is going to be delivered well, the initial infrastructure investment would be enormous. Smaller firms attempting to provide a more basic service so poor kids can do their homework (for example) won’t be able to because the provider won’t be allowed to block bandwidth killers like Netflix and YouTube… Which poor kids have no business logging onto in the first place.
And that leads to my second problem. People arre going apoplectic over paying an extra buck and half for more, higher quality, and faster delivered entertainment. TV shows, folks! Granted, there are other examples, but this is the one that got under everyones’s saddle.
Although, I agree with the original assessment that the court will, yet again, stop this if Congress doesn’t get to it first, so it may all be moot.
@ Towertone
I live in a town of 15,000. We have two choices: dsl or cable. The dsl is reliable, but slow. The cable is not so reliable and the prices have increased over 500% since 2000.
I also disagree with your statement “to base a decision to regulate the internet on what a small percent of the country needs” since the US ranks 35th in the world for broadband speeds. As of the 1st quarter of 2010, only 57% of the internet connections in the country had access at better than 2 Mbps. (This data is based on server reports from Akamai.) The majority of the country has slower access – and it’s not improving. The same data shows a decline of 2.4% year over year from 2009 in access speeds.
8^þ
1) Those numbers are skewed. It is silly to take a country the size of America and compare it to a smaller nation. Take the larger urban areas and go out the appropriate distance to equal another country and get your average that way.
2) NN will not change anything about bandwidth or speed, except to possibly slow its deployment down. Depends on what the FCC does from here on out.
3) “the prices have increased over 500% since 2000.”
the prices of what? Did you have HD video in 2000? Did you have a DVR? Did you have as many channels? Were the per sub prices anywhere near as high as what the networks and Hollywood are charging now? Did you pay for locals? Did you have phone? Internet? What exactly went up by that astronomical amount? NOT ONE OF OUR SYSTEMS HAS GONE UP MORE THAT 50% FOR BASIC. Our profit margins are slimmer now for video because of satellite, Verizon and ATT.
But I am curious. If a “basic” plan cost $30.00 in 2000, how much is that now? And who pays that much for that shit?
Believe what you want, folks, but the biggest growth for cable in the past decade has been internet, video has held its own, and phone service is a loss-leader. NOW tell me ISPs are going to go fsck their customers out of bandwidth.
What surprises me is how many Apple fans are against net neutrality.
We need net neutrality because most of the ISPs are also content providers. These companys are in direct competition with Apple. These companys want to charge both Apple and their customers for the bandwidth.
If you think that I am wrong then consider this. You pay $60 to $150 per month for cable or sattelite television. Yet you are still watching commercials that are paid for by the networks that produce the shows that you watch.
When cable was first introduced, the promise of it was no more commercials. Yet that never happened. You are paying twice for content. You should not have to pay twice. But you gladly do and I shake my head in wonderment.
And to those of you that say that we have a choice of ISPs, and can switch if we do not like the rates of the one the we are using. I don’t know what fantasy land you live in, but I live in the US. In the US, everyone really has only four choices for high speed Internet service. The telephone company, the cable company, or one the two satellite services. Not much choice their. Ironically, all of them are competing with Apple to provide content.
I do not know about you, but Apple has treated me as a customer a lot better than the cable and telephone companies. They deserve our support of net neutrality so that we do not fall into the same trap that we did with cable TV.
You scum bag Democrats are behind that this? This is one more nail in the coffin of Freedom in the US! Screw you foreigners who chime in. Go to hell.
Should read The Law by Frederick Bastiat.
Spells out freedom perfectly.
http://www.amazon.com/The-Law-ebook/dp/B001B5VPXY/ref=tmm_kin_title_0?ie=UTF8&m=AG56TWVU5XWC2&qid=1292986263&sr=8-1
I love my Apple products. We truly pray for our freedom from you commies every waking moment. 2012 can’t come soon enough from this nightmare and assault on humanity.
Sorry, BSOD, but you, as many others, don’t have a clue where the money goes to for cable expenses.
It ain’t profit and big salaries, I can guaranDAMtee you that.
(BTW,ever hear the one about how Social Security was supposed to be set up as individual accounts when it began?)
Never let a vibrant free market go unhindered by stupid meddling bureaucrats.
That’s four choices, which is 3 higher than it started with, and not as high as it is likely to go.
This stuff isn’t free. It isn’t cheap, either. Are we really to expect to get this vast expansion of content and speed without having to pay for it? I find it silly how much complaining there is about rising cable prices, as an example. How many stations were there in 1999? How many are there now?
The other part of requiring industries to do x,y, and z is that it never lowers costs. Never.
Perpetually shortsighted knee-jerk Libs and anyone else who’s confused about this NN bullshit, read the book below and apply it to NN and wake the fsck up, finally. Stop being easily-manipulated pawns of control-freak bureaucrats:
The good guys, the bad guys and the first amendment: Free speech vs. fairness in broadcasting by Fred Friendly
It’s NOT “neutral.”
Read the language for a change, Lib lambs.
Those who trust government deserve to be enslaved.
By JOHN FUND
The Federal Communications Commission’s new “net neutrality” rules, passed on a partisan 3-2 vote yesterday, represent a huge win for a slick lobbying campaign run by liberal activist groups and foundations. The losers are likely to be consumers who will see innovation and investment chilled by regulations that treat the Internet like a public utility.
There’s little evidence the public is demanding these rules, which purport to stop the non-problem of phone and cable companies blocking access to websites and interfering with Internet traffic. Over 300 House and Senate members have signed a letter opposing FCC Internet regulation, and there will undoubtedly be even less support in the next Congress.
Yet President Obama, long an ardent backer of net neutrality, is ignoring both Congress and adverse court rulings, especially by a federal appeals court in April that the agency doesn’t have the power to enforce net neutrality. He is seeking to impose his will on the Internet through the executive branch. FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski, a former law school friend of Mr. Obama, has worked closely with the White House on the issue. Official visitor logs show he’s had at least 11 personal meetings with the president.
The net neutrality vision for government regulation of the Internet began with the work of Robert McChesney, a University of Illinois communications professor who founded the liberal lobby Free Press in 2002. Mr. McChesney’s agenda? “At the moment, the battle over network neutrality is not to completely eliminate the telephone and cable companies,” he told the website SocialistProject in 2009. “But the ultimate goal is to get rid of the media capitalists in the phone and cable companies and to divest them from control.”
A year earlier, Mr. McChesney wrote in the Marxist journal Monthly Review that “any serious effort to reform the media system would have to necessarily be part of a revolutionary program to overthrow the capitalist system itself.” Mr. McChesney told me in an interview that some of his comments have been “taken out of context.” He acknowledged that he is a socialist and said he was “hesitant to say I’m not a Marxist.”
For a man with such radical views, Mr. McChesney and his Free Press group have had astonishing influence. Mr. Genachowski’s press secretary at the FCC, Jen Howard, used to handle media relations at Free Press. The FCC’s chief diversity officer, Mark Lloyd, co-authored a Free Press report calling for regulation of political talk radio.
Free Press has been funded by a network of liberal foundations that helped the lobby invent the purported problem that net neutrality is supposed to solve. They then fashioned a political strategy similar to the one employed by activists behind the political speech restrictions of the 2002 McCain-Feingold campaign-finance reform bill. The methods of that earlier campaign were discussed in 2004 by Sean Treglia, a former program officer for the Pew Charitable Trusts, during a talk at the University of Southern California. Far from being the efforts of genuine grass-roots activists, Mr. Treglia noted, the campaign-finance reform lobby was controlled and funded by foundations like Pew.
“The idea was to create an impression that a mass movement was afoot,” he told his audience. He noted that “If Congress thought this was a Pew effort, it’d be worthless.” A study by the Political Money Line, a nonpartisan website dealing with issues of campaign funding, found that of the $140 million spent to directly promote campaign-finance reform in the last decade, $123 million came from eight liberal foundations.
After McCain-Feingold passed, several of the foundations involved in the effort began shifting their attention to “media reform”—a movement to impose government controls on Internet companies somewhat related to the long-defunct “Fairness Doctrine” that used to regulate TV and radio companies. In a 2005 interview with the progressive website Buzzflash, Mr. McChesney said that campaign-finance reform advocate Josh Silver approached him and “said let’s get to work on getting popular involvement in media policy making.” Together the two founded Free Press.
(continued below)
Free Press and allied groups such as MoveOn.org quickly got funding. Of the eight major foundations that provided the vast bulk of money for campaign-finance reform, six became major funders of the media-reform movement. (They are the Pew Charitable Trusts, Bill Moyers’s Schumann Center for Media and Democracy, the Joyce Foundation, George Soros’s Open Society Institute, the Ford Foundation, and the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation.) Free Press today has 40 staffers and an annual budget of $4 million.
These wealthy funders pay for more than publicity and conferences. In 2009, Free Press commissioned a poll, released by the Harmony Institute, on net neutrality. Harmony reported that “more than 50% of the public argued that, as a private resource, the Internet should not be regulated by the federal government.” The poll went on to say that since “currently the public likes the way the Internet works . . . messaging should target supporters by asking them to act vigilantly” to prevent a “centrally controlled Internet.”
To that end, Free Press and other groups helped manufacture “research” on net neutrality. In 2009, for example, the FCC commissioned Harvard University’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society to conduct an “independent review of existing information” for the agency in order to “lay the foundation for enlightened, data-driven decision making.”
Considering how openly activist the Berkman Center has been on these issues, it was an odd decision for the FCC to delegate its broadband research to this outfit. Unless, of course, the FCC already knew the answer it wanted to get.
The Berkman Center’s FCC- commissioned report, “Next Generation Connectivity,” wound up being funded in large part by the Ford and MacArthur foundations. So some of the same foundations that have spent years funding net neutrality advocacy research ended up funding the FCC-commissioned study that evaluated net neutrality research.
The FCC’s “National Broadband Plan,” released last spring, included only five citations of respected think tanks such as the International Technology and Innovation Foundation or the Brookings Institution. But the report cited research from liberal groups such as Free Press, Public Knowledge, Pew and the New America Foundation more than 50 times.
So the “media reform” movement paid for research that backed its views, paid activists to promote the research, saw its allies installed in the FCC and other key agencies, and paid for the FCC research that evaluated the research they had already paid for. Now they have their policy. That’s quite a coup.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703886904576031512110086694.html
TowerTone,
“I have set aside 2 weeks in January just to do the paperwork and filings to drop some paths along with the towers and renew several others. I am NOT looking forward to it.”
“I feel your pain.” <read in your best Bill Clinton voice>
It is amazing how many people are calling Net Neutrality supporters Liberal. It is childish name calling with the sole intent of intimidating. To that, I say; “I’m rubber, your glue. Whatever you say bounces off of me and sticks to you.”
I have never voted for a Democrat my entire life. I have always voted for a Republican. So the name calling does not work. What does work is a rational argument.
I support Net Neutrality because I am tired of seeing companies monopolize something, like cable TV, and then screw the customer. Lets be honest, how many of you are happy with cable TV? They provide you with so called HD TV, but it is nothing but fuzzy pixelated crap. The content I get from Apple is near the same quality as Blu-Ray.
The cell phone providers do the same thing. They are selling so called “4g”. It is not 4g, it is still 3g. Sure it is faster, but it is still 3g.
Bottle companies do it too. Why are you paying Coca Cola $1.50 for a bottle of Dasani, the same price as a bottle of Coke, when all it is is tap water?
If you think that the ISPs are not going to screw all of us, and I mean Apple too, then you need to read this article on Wired:
http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2010/12/carriers-net-neutrality-tiers/all/1
Download the PowerPoint presentation too. It’s an eye opener. Do you really want to pay more just so that you can access Facebook? That’s what they are proposing.
BSOD,
It’s painfully obvious that you have no idea WTF you’re babbling about.