FCC Declares Intention To Enforce Net Neutrality 343
Unequivocal writes "The FCC chairman, Julius Genachowski, told Congress today that the 'Federal Communications Commission plans to keep the Internet free of increased user fees based on heavy Web traffic and slow downloads. ...Genachowski... told The Hill that his agency will support "net neutrality" and go after anyone who violates its tenets. "One thing I would say so that there is no confusion out there is that this FCC will support net neutrality and will enforce any violation of net neutrality principles," Genachowski said when asked what he could do in his position to keep the Internet fair, free and open to all Americans. The statement by Genachowski comes as the commission remains locked in litigation with Comcast. The cable provider is appealing a court decision by challenging the FCC's authority to penalize the company for limiting Web traffic to its consumers.' It looks like the good guys are winning, unless the appeals court rules against the FCC."
Re:I guess Canada should be on watch (Score:5, Informative)
Canada doesn't give two shits about what the FCC has to say about net neutrality.
The CRTC has been actively working against the entire idea of net neutrality, and the very few providers that don't have to answer to the CRTC perform lovely things like AD insertion/replacement and falsifying DNS, not to mention throttling competitor's VoIP service (but, of course, not their own).
Canada has the sort of internet you find in the 3rd world. The only difference being not the price, nor the bandwidth (the price and average available bandwidth is in-line with most 3rd internet world pricing) but rather the caps on the service (most 3rd world countries have somewhat smaller caps).
Way to go, Canada!
FCC Network Neutrality Principles (Score:5, Informative)
The FCC's Network Neutrality Principles [fcc.gov] are:
Neither of the principles you state are, as such, strictly necessary to meet those principles.
That being said, discrimination by source or destination could in some cases violated the principles (e.g., if an ISP that is also a content provider outright blocks access to traffic trying to reach competing content providers over its network, or blocks all port 80 requests, or all requessts that appear to use the HTTP protocol, going to their non-business subscribers IPs.) Likewise, discrimination by protocol might in some cases violate the protocol (indeed, the last example of discrimination by source or destination is also a discrimination by protocol.) Whether deprioritizing rather than outright blocking traffic using certain ports or protocols would violate the principles depends on the circumstances; presumably, deprioritization that made it impractical to use the protocol for its principal purpose would be problematic.
Re:Careful what you wish for... (Score:5, Informative)
The problem is, ISP's are already doing it based on protocol, and it's bad. If your internet service is provided by a cable company, they just may slow down video protocols as perceived competition on their own bandwidth, but allow voice ones through to take a stab at phone companies.
On the other hand, if you have a DSL through a phone provider, they just may slow down voice/audio protocols for the same reasons, but allow video ones through to take a stab at cable companies.
There was a LOT of competitions, back biting, and attempts at legislation between both of these types of companies a few years back, I remember TONS of commercials with each side trying to get the people on board. Both sides pretty much supported the concept of government intervention to keep the other out of their business while allowing their side to get into the others. I'm generally against most government intervention.
In most cases, a competitor will spring up when one type of industry is screwing the people at large that doesn't screw the people at large, at least at first. Unfortunately in communications industries those competitors are few and far between.
I would LOVE to start my own cable company that simply pushed analog and QAM TV without the need for converter boxes and was utterly lacking in all but absolutely require encryption. I think the public would love to use their own TV tuners again and be able to build their MythTV boxes/use their Tivos without having to clear it with some mystical gate keeper.
Re:principles vs. law (Score:5, Informative)
Specificially the preemption of franchising authority regulation of telecommunication services, and the elimination of most of the greedy/protective (depending on your political views) PSC boards.
The alternative is something they don't want, which is why they are trying to find some illiterate judge to declare the FCC impotent.
Re:principles vs. law (Score:5, Informative)
Presumably because Congress, by law, has given the FCC authority to regulate interstate and foreign communication to acheive policy aims set by Congress, including, for instance, direction "to preserve the vibrant and competitive free market that presently exists for the Internet" and "to promote the continued development of the Internet" and to "encourage the deployment on a reasonable and timely basis of advanced telecommunications capability to all Americans", and also because of the US Supreme Court ruling in Brand X, 545 U.S. 967 (2005) that "the Commission remains free to impose special regulatory duties on facilities-based ISPs under its Title I ancillary jurisdiction."
(Additional authority is cited in the FCC's Memorandum Opinion and Order [fcc.gov] in the Comcast case.)
No, there are net neutrality principles that the FCC has articulated that it believes are appropriate and necessary to acheive the mandates the FCC has been given by Congress with regard to the internet, and which it intends to use to guide its policymaking in that area.
True, principles, as such, have no binding force. The FCC Net Neutrality principles [fcc.gov], one should note, are essentially a statement of how the Commission intends to acheive the objectives set for it in law, using its existing statutory authority; they aren't asserted to be independent legal authority.
Anyone can take the FCC to court for anything they want; whether they can win or not is another matter.
simple (Score:3, Informative)
The stimulus bill that was passed requires any firm getting stimulus money for infrastructure upgrades, to follow the FCC's net neutrality tenets.
Shortfalls (Score:5, Informative)
I'm sure it's not in your opinion, but you're sadly oversimplifying or ignoring every use case and ignoring the drivers behind QoS in general. If you want something simplistic and turnkey, there's certainly products out there. Netequalizer springs to mind.
But hey, let's throw in a few simple examples:
HTTP downloads vs. Flash video streamed over HTTP. One is decidedly interactive (even if buffering certainly helps), the other one is decidedly non-interactive (even if faster = neater, naturally).
SIP telephony vs. SIP videoconferencing. Agnosticism per your definition would make the algorithm punish the SIP videocon.
Or, let's take an even simpler example: P2P. Rather than a few very hungry connections, you get a large number of connections pushing less data per connection.
One can always argue that service providers should provide enougb bandwidth so that they won't even have to prioritize data the first place. Nice in theory, hard (or simply uneconomic) in practice. Take a cable provider - with a limited upstream bandwidth per channel, you need some sort of fairness. Simple per-plug fairness works to some extent, but you don't really want to punish the puny amount of upstream data your average HTTP request would generate just because the same user is P2P'ing like there's no tomorrow. Makes for a bad user experience.
When we get to wireless, it gets even messier with the limited and shared upstream and downstream.
I could go on for a whie, but I believe the point has been made. It's not a case of "You simply XYZ" at all.
Re:The Good Guys? (Score:3, Informative)
Wrong. The FCC's original 1934 mandate included both the regulatory authority over the airwaves that had previously belonged to the Federal Radio Commission and that over wire communication that previously belonged to the Interstate Commerce Commission, so even if we're looking at their original jurisdiction and ignoring newer laws like the 1996 Telecommunications Act, the FCC has always had a broader mandate than the airwaves, and its always included communication over wires.
Assuming, for the sake of argument, that "net neutrality" was mostly an antitrust issue, and, further, assuming, again for the sake of argument, that this particular area of commerce isn't explicitly within the FCC's regulatory purview, that would make it a matter for the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), not the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC).
Re:Foundational concept (Score:3, Informative)
Use-based pricing (by maximum bandwidth or total transfer) doesn't even come close to violating any of the FCC's network neutrality principles. There is nothing non-neutral about paying for what you use.
Re:"good guys winning"? (Score:4, Informative)
The FCC is acting under general policy direction from Congress. The specifics aren't dictated by Congress, but then, if Congress wanted to dictate the specifics, they probably wouldn't create regulatory agencies in the first place.
Continuing to follow through on a policy statement made in 2005 that it has pursued by various means in the intervening time period is hardly a "whim".
Acting under legal authority articulated by the US Supreme Court (in Brand X in 2005) isn't "ignoring the rule of law."
Re:Careful what you wish for... (Score:4, Informative)
So, you wouldn't mind having telesurgery on a connection that wasn't protocol aware?
Are you shitting me?
I would never get any kind of telesurgery where the success of the surgery depended on specific latency and reliability promises over the Internet. Protocol-aware QoS isn't magic, it doesn't prevent packets from ever being dropped, or being delayed, or a router crashing and dropping the connection, and so on. You're telling me I'm betting my life on their traffic shaping algorithms? I wouldn't bet my life on that, and a hundred other assumptions that go into the net.
So, no, I would mind. In either case. Either stick to surgeries which don't have critical time constraints on each step so some lag is acceptable, have assistants present for anything that does, or use a communication medium a lot more direct and reliable than the damn internet!
Re:Cue complaints (Score:2, Informative)
It's not that simple. The 20% causing the congestion make the network unusable for other services, so that the others can't use the network to do what they want.
For example, VoIP telephone services are unusable if there is any significant amount of packet loss or jitter, or if latency is too high.
The 20% of the population using 90% of the bandwidth hurt the quality of the service of people who the network is really important to, because the people not using large amounts of bandwidth aren't simply sending as many bits as they can down the wire (like transferring bulk data); instead they are transferring small parcels of very important data.
And the moment providers start thinking about offering QoS services to prioritize these people's small 256-kilobit data streams for sending voice and video; the Bittorrent users are screaming bloody murder, and whining to the FCC about how X bid bad provider added a few minutes of extra time to their bulk download spree, how dare they!
Re:Port blocking is part of Net Neutraility! (Score:3, Informative)
Actually, it's "free rein" as in letting your horses run without restraint.
Yes, it can, can't it?
Re:Two-edged sword (Score:5, Informative)
Why was this modded insightful. It should be "-1 ignorant". There is virtually nothing factual or truthful about the parent post about the ICC, it is a rant from either an libertarian extremist or a far-right extremist. Personally, and without looking at the user's other posts, I vote for far-right with a patina of libertarianism. I say this because the poster appears to claim that the Republicans weren't really conservative. Apparently it seems he may have his own custom definition of conservative not shared by the rest of society.
The article for the ICC at Wikipedia is here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interstate_Commerce_Commission [wikipedia.org]
According to the parent, the ICC was formed after a dispute over four trucks, especially considering that the article states the ICC was formed in 1887 to regulate railroads. I'm fairly sure that interstate cargo transport would not have been done by ICE trucks. If they existed the existing roads would have not been passable, the relative unreliability of early ICE engines and vehicles is another factor to consider. Even better, in the 1970' and 1980's Congress started taking away powers from the ICC (many were probably just redistributed instead) and in 1995 the ICC was abolished by the Republicans in Congress. The remaining functions of the ICC were distributed to the Surface Transportation Board. Interestingly, the ICC was the model for many other federal agencies like the FCC, SEC, and FTC among others. Its hard to argue against the need for a functional SEC and FTC today at least in a credible manner.
While personally I would like more people, who are well informed to be involved in a constructive manner with the government. I prefer inactive, but informed individuals rather than people like the parent, who is badly misinformed or who even knows what they are spewing is untrue. While I'm not saying the parent does this, but acting like hooligans nonviolent or otherwise in order to obstruct the government helps no one, not even themselves.
Re:Let me say.... (Score:1, Informative)
Re:Two-edged sword (Score:3, Informative)
>>>If you compare what the USA pays per capita for that health care, compared to developed European countries
Yes and if you compare the QUALITY of the cheap "bargain basement" European care, you'll see why the USA is still the better health system. The European may save money, but at the cost of rationing services such that citizens have shitty results:
UK HEALTHCARE WAITING TIMES
8 months - cataract surgery
11 months- hip replacement
12 months- knee replacement
5 months - slipped disc
5 months - hernia repair
SOURCE - The BBC, May 2009
PROSTATE 5-YEAR CANCER SURVIVOR RATE
100%- United States
90% - Canada
77% - United Kingdom
MEP Daniel Hannan said in early August, "The worst thing to be is elderly under the UK Health System..... you will be denied care and left starving in wards." Another young woman asked the UK System for a PAP smear to test for cervical cancer. She was refused three years in a row. And then she developed cancer and died at age 25. In the United States she could have simply *paid* to get the PAP smear, found the early cysts, and survived.
Yeah U.S. is expensive. But it's also LIBERATED so nobody controls your health except yourself. No silk-suited bastard in parliament can say "no" or otherwise run your life. Look at my signature.