FCC Tosses Petition Challenging Its New Internet Regulations 133
A petition submitted to the FCC by several of the players (including AT&T, CenturyLink, and USTelecom) who would be most affected by the agency's recently asserted Internet regulatory powers has been rejected by the agency's leadership. The Internet providers, along with the CTIA trade association, asserted that the FCC's Open Internet order is aganst the public interest. Per The Verge, the Commission last Friday "denied the petition, issuing an order that states its classification of broadband internet as a telecommunications service "falls well within the Commission's statutory authority, is consistent with Supreme Court precedent, and fully complies with the Administrative Procedure Act."
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A victory for THE PEOPLE'S network
Since it's now the "People's Network" I guess AT&T, CenturyLink, and USTelecom should just power down all their gear and put employees on leave for a a couple of weeks, and tell the government to go pound sand.
Let's see how the "People's Network" gets along without them.
Strat
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Are you kidding? As long as there is any money at all to be made, they'll still be there. They were there way back when commercial traffic was still banned on half the links and for all but a .com domain.
Good (Score:5, Interesting)
It's time to hold the players big and small accountable for their oppressive actions. They should be providing a data pipe, period. No "priority" internally hosted services, no "doesn't count towards your cap" services, no throttling of competing services.
Perhaps more importantly, classifying broadband as telecommunications opens up the possibility of monopoly breakups in some of the markets where there is a serious lack of competition.
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No "priority" internally hosted services, no "doesn't count towards your cap" services
Ehhh. While a noble goal, I'm guessing you don't work in networking at a design level. If you have to leave your own network, you have to pay for the traffic you pull; that's even true for the largest ISPs. So there really is a good argument to be made for giving priority to (and ignoring data caps for) services on the provider network. If you disallow that sort of thing, then you'll be stepping on all the easiest ways to, for example, peer out big files during peak times. You'd also put a dent in netw
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If an ISP wants to throttle video, as long as they do it equally among all providers, that seems fair. Or to give preference to online gaming, that's fair too. As long as the ISP isn't picking and choosing, or asking for money to give a higher preference.
But that is 'picking and choosing', and it's not 'simply providing a pipe'. Why should my ISP get to decide that my neighbour's Skype conversation is more important than my multiplayer, if I'm paying for the connection?
Not to mention that there's a technical way around such measures. Have your multiplayer connection give the appearance of a Skype connection, and you're set.
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Agree completely.
By all means allow multiple levels of service. Let customers flag some traffic at their routers as high-priority which gets better latency guarantees, of course at a higher price. Then users playing games could choose to have super-low-latency connections for the stuff that matters.
I don't have a problem with ISPs having recommended one-click router settings either, or even making them defaults. By all means give the customer a router that auto-flags VOIP as high-priority and bittorrent
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Wasn't this part of IPv6 - that QoS was built into the protocol? So yes, you can mark traffic as high priority and be charged for it as appropriate? It's handled in the routers so it seems like a perfect opportunity to monetize a
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It is available in IPv4 and your ISP most likely uses it. They almost certainly strip the QoS flags off of your packets when they get them, however, and set them according to their own policies.
This isn't a technology issue - it is a policy issue.
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This would work but the processing needed on the ISP side is not trivial and they cannot even get traffic volume reporting right although I believe that is deliberate.
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Personally, I would rather just pay the $70/m for a dedicated 70/70 connection that I can run at 100% 24/7 with no congestion at all, other than on my own dedicated l
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But that is 'picking and choosing', and it's not 'simply providing a pipe'. Why should my ISP get to decide that my neighbour's Skype conversation is more important than my multiplayer, if I'm paying for the connection?
That's not what he's talking about. The problem is that the ISPs want to pick and choose between destinations, not protocols. For example, Comcast wants to give home subscribers a high-speed connection to certain video services which have paid big fees to Comcast (or better yet to Comcast's
Re:Good (Score:5, Interesting)
Network Neutrality doesn't mean that an ISP can't provide QoS and say "All video streaming packets get bumped ahead of e-mail packets." What it means is that an ISP can't say "Video packet A gets bumped ahead of video packet B because provider A paid us for 'fast lane access.'" Even more, it says that ISPs can't say "All video packets get slowed down so that our service's video packets can seem faster and so we can use our local Internet access monopoly to get people to sign up for our video services." (Look at the Comcast-Netflix speed graphs for an example of this. Netflix's speed tanked until right when Netflix decided to pay Comcast for faster access.)
Re: Good (Score:4, Insightful)
QoS is hard but necessary (Score:5, Informative)
ISP should be limited to purchasing more bandwidth and using anti-bufferbloat AQMs, but no throttling or QoS.
QoS may be hard. But it's necessary, because streaming and TCP don't play well together.
Streaming requires low latency, low jitter, low packet loss, and has a moderate and limited (in absence of compression, typically constant) bandwidth. TCP, when being used for things like large file transfers, increases speed to consume ALL available bandwidth at the tightest choke point, and divide it fairly among all TCP connections using the choke point. It discovers the size of the choke point by expanding until packets are dropped, and signals other TCP connections by making their packets drop. The result that TCP forces poor QoS onto streams unless the infrastructure is massively oversized.
This can be fixed by a number of traffic management schemes. But they all have this in common:
- They treat different packets differently.
- The infrastructure can be misused for competitive advantage and other unfair business practices.
The PROBLEM is not the differing treatment of different packages (which can help consumers), but the misuse of the capability (to hurt consumers).
So IMHO an "appropriate legal remedy", under current legal theories, is not to try to force ISPs to treat all packets the same (and break QoS), but to limit the ISPs ability and incentives to misuse the capability.
So the appropriate regulation is not communications technical regulation, but consumer protection and antitrust law:
- Consumer fraud law should already cover misbehavior that penalizes certain traffic flows improperly. (What is "internet service" if it doesn't handle whatever end-to-end traffic is thrown at it, just for starters) Ditto charging extra for better packet treatment rather than just fatter pipes, charging anyone other than their base customers for the service, or heavily penalizing packets of customers (or the customers themselves) whose usage is problematic for the ISP but within the advertised service. If current law needs a tweak, the enforcement infrastructure is already there should Congress choose to commit the tweak and use it.
- Penalizing packets of competitors for its own services, or giving appropriate handling to its own packets of a type and not to that of others, is anticompetitive behavior. Indeed, having such services in the same company AT ALL, let alone forming conglomerates that include both "content" creation and Internet service distributing it, is a glaring conflict-of-interest, of the sort that led to the historic breakups of AT&T and Standard Oil. Antitrust law is up to the problem: Just use it.
(I put quotes around "appropriate legal remedy" above, because I think that a free market solution would be even better. Unfortunately, we don't have a free market in ISP services, due to massive, government-created or government-ignored barriers to entry. And we aren't likely to see one in the near future - or EVER, unless the government power-wielders get it through their skulls that "competition" and its free-market betnefits don't kick in until there are at least three, and usually until there are four or more, competitors for each customer. (This "Two-is-competition, Hey! Where's the market benefits?" error has been built into communication law ever since the allocation of bandwidth for the early, analog, AMPS cellphone service.) With only two "competitors", market forces drive them to cartel-like behavior and all-the-market-will-bear pricing, without any collusion at all.)
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QoS may be hard. But it's necessary, because streaming and TCP don't play well together.
I guess you haven't been keeping up in network technology. My ISP uses an AQM and I can maintain about 10ms of additional latency even when my connection is flooded beyond 100%. I have tested a DOS, and sending 105% my download results in about 5% packet-loss, but still around 10ms of latency at most.
When I manage my own AQMs on my network, I can maintain 0ms of additional latency, no QoS needed. Not only does it stability latency, but it stabilizes bandwidth. I can effectively run my network at 100%, mai
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My ISP uses an AQM and I can maintain about 10ms of additional latency even when my connection is flooded beyond 100%. ... When I manage my own AQMs on my network, I can maintain 0ms of additional latency, no QoS needed.
Latency is a problem, and as you mention, AQM can deal with it without packet-type distinctions. But it's not the BIG problem when TCP and streams are trying to divide a channel's bandwidth.
That problem is packet loss. TCP imposes it on streams. TCP is HAPPY to accept a little packet loss
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If they do it right, it should only be applied to the individual customer's share of the bandwidth under fair sharing.That is, of the packets I am transferring on the network, the ones I flag as low latency go to the head of my queue but don't go in front of the packets you are transferring.
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Since PIE is a queue discipline, it cannot eliminate queuing. It can help buffer bloat though.
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Sure, but the best results will still come from multiple sub-queues feeding in to tailor the behavior to the service type. The fair queuing is still needed so you're neighbor the rabid downloader doesn't disrupt your VoIP call.
Ideally, in the fair queueing, each customer will get a commit large enough to support at least VoIP and a video stream and the customer queues will allow bandwidth borrowing.
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Re: Good (Score:1)
That is not the internet. If it's only accessible from your ISP it isn't the internet. They can run internal services and they may be faster than the internet connection, but it needs to not interfere in any way with your internet speeds that you pay for and they can not call that the internet. Because it's a private network and not what they sold you when you signed up for internet service.
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I don't see a problem with caching as long as that caching is available to all. Of course, that upstream doesn't cost the ISPs all that much. In the quantities they need, it's less than $1 per Mbps 95th percentile. So to support a customer paying over $50/month, that's under $2 for them to watch all the Netflix they want.
Of course, in the case of Netflix, Comcast could have just accepted the mutually beneficial offer of a caching server and not even needed to pay that, but they chose to squeeze them for mo
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Is this a USA government institution? (Score:2)
I thought the US government was since Ronnie wholly owned by the corporations...
Let us (normal internet users) hope the FCC can get away with this pro net-neutrality policy, level playing field and all that!
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Is this FCC a USA government institution?
I thought the US government was since Ronnie wholly owned by the corporations...
Let us (normal internet users) hope the FCC can get away with this pro net-neutrality policy, level playing field and all that!
There's something in the air. Lately even Joe Scarborough and some of the FOX News regulars have occasionally balked at the bullshit.
Probably the solar system is passing through a cloud of hippie gas or something.
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nah they are just beginning to realize that the population is about to resort to actually getting off the couch.
Good to see the FCC at least considered it. (Score:2, Interesting)
I mean, we'd want the same treatment when we come up with petitions.
After all, companies have the same rights as citizens... no more no less... right?
Re:Good to see the FCC at least considered it. (Score:5, Funny)
Doesn't it say in the Bible that corporations go to heaven? I'm sure it must.
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Doesn't it say in the Bible that corporations go to heaven?
Only the penny-stock corporations. But it's easier for a herd of camels to get through the eye of a needle than for a rich corporation to go to Heaven.
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Considering the unlimited copyright extensions and money-based politics, corporations can never die. That is why they will never reach any afterlife.
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Doesn't it say in the Bible that corporations go to heaven? I'm sure it must.
Well I'm sure it does but Corporations are people that never die and if they do they are usually bought out and ripped apart. Granted sometimes that really needs to happen!
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So, they're soulless and evil abominations, then? Basically the undead?
I think that explains a lot, actually.
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Re:Good to see the FCC at least considered it. (Score:5, Funny)
Income tax is better (Score:2)
A tax on a commodity focuses that tax on a subset of income--you spend what you make--thus magnifying the tax. If, for example, 2% of all pre-tax income in Australia was spent on Netflix, then a Netflix tax of 10% would translate to an income tax hike of 0.2% across the board; if it were focused on high-income earners, it would affect only the small part of society at a rate almost identical (e.g. the top 50% have 87.25% of the money, 0.2% becomes 0.229%; the top 25% have 67.38%, income tax hike of 0.2968
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If Net Neutrality is against the public interest.. (Score:1)
...why did so many people have to rally, protest and sign petitions just to get Tom Wheeler to implement it instead of going with the telcos' desire for paid prioritization?
The telcos speak poison with their forked tongues.
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Re:how long until the internet dies? (Score:5, Insightful)
The right wing "news sources" and blogs have been saying that Obama is trying to take away our freedom through net neutrality all along.
Seriously.
And in the disqus comments and the like you can read thousands and thousands of hysterical old people screaming and crying about it ...
It's like that on everything. The hysteria of confused old people is a commodity bought and sold by corporations.
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Still seems to me that the AC I was talking about was just being sarcastic. No fear or ranting, just a simple ridiculous statement. Unlike some of the other posters around here. Of course, that's just a guess on my part since I can neither read minds, nor do we have a Sarcasm Element in HTML. Damn we could seriously use that one.
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It's like that on everything. The hysteria of confused old people is a commodity bought and sold by corporations.
I especially like it when someone wants their representatives to eliminate entitlements, but don't dare touch their medicare and social security.
Full disclosure: I probably qualify as "old", and perhaps "confused" too. (Though if both, the later may not be caused by the former.)
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Or are hand written.
On $100 bills
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They can afford to brainwash millions of elderly tea partiers who think that the army is about to invade Texas and take away all their guns because Obama is a n****r..
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Actually, you missed out 'about to invade Texas' in a convoy of UN trucks paid for by the Illuminati and controlled by lizardman from Zeta Reticuli.
There is one bright light on the horizon. Bigfoot is friendly. Source: my neighbour.
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They can afford to brainwash millions of elderly tea partiers who think that the army is about to invade Texas and take away all their guns because Obama is a n****r..
And Rand Paul
And Ted Cruz.
So hold on to your hats folks. I'm wagering that the 2016 party platform is going to include denying the moon landings, and getting to the bottom of this chemtrail business.
Re: how long until the internet dies? (Score:4, Insightful)
This is regulation in favor of the people. We don't see a lot of that and so it's a bit of a surprise.
Naturally the right wing opposes it. It hurts the 1 percent AND demonstrates proper use of government regulation. Those are two things they can't stand the very thought of.
Re: how long until the internet dies? (Score:5, Funny)
>Naturally the right wing opposes it.
Isn't that the Republican moto ? "America has seen great progress over the past 75 years, and we have been the opposition to all of it."
Re: how long until the internet dies? (Score:5, Informative)
As if there aren't people on both sides for and against it.
http://www.infoworld.com/artic... [infoworld.com]
http://time.com/3578255/conser... [time.com]
http://www.theatlantic.com/tec... [theatlantic.com]
http://www.politico.com/story/... [politico.com]
Re: how long until the internet dies? (Score:5, Insightful)
I wish that the American people would wake up and stop treating politics as a sporting event and villianize everything from the other party. I wish we would start to seek and promote those that actually seek a better USA and that understand the principles that founded this country in the first place. These kind of individual are members of both the major parties and many of the minor parties. As the american people participate early we can avoid having to vote for the lessor evil and instead start voting for the greater good. If you only start to think about who to vote for in the general election it is too late.
Re: how long until the internet dies? (Score:4, Interesting)
Out of curiosity, what part of the republican platform is still worth cheering on these days, unless you're just a libertarian who feels like voting as such is throwing away a vote? I don't really see much in the republican platform that looks particularly appealing to me, and this is coming from somebody who grew up listening to Rush Limbaugh.
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I'm guessing it's either the GOP stance on abortion or immigration. That's usually how they keep commoners voting for them while they push legislation to benefit the 0.0001%.
Re: how long until the internet dies? (Score:2)
Well I was mocking the party leadership not (all of) it's voters.
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You are a RINO to the current republican leadership.
Re: how long until the internet dies? (Score:4, Interesting)
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> This is regulation in favor of the people. We don't see a lot of that and so it's a bit of a surprise.
Bernie for President !!!
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Exactly, you could see fairly quickly that the 1% interest rates were creating a bubble, were excessively low, and were being held there to stop the business cycle from having an ordinary recession. Which resulted in intensifying the 2007 recession.
The current low rates are intensifying the next recession. We will have a recession every 3 to 5 years. Engage in chicanery to prevent that- and what you will get is much worse.
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THAT's why we had a recession. The "fake money" talk is nothing more than a failure to understand the function of a "fiat" currency - and we don't have space here for a course on global economics.
They don't want to hear it anyway.
I'd add the economic drag of 2 wars on the layaway plan though. It's a jump start at first, but is not immune from eventual accounting. Odd that the people who are all aghast about just "running the printing presses to make money" have little to say about that practice.
That we managed to avoid a total collapse in 2007-8 is as close to a miracle as you can get.
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Re:pro government insanity (Score:4, Interesting)
No one was "forced to lend to people who couldn't afford homes." They knew they were giving bad loans but they didn't care because they knew they could sell them and let them become somebody else's problem.
My understanding is that it was a bit of both. Government policies encouraged loaning to people who couldn't afford homes. However, you are correct that the folks doing it didn't care since it was somebody else's problem.
Student loans are the same thing. Companies gleefully loan to students who they know will never be able to repay, because the US government promised to bail them out if they don't. They'll even pay them collection fees on top of that to recover the money.
What I don't get is why student loan interest rates are any higher than treasury bond rates. If they're US-guaranteed investments, why should they have a higher interest rate?
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Re:government insanity (regulatory capture) (Score:2, Troll)
The government policies didn't "encourage" loaning to such people. They specifically _forbade_ it. The problem was that the deregulation regime didn't provide any "stick" to back up that prohibition. So on one side it offered a financial carrot of massive proportions, the other side just said "it's your duty to not do X and Y and to make sure that you are being good."
The people who bought, paid for, and essentially wrote the legislation, that is the banks, didn't put any "and for every time you fail your du
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>who was buying the loans
Everyone. Everyone from 401Ks to mutual funds, to hedge funds, cities, states, CALPERS - i.e., Wall Street and eventually you through your ownership of a CD or something.
They were all bundled up with AAA class loans and called "mortgaged backed securities." AAA on the top, junk on the bottom. And then labelled "AAA" quality - same as cash. Which they obviously were not to anyone paying attention.
Magnetar saw what was going on and bet against all that.
"A hedge fund named Magne
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whole thing never would have happened.
Oh look, one of those people.
Bear Stearns (or anyone else for that matter in the private market) doesn't get any of the blame for what they inflicted upon themselves? That the ratings agencies are totally innocent of cooking the books when it comes to classifying mortgage backed securities? That the ratings agencies /defended to the death/ the right to "free speech" for putting out objectively fraudulent ratings?
Nobody else would have been in the market if Fannie Mae
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Do I you think a greedy bank would give a sub prime loan knowing that the borrower is going to default? A greedy bank will give a sub prime loian every tme if it knows it can repackage and sell the loan to the federal government
This explains exactly why you don't understand what was going on.
The banks *farmed out* their loan operations to mortgage brokers. Private ones. Ones that didn't give a /shit/ about whether or not the borrowers could pay them back.
BECAUSE THE BROKERS' INCOMES WERE TOTALLY DEPENDENT
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Actually it was caused by financial wizards (Score:3, Informative)
being allowed to bilk the whole world with junk bonds and fraudulent securities. If the government was allowed the power to regulate, that wouldn't have happened - but corporations bought the government off and apparently will continue to, forever.
They also control your mind, such as it is.
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pro government mania
Are you mentally ill or something? Rarely do I read texts as completely deluded as yours. Geez.
You should read more of his posts.
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But who is really capable of thinking long term?
Everyone except rich people and wannabes, apparently. It's the MAKE MONEY FAST mentality that has mortally wounded our economy over the past 35 years.
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>It is curious to observe the pro government mania taking place at this time, the time of the biggest economic downturn pretty much in history of the USA
Ahem: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G... [wikipedia.org]
> the downturn caused by the government power grab and destruction of individual freedoms.
This government has less power than the previous one, and has restored some of the freedoms the last one took - and protected freedoms all previous governments have denied. None of which is actually relevant since the only g
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I agree with much of your post except the part where you claim this government has less power than the previous one. What are you basing that on? What freedoms have they restored? Are they allowing us to choose our own doctor again?
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When did they remove your ability to choose your own doctor? The ACA does not restrict your doctor in any way. Your insurance company may, but that is between you and them, not the government.
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I guess the ACA had nothing to do with this then.
http://politicalticker.blogs.c... [cnn.com]
http://www.weeklystandard.com/... [weeklystandard.com]
Re: pro government insanity (Score:2)
For a start they recognised the previously denied freedom of homosexual people to get married to the partner of their choosing.
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Kind of off topic, and somewhat incorrect as it gives them no more or less power.