FCC Approves Net Neutrality Rules For 'Open Internet'. Ended by orange turd and losers.

Why didn't the government just create its own infrastructure if they were paying for it to begin with? Obviously it would have been profitable, even just to sell it on wholesale...

It just seems silly. Like selling roads to private companies, and then closing down other exits.
"Free markets."
 
Why didn't the government just create its own infrastructure if they were paying for it to begin with? Obviously it would have been profitable, even just to sell it on wholesale...

It just seems silly. Like selling roads to private companies, and then closing down other exits.

It is silly. America is just run by large corporations, and has been for a long time. Sure, we get 1 vote, but the corporations funnel money into their campaigns.

We basically let people bribe politicians here and look the other way. The politicians fighting against net neutrality are 100% bought by the big ISP lobbies, but we still let it happen. You'd think the fact that every politician voting against net neutrality has a donation from an ISP would be a huge scandal, but it isn't. People just don't seem to care for some reason.

Sadly I think the biggest problem in America right now is just getting people to pay attention and vote. When a reality TV star runs for President, half the country didn't even bother to show up and vote one way or the other.
 
Ooooh, ok. I was wondering why you wouldn't just change provider.
The government owns the cables here in Australia, and then the ISP's lease the nodes. They then try to out-do each other with bonus thrown in stuff you don't really need. So even at my mother's rural farm house, she has the choice of about 20 ISP's.

Yeah, way back when I was in college, we pretty much said that the official slogan from Cox (our local cable company) was: "We don't care. We don't have to care. We're a monopoly."
 
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Yeah, way back when I was in college, we pretty much said that the official slogan from Cox (our local cable company) was: "We don't care. We don't have to care. We're a monopoly."
Like when last drinks are called at dick'o'clock in a bar, and all that are left are golems and grenades...
 
Like when last drinks are called at dick'o'clock in a bar, and all that are left are golems and grenades...

Dick O'Clock sounds like a really bad Batman villain. I also have a joke about it being the time you limp away, but I'm not sure I'm up for erectile malfunction humor. *rimshot*
 
But.... but..... but..... removing Net Neutrality rules will spur competition. Companies won't throttle users.....

https://arstechnica.com/information...obile-video-will-charge-extra-for-hd-streams/

Customers get bad news in email
Comcast has been telling Xfinity Mobile customers about the changes in an email titled, "Update on cellular video resolution and personal hotspots." One Comcast customer forwarded the email to Ars, and there's also a Reddit thread discussing the email. All Xfinity Mobile customers are receiving this email, Comcast confirmed to Ars.​
"To help you conserve data, we've established 480p as the standard resolution for streaming video through cellular data," Comcast told customers. For now, customers can contact Comcast for an "upgrade" to 720p video "on an interim basis at no charge."​
But after the interim period is over, getting HD-quality video will cost extra. "Later this year, 720p video over cellular data will be available as a fee-based option with your service," Comcast told customers. Comcast hasn't mentioned any plans to make 1080p or any resolution higher than 720p available over cellular, and there's no word from Comcast yet on what enabling 720p video will cost. Comcast previously imposed no speed limits on video streaming on the Xfinity Mobile service.
"It's important to note that this change won't impact video resolution when using Wi-Fi, where customers will continue to be able to stream in HD," Comcast told Ars. Over Wi-Fi networks, including Comcast's public hotspots, video will play at whatever resolution is streamed by the video provider, a Comcast spokesperson told Ars. Nearly half of videos that stream on Comcast's mobile service play at 480p today, according to the company.​
 
But.... but..... but..... removing Net Neutrality rules will spur competition. Companies won't throttle users.....

https://arstechnica.com/information...obile-video-will-charge-extra-for-hd-streams/

Customers get bad news in email
Comcast has been telling Xfinity Mobile customers about the changes in an email titled, "Update on cellular video resolution and personal hotspots." One Comcast customer forwarded the email to Ars, and there's also a Reddit thread discussing the email. All Xfinity Mobile customers are receiving this email, Comcast confirmed to Ars.​
"To help you conserve data, we've established 480p as the standard resolution for streaming video through cellular data," Comcast told customers. For now, customers can contact Comcast for an "upgrade" to 720p video "on an interim basis at no charge."​
But after the interim period is over, getting HD-quality video will cost extra. "Later this year, 720p video over cellular data will be available as a fee-based option with your service," Comcast told customers. Comcast hasn't mentioned any plans to make 1080p or any resolution higher than 720p available over cellular, and there's no word from Comcast yet on what enabling 720p video will cost. Comcast previously imposed no speed limits on video streaming on the Xfinity Mobile service.
"It's important to note that this change won't impact video resolution when using Wi-Fi, where customers will continue to be able to stream in HD," Comcast told Ars. Over Wi-Fi networks, including Comcast's public hotspots, video will play at whatever resolution is streamed by the video provider, a Comcast spokesperson told Ars. Nearly half of videos that stream on Comcast's mobile service play at 480p today, according to the company.​

What you say? Comcast is being a bunch of assgoblins? This is, without a doubt, easily one of the most shocking things I've read in the last three seconds.

I'm just disappointed that they didn't market this as "You wanted net neutrality. We listened. You can have it... for $4.99 a month." *

* Introductory rate, which nobody qualifies for because fine print. Your mileage may vary. Actual price will be based on, wait, we don't have to tell you.
 
Want to file a complaint against a service provider, that'll be $225 please. The FCC wants to now charge individual tax paying Americans, who pay their salaries, and fund the FCC, $225 to do their job we're already paying them for . Congratulations trump voters.

https://www.engadget.com/2018/07/11/fcc-complaints-rule-change/

A proposed rule change at the FCC has raised concerns that the organization is attempting to abdicate its responsibilities to the public. This Thursday, the Commission will consider altering its complaints-handling procedure between individuals and their service providers.​
Until now, people have been able to make informal complaints to the FCC, which has to at least attempt to deal with their concerns. The concern with the rule change is that now, these issues would simply be forwarded on to the provider in question.​
That is, unless you make a formal complaint at the cost of $225, at which point the FCC will handle your issue on your behalf. As both Gizmodo and the Verge point out, the implication is that the rule changes will mean that you'll need to pay the FCC, in cash, to do its job.​
Those same reports also say that, when Pai rolled back Net Neutrality, he and his agency was at least obliged to pretend to pay attention to opposing arguments. It's thought that the plan to streamline the complaint procedures would also remove any obligation for commissioners to listen to the general public.​
The plan has raised the ire of two U.S. Representatives: Frank Pallone Jr and Mike Doyle, who wrote a letter to Pai criticizing the plan. The pair say that the idea of forcing users to pay $225 to make a formal complaint "ignores the core mission of the FCC -- working in the public interest."​
The Commission has already served to refute the point, telling CNET that Pallone Jr and Doyle's concerns is "based on a fundamental misunderstanding of the draft order." Sadly, trust and goodwill at the FCC is at an all-time low, given that the body rolled back Net Neutrality in the face of overwhelming public opposition.​
Not to mention that the FCC stands accused of lying about being under a DDoS attack during the public consultation regarding net neutrality. And that its chief, Ajit Pai, is under suspicion of removing rules on ownership in order to benefit a sympathetic broadcaster purchase Tribune Media.​
 
Your best bet is to have a municipal ISP. One that answers to the people of the community and not shareholders.
 
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ISPs should be regulated like any other utility. I thought this was a no-brainer, but then the American people went and elected a leader without a brain.
 
Remember when these a******s aid the FCC site was DDoS and commenting against their measures were halted because of the "attack"? Well, they f***ing lied.

https://www.engadget.com/2018/08/06/fcc-report-reveals-ddos-claims-were-bogus/

FCC admits its comment system never suffered DDoS attack
If you didn't buy the FCC's claims that its comment system fell prone to a DDoS attack when it was soliciting net neutrality comments, investigators have just validated your suspicions. An imminent report from the agency's Inspector General has revealed that there's no evidence of such an attack. To put it another way, the comment system's problems were more likely due to large-scale opposition to the net neutrality repeal (helped by Last Week Tonight's John Oliver), not an untimely hacking campaign.​
Chairman Pai tried to spin the report in a statement, portraying the false DDoS reports as the products of "the prior Administration" and former Chief Information Officer David Bray. The CIO's subordinates were afraid to disagree with his belief there was a cyberattack, according to the FCC chair. Pai also claimed that the report "debunks the conspiracy theory" that he and his office knew the DDoS claims were unfounded. Instead, he argued, the FCC should focus on revamping the struggling commenting system (which he again pinned on the prior administration) so that this kind of failure didn't happen again.​
The problem, as you might guess, is that the FCC didn't exactly shoot down Bray's claims when new. While there may be a degree of truth to Pai's assertion that he couldn't talk about the Inspector General report (to avoid skewing the outcome), the agency was quick to stonewall requests for evidence that would prove or disprove the DDoS allegations. Why not just release data shooting down the claims before the Inspector General even got involved? TechCrunch added that Bray's subordinates don't appear to have spoken up after he left. If the FCC wanted to dispel notions that it used the DDos story to downplay net neutrality support, it could have done so much sooner.​
The report still isn't available to the public, and it's possible that there are important details still under wraps. However, it's safe to say that the comment system does need an overhaul to provide easier feedback. The bigger concerns may revolve around the legions of fake commentssupporting Pai's repeal -- there are still no definitive answers, and they may not be forthcoming from an FCC that's uninterested in revisiting the net neutrality debate.​
 
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https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/...of-unique-fcc-comments-favored-net-neutrality

99.7 Percent of Unique FCC Comments Favored Net Neutrality
A new report from Stanford University shows that most commenters were knowledgeable about the issue and very much in favor of keeping the protections.
After removing all duplicate and fake comments filed with the Federal Communications Commission last year, a Stanford researcher has found that 99.7 percent of public comments—about 800,000 in all—were pro-net neutrality.​
“With the fog of fraud and spam lifted from the comment corpus, lawmakers and their staff, journalists, interested citizens and policymakers can use these reports to better understand what Americans actually said about the repeal of net neutrality protections and why 800,000 Americans went further than just signing a petition for a redress of grievances by actually putting their concerns in their own words,” Ryan Singel, a media and strategy fellow at Stanford University, wrote in a blog post Monday.
Singel released a report Monday that analyzed the unique comments—as in, they weren’t a copypasta of one or dozens of other letters—filed last year ahead of the FCC’s decision to repeal federal net neutrality protections. That’s from the 22 million total comments filed, meaning that more than 21 million comments were fake, bots, or organized campaigns.​
“This is not to say that all non-unique comments filed to the FCC via online campaigns are fake,” the report says, since many commenters used form letters to share their support for net neutrality. “However, due to the large amount of noise created by fake comments, it remains very difficult to locate the real signals in the non-unique comments.”​
Before voting to repeal federal net neutrality protections last year, the FCC opened up an online form to collect comments from the public. If you recall, it was a s***show, with millions of fake comments sent in by bots under phony names, stolen identities, and even names of dead people. It led to multiple lawsuits filed, including one by 23 state attorney general. Despite acknowledging the failures, the FCC refused to investigate or really reconsider the comments at all, though a judge recently ruled that the agency must release records related to the phony comments to the public.​
With the help of his colleague Jeff Kao, Singel used machine learning models to identify more than 800,000 unique comments and analyze them, showing that commenters were firmly against repealing the rules, and these commenters spanned the country geographically and politically.​
Singel found that “while there were more comments on average from House districts represented by Democrats, a substantial number of unique comments were filed in Republican districts,” the report reads. The average number of comments filed in each district was 1,489, with Republican districts having an average of 1,202.​
He also found that unique commenters had a more nuanced understanding of net neutrality law than lawmakers may have assumed, including regularly mentioning the decision to reclassify broadband as a common carrier under Title II of the Communications Act of 1996.​
The report also suggests that net neutrality could play a role in the upcoming midterm elections, with many of the so-called “toss up” states having significant representation from pro-net neutrality commenters. For example, California's 45th District is currently held by Republican Representative Mimi Walters, and a tight battle is expected there. In that district, the report found more than 2,300 unique comments filed, the majority of which were opposed to repealing net neutrality.​
If this report is any indication, candidates in tight races might want to reexamine their stance on net neutrality.​
 
https://www.techdirt.com/articles/2...-despite-tax-cuts-repeal-net-neutrality.shtml

Oh Look, Wireless Sector Investment Is Declining Despite Tax Cuts, Repeal Of Net Neutrality
You'll recall that one of the top reasons for killing popular net neutrality rules was that it had somehow killed broadband industry investment. Of course, a wide array of publicly-available data easily disproves this claim, but that didn't stop FCC boss Ajit Pai and ISPs from repeating it (and in some cases lying before Congress about it) anyway. We were told, more times that we could count, that with net neutrality dead, sector investment would spike.​
You'll be shocked to learn this purported boon in investment isn't happening.​
A few weeks ago, Verizon made it clear its CAPEX would be declining, and the company's deployment would see no impact despite billions in tax cuts and regulatory favors by the Trump FCC. Trump's "tax reform" alone netted Verizon an estimated $3.5 billion to $4 billion. A recent FCC policy order, purporting to speed up 5G wireless deployment (in part by eliminating local authority over negotiations with carriers), netted Verizon another estimated $2 billion. And that's before you even get to the potential revenue boost thanks to the repeal of net neutrality and elimination of broadband privacy rules.​
Ironically, Verizon's dip in CAPEX came right on the heels of the wireless industry and Ajit Pai, in perfectly coordinated unison, trying to claim that a CAPEX rise in 2017 was directly due to the repeal of net neutrality. They ignored an important point however: net neutrality wasn't even repealed until June of this year. If this endless roster of favors was to impact network investment, accelerate network deployment, and unleash a magical wave of "innovation," that should all be happening right now. And yet, the opposite is happening. And of course it's not just Verizon. AT&T and Sprint are also reducing overall CAPEX:​
"Sprint, Verizon and AT&T have all reduced their overall capex numbers for 2018. The operators cite a variety of reasons, from timing issues to more efficient network technologies. But the ultimate result is the same: Where there was once excitement, now there’s a decided sense of pragmatism."​
Now there's a number of different reasons for this, including some cost savings in moving from legacy hardware to more efficient virtualization technologies. But again, a decline is not what was promised ahead of the sales pitches for the tax cuts and the attack on net neutrality. The nation was, time and time again, promised unrivaled "innovation and investment boosts" if the nation's companies received a multi-billion-dollar tax cut, and net neutrality and other "regulatory underbrush" was cleared out of the way. That didn't happen.​
Instead of investing all these tax breaks, perks, and savings back into the network, they were pocketed by investors and executives. Which, for anybody with half of a functional brain stem was the entire point of having a former Verizon lawyer running the FCC in the first place. This is a longstanding trend in telecom: promise the public the world if they get tax cuts, subsidies, and blind deregulation, then avoid doing pretty much all of those things while pocketing the savings. Perhaps someday America will actually learn some kind of lesson from the experience.​
 
https://gizmodo.com/court-rejects-the-fccs-attempt-to-postpone-net-neutrali-1831853325


Shutdown or no, the consolidated lawsuits facing the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) over its 2017 rules that wiped out net neutrality protections nationwide will go forward on Feb. 1, a three-judge panel in D.C. Circuit ruled Thursday.

Earlier this week, the FCC sought to postpone oral arguments in the case, which are set to begin next month. In its motion, the agency claimed the resources needed to advance its case had been hamstrung by the ongoing government shutdown, which shows no sign of coming to an end. With its funding gone, FCC employees are prohibited from engaging in work “except for emergencies involving the safety of human life or the protection of property.”
 


https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy...ality-challenged-by-new-washington-state-law/

The Washington state legislature has approved a net neutrality law that applies to all wired and wireless Internet providers in the state and prohibits blocking, throttling, and paid prioritization.​
The bill comes in response to the Federal Communications Commission decision in December 2017 to scrap federal net neutrality rules. The state bill still needs the signature of Governor Jay Inslee, who previously pledged to enforce net neutrality "under our own authority and under our own laws," calling it "a free speech issue as well as a business development issue."​
Washington is apparently the first state whose legislature has passed a law that imposes net neutrality rules on all ISPs. The governors of five states had already decided to impose net neutrality restrictions on ISPs that provide Internet service to state agencies.​
The Washington bill was approved in the state House on February 9 by a vote of 93-5. The bill passed in the Senate yesterday by a vote of 35-14.​
 


https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy...ality-challenged-by-new-washington-state-law/

The Washington state legislature has approved a net neutrality law that applies to all wired and wireless Internet providers in the state and prohibits blocking, throttling, and paid prioritization.​
The bill comes in response to the Federal Communications Commission decision in December 2017 to scrap federal net neutrality rules. The state bill still needs the signature of Governor Jay Inslee, who previously pledged to enforce net neutrality "under our own authority and under our own laws," calling it "a free speech issue as well as a business development issue."​
Washington is apparently the first state whose legislature has passed a law that imposes net neutrality rules on all ISPs. The governors of five states had already decided to impose net neutrality restrictions on ISPs that provide Internet service to state agencies.​
The Washington bill was approved in the state House on February 9 by a vote of 93-5. The bill passed in the Senate yesterday by a vote of 35-14.​


And today Inslee announced his campaign for President. This is a bit of good news to go along with that.