FCC and Internet Neutrality

[AwfulArchdemon]

Well, the law passed today. What does this really mean? I've heard it means a slower, OR more expensive internet. Pay to do anything. Is this true? Oddly, I have found no specific information about why it's such a "victory" for the law to be passed. All I've ever heard about it were bad things. I searched and searched, and all I've seen is corporate officials praising the bill, while anyone who's not corporate lambasting it, saying "it's only good if you like a completely government-controlled internet."

 

What can I expect to happen now? What are the (inevitable) ramifications?

 

It would seem petitions do very little. The decision is certainly not ours to make.

[sieboldii]

1) It is not a law. Laws can only be passed by Congress.

 

2) It is over 300 pages of regulations aimed at Internet Equality meaning no more high speed internet even if you can afford it.

[pewp43]

If you are old enough to remember Ma Bell... Renting your rotary phone.

 

Something like that.

[Captain Cobra]

http://www.npr.org/blogs/thetwo-way/2015/02/26/389259382/net-neutrality-up-for-vote-today-by-fcc-board

[pornphile]

Pro net neutrality people: want to regulate corporations from putting tiers on bandwidth

Anti net neutrality people: want to keep government out of the internet business

 

Basically, you're switching from one overseer to another(IP provider to FCC). And someone's gotta pay for the new FCC regulatory body so don't be surprised if prices do go up.

[Crooltool]

in a very simple nutshell, placing internet access under title II puts it in the same access of cell phone, electricity ect, in the case of cell phones, it prevents cell phone companies from blocking access to their customers from other cell phone companies, IE Sprint cannot block calls from or to AT&T customers and vice versa, what this law is aimed at is to prevent the major ISPS <owned by cable companies> from limiting services such as netflix either by forcing them to pay to access the cable companies customers at the same speeds as say the cable companies version of netflix, it ensures that time warner cannot block content from say charter and vice versa, and it also prevents ISPs from blocking content they don't agree with, such as time warner blocking web pages associated with fox news or even lovers lab. Since most people only have one or 2 choices for broadband access, and can't just pick up and move to another ISP if for example their current one decides to limit netflix to 56kbps so their customers drop netflix and keep their current cable TV.

 

the whole reason there is a Title II is because back in the early days of telephone service, the various telephone companies did just that, you could only call people who were customers to the same company. If you want to get an idea of who's on who's side, just look at who is paying the 2 sides lobbiests, anti title 2, paid strictly by comcast, time warner, AT&T and charter, pro title 2, google, netflix, ect, one side is strictly ISPs, the other is content providers, we as customers are pretty much stuck in the middle. as to whether petitions work or not, before the pro title II petition went viral <thanks to Steven Cobert> the FCC was kissing so much IPS ass it wasn't funny, they were green to green light ISP outright refusing to allow netflix  to their customers if they so chose

[Kendo 2]

Pro net neutrality people: want to regulate corporations from putting tiers on bandwidth

Anti net neutrality people: want to keep government out of the internet business

 

Basically, you're switching from one overseer to another(IP provider to FCC). And someone's gotta pay for the new FCC regulatory body so don't be surprised if prices do go up.

And we're switching from an overseer who is efficient in the sense that they are running a business for one that is wasteful, ineffectual and crammed full of pointless bureaucracy.

 

Every time the government sticks their hands in the cookie jar they fuck something up and it won't be apparent until it is too late to set the clock back.  There will be hidden costs passed on to the providers and then passed on to us.  This is basically Washington looking at a new source of tax revenue and 'we the people' will stuck with the end cost and slower internet speeds for everyone, not just the people with shitty service.  ALL service will be shitty and we'll be paying more for it.

[Crooltool]

That may be true, but for us the customer,  how much do you think Ashal could pay comcast? its cost netflix a few billion a year to end Comcast throttling their content by 90%. all that this ruling  says is that ISPs cannot throttle or block LEGAL content. so really, no overseer, even the cable companies are pitching that bill of goods, only a few extremist talking heads. its not a goverment take over of the intenet, its just making ISPs play by the same rules that cell companies and and telephone companies already do, they cannot block or throttle content from ISPs or content providers. What the cable companies ARE complaing about is that it stops them from having control over THEIR network, but, is it really THEIR network? It was built with tax dollars from the DOD <Arpanet> and upgraded with massive grants from the goverment <IE our taxes paid for it>

 

 

[JMKAM]

Precursor to government-controlled internet where they can censor it and further silence dissent. 

[prideslayer]

its cost netflix a few billion a year to end Comcast throttling their content by 90%.

What do you mean by this? Netflix just decided to pay Comcast for transit rather than Cogent, and I'm pretty sure it's costing them less -- not more.

 

I don't think these new rules are going to work out for anyones benefit, especially since the last mile unbundling aspect has been explicitly called out as something they won't enforce, when that's the very thing the market needs the most. Lack of competition (from a consumers perspective) in cable and fiber is due to the expense of rolling out new wiring for an entire city, something DSL providers don't have to do thanks to the telcos being classified common carriers under title II.

[Crooltool]

as far as comcast and netflix, http://technical.ly/philly/2014/05/09/graph-shows-netflix-speeds-changed-comcast-deal-comcast-roundup/

 

as for monopolies, there is this http://www.theguardian.com/business/2014/aug/29/us-telecoms-fcc-block-high-speed-internet-chattanooga

and this http://money.cnn.com/2014/05/20/technology/innovation/chattanooga-internet/ 

and the telecom/cable companies trying to stop municipalities from building their own high speed networks in cities they don't even serve

 

http://www.newrepublic.com/article/politics/102699/rural-broadband-internet-wifi-access

[prideslayer]

The telecom lobby is strong. It's up to those elected to not give in to their demands, at the behest of their concerned citizens. That goes from the local level all the way to the top.

 

The comcast/netflix thing is a nonstarter though. Netflix has many ISPs. One of them wasn't delivering what they were being paid for, so Netflix switched. Good for them. I wouldn't shed a tear if Cogent went out of business tomorrow. I'd probably do a little dance.

[Crooltool]

My thing is basically this, we wouldn't have NEEDED this reclassification if the cable and telecom companies hadn't decided to act like a bunch of dicks in the first place. Am I happy that this action was taken, no, do I think it was nessecary, yes. the majority of the network was built with tax dollars, the industry took billions in grants with the promise of getting internet to rural places, then decided that it was too much work but kept the money anyways, I happen to live in a rural area. point is, in a "free market" which is what these companies claim to want, then cities or towns whose citizens approve, should be able to build and maintain their own networks, I do know this, for years we only had 1 ISP available in our town, the local cable co, they shit on us every day, service unreliable <coudn't go a day without a major outage, the repeater on my street was bad, instead of replacing it, they would come out and reset it every couple of days, this went on for 2 years, well frontier came to town with DSL, the day they opened for business, the repeater was replaced. These companies buy themselves a monopoly in a city or town, then just let their customers rot and the only way to get them to do anything is to have a competing co move in. So my thought are this, If these companies don't want to be classified as common carriers then they MUST give up any exclusivity contracts and stop any and all efforts to stop competition, its either a free market, or its got to be regulated, simple as that

 

[prideslayer]

I'm curious about how you think the rules that passed are going to help with any of your concerns. I know we haven't actually seen the rules yet, but that synopsis PDF specifically says that ISPs will not be held to the common-carrier aspects of Title II -- and the same was said during the FCC 'debate' yesterday, which I watched live.

 

Nothing I've heard from either side indicates that these rules are going to do anything to help Rural broadband rollout, and they have said explicitly that last-mile unbundling shall not take place. Nobody is going to get better service out of this deal as far as I can tell, and it doesn't do a thing to encourage competition.

 

If you want to blame someone, blame the municipalities that approve and sign those contracts, and the voters who don't take them to task over it. Otherwise, things will never change. FIOS and Google Fiber are treading a well worn path using contracts basically identical to those that the CATV companies have. In 10 years, people will look at cable the same way they look at dialup now -- and you'll still only have one "choice" in providers. Whoever your local, exclusive, fiber provider is.

[Slath]

Well, this sucks. But they won't censor the internet with that. Only the users.

[pinky6225]

The thing i don't understand is why the ISP's say that carrying more data (i.e video) costs them more and so content providers should pay for it since the ISP's customers already do pay (atleast here in the UK) for tiered speed with the up to X packages, mine is with BT and is up to 80 mb although it usually averages somewhere between 50 to 75mb, since their would be no point in paying for a high bandwidth connection if the content is going to be throttled anyway.

 

If anything surely ISP's should be encouraging content providers to make loads of data for us to download so we will pay for faster and faster connections rather than trying to get paid by both content providers and their customers.

[prideslayer]

The thing i don't understand is why the ISP's say that carrying more data (i.e video) costs them more and so content providers should pay for it since the ISP's customers already do pay (atleast here in the UK) for tiered speed with the up to X packages, mine is with BT and is up to 80 mb although it usually averages somewhere between 50 to 75mb, since their would be no point in paying for a high bandwidth connection if the content is going to be throttled anyway.

 

If anything surely ISP's should be encouraging content providers to make loads of data for us to download so we will pay for faster and faster connections rather than trying to get paid by both content providers and their customers.

That's really not what's going on at all. Nobody is saying content providers should pay, though there's a lot of hyperbole and FUD surround this idea.

 

What happened with Netflix/Cogent/Comcast is pretty simple, but you have to really drop your preconceptions and pay attention to understand what happened there. If you're already decided on the subject and think Comcast is a blight upon the planet that cannot possibly do anything right, then just say so and move on.

 

----

 

Alice and Bob live on a dead end street. Both have a few hundred acres of land. Behind Alices property is a town, TownA. Similarly behind bob is TownB. A toll road connects the two towns, however Alice and Bob both have their own private roads, through their land, to the town closest to them.

 

Alice and Bob use each others roads sometimes, and pay each other a toll when they do.

 

(This is 'paid peering')

 

After a while they see that they're both using and paying about the same every month, so they work out an agreement where neither one has to pay to use the others road.

 

(This is 'settlement free peering')

 

Alice has a delivery company and starts making heavier and heavier use of Bobs free road, rather than use the toll road. Bobs use of Alices road is not increasing. Eventually the road becomes congested, and Alice asks bob to widen it. Bob says no, but that Alice can continue to use the existing capacity according to their free arrangement. If she wants a wider road through his property, she has to pay -- either bob, or the normal toll road.

 

Alice refuses to begin paying Bob again.

 

Her customers get angry at late deliveries, and she tells them its Bobs fault.

 

Eventually one of her bigger customers just stops using Alice's delivery company, and starts paying Bob for use of his toll road directly, which costs them less than they were paying Alice and also less than they would pay to use the normal toll road.

 

And now you understand exactly what happened. Alice is Cogent, Bob is Comcast, and the big customer is Netflix.

 

You really have to understand that settlement-free peering is rare in the industry except among top tier providers with a lot of bandwidth, who both need to use each others networks for transit in roughly equal amounts. Paid peering is far more common. It's the model every company that is not a Tier1 provider uses, from small fries like you and me paying our ISPs, to multi-billion dollar companies like Walmart.

 

 

EDIT: I would also note that the new rules, as far as has been said, don't do anything to alter these peering arrangements either. In short, so far, they haven't addressed a single complaint levied by consumers -- no matter if the complaints are well grounded or just the result of a confused understanding.

[AwfulArchdemon]

But what does this mean for me? Should I expect to have a slower internet? Other issues? Anything bad gonna happen? Price change for Comcast? Will I end up paying more for anything? Will having a fast internet matter (will it stay fast)? Has anything good come out of this, or is it just another costly mistake?

[EternalDamned]

It's 332 pages of regulations no-one was allowed to see until it was passed (sound familiar?) and it was paid for by Comcast and Google. It's not about protecting anyone, it's about control, the ability to silence dissent.

[Slammer64]

This topic is starting to tread dangerously close to that uber-forbidden category: "Politics".  Keep it clean and friendly, you don't want this getting locked by one of the moderators.

[Captain Cobra]

How would government regulation not be politics?

[Jexsam]

This is a massive victory for the internet as a whole.

[prideslayer]

But what does this mean for me?

Nobody really has any idea beyond the few that have seen it. It's normal for it to take weeks or months for FCC rules to be released to the public after the initial vote; the actual process isn't done yet.

 

Everyone saying it's going to do this evil thing, or this noble thing, is just blowing hot air. Until the rules are actually released, partisan opinions from the few that have seen it are all there is to go on, besides the summary PDF. That PDF says:

 

Broadband providers cannot:

- block access to legal content.

- impair or degrade lawful traffic.

- prioritize some traffic over others for a fee.

None of this has bearing on peering arrangements. Content providers need to have internet access in order to run their businesses, and for that access, they need to pay an ISP -- or often, several of them.

 

The third item does present some problems for people like me though. It makes no distinction (nor can it, really) between companies like Skype paying to have their traffic prioritized over say Vonage -- and between end users like myself that would like to pay more to have our traffic prioritized over OTHER end users. I work from home and do development and network management over a VPN into my office, and I'd love to have the option to have that traffic prioritized over people at home just using the internet for entertainment, but that's not possible under the rule.

 

Two good things in the PDF for consumers:

 

- Providers must disclose "in a consistent format" any rates that are promotional, fees, surcharges, and caps, as well as (expected or average, I guess?) packet loss and notice of their network management practices that may affect users. This sounds like those APR disclosure things, but who knows what form it might take.

 

- ISPs (remember, this affects wireless data plans as well, from cellular providers) saying that if they offer unlimited data, they cannot then restrict or degrade access when your usage is high, as they do now. I expect though that this restriction will just mean the end of "unlimited" data plans, which as everyone should know by now, are unlimited in name only. False advertising, really.

 

The PDF then goes on to talk specifically about peering ('interconnection'), which is where the Title II stuff comes into play. Nothing concrete is really stated here, and it says that "interconnection activities" will be judged on a case by case basis to determine if they are "just and reasonable." I think this in particular, if that's how it's actually worded in the rules when published, will be at the center of many lawsuits.

 

There are six items listed from Title II that they say will absolutely apply.

 

- "unjust or unreasonable practices or discrimination."

- Investigation of consumer complaints.

- Consumer privacy.

- Fair access to "poles and conduits".

- Protection for the disabled.

- Universal Service Fund.

 

I'll editorialize on one final point here, because some people may incorrectly seize on it, reading more than is there. The fair access to poles/conduits if improperly interpreted may sound like last-mile unbundling, which I'm personally heavily in favor of. This was done with the telcos when Ma Bell (the original AT&T) was busted up. We ended up with the huge company busted up into a bunch of RBOCs, acting as ILECs, and opened the door to competition from CLECs. This is why, today, with a landline -- you have your choice of phone providers, and your choice of DSL providers using those phone lines.

 

However, the PDF says specifically that the order "forbears from applying ... last mile unbundling, ...". That means, it's not happening, and that point about poles and conduits should be taken very literally. If Cox wants to move into a market that Comcast is in, they can, but unlike with the telcos they CANNOT use the existing wiring laid down by Comcast (or whoever came before them). They CAN use the existing poles and conduits (underground) to run NEW cabling of their own.

 

I seriously doubt any cable providers will take them up on the offer. Most of the poles and conduits are owned by power & gas companies anyway, who already lease space to competing broadband providers who want to lay down their own cable. Few cities, if any (I am aware of none) have poles and conduits actually owned by cable companies -- that infrastructure predates them by many years.

[prideslayer]

How would government regulation not be politics?

A person can talk *about* politics without getting *political*. Or you can try to steer the conversation towards the facts and technology and away from the supposition, smoke, and mirrors as I am trying to do.

 

EDIT: Oh for the interested, you can get the pdf at http://transition.fcc.gov/Daily_Releases/Daily_Business/2015/db0226/DOC-332260A1.pdf

[AwfulArchdemon]

Oh, okay. Thanks. You most certainly know a lot about this, considering there is very little info about it. Sounds like you studied it. If there is any breaking news being released about it, this looks like the thread I'll learn about it on, likely posted by you. Thanks for all the info.

 

About politics, anything government related is automatically political. It's only when debates among members begin that the thread gets locked. I'll wait for results to be produced before I bother forming an opinion, since seemingly bad plans sometimes produce good results, and seemingly good plans sometimes produce negative results.