10mo ago

Net neutrality is back as FCC votes to regulate internet providers

www.cnn.com Net neutrality is back as FCC votes to regulate internet providers | CNN Business

The US government on Thursday banned internet service providers (ISPs) from meddling in the speeds their customers receive when browsing the web and downloading files, restoring tough rules rescinded during the Trump administration and setting the stage for a major legal battle with the broadband in...

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10mo ago

Net neutrality is back as FCC votes to regulate internet providers

www.cnn.com /2024/04/25/tech/net-neutrality-is-back/index.html

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33 comments

And the moment a Republican administration is back, it’ll be gone again. This needs to be codified in law, not flip flopping every few years.
- That would require Congress to act and Congress is barely capable of accomplishing the bare minimum to keep the budget running so the entire world isn't thrown into chaos. Asking them to do anything that actually protects consumer rights is going to take either an emergency or an extreme electoral shift.
  
  I don’t disagree. And while I agree with the FCC continually trying to keep Net Neutrality alive, it’s a stopgap measure at best, one that will come and go until there is an elected Congress that isn’t full of greedy, sycophantic, whiny, spineless pieces of shit.
  
  Why would it necessarily have to be federal law, and not state law?
  /cc @ulkesh@beehaw.org

With Thursday’s party-line vote, the FCC redefined internet service as similar to legacy telephone lines, a sweeping move that comes with greater regulatory power over the broadband industry.
Leading FCC officials have said restoring net neutrality rules, and reclassifying ISPs under Title II of the agency’s congressional charter, would provide the FCC with clearer authority to adopt future rules governing everything from public safety to national security.
“Broadband is a telecommunications service and should be regulated as such,” said Justin Brookman, director for technology policy at Consumer Reports. “The Title II authority will ensure that broadband providers are properly overseen by the FCC like all telecommunications services should be.
“These 400-plus pages of relentless regulation are proof positive that old orthodoxies die hard,” said Jonathan Spalter, CEO of USTelecom, a trade association representing internet providers.
My god the fucking irony. The trade association made up of Broadband ISPs, arguing that they shouldn't be regulated as Telecom providers, is literally called... USTelecom.
"Don't treat us like ducks!" said the trade association representative from USDucks.
- Thanks for pointing that out! That's ... truly special 😂
- I think net neutrality is a good thing, but could this reclassification mean that the FCC will have increased authority to police content online? There has been a lot of worrying activity around that lately in general, and the FCC has a history of imposing censorship on traditional media.
  
  Net Neutrality is about not policing content online. That's kind of its whole thing:
  These net neutrality policies ensured you can go where you want and do what you want online without your broadband provider making choices for you. They made clear your broadband provider should not have the right to block websites, slow services, or censor online content. These policies were court tested and approved. They were wildly popular. In fact, studies show that 80 percent of the public support the FCC’s net neutrality policies and opposed their repeal.
  The closest we get to online censorship is obscenity laws, which one might think applies to porn, but obscenity is actually defined much more narrowly than just "content designed to arouse". Obscenity is basically stuff that even Hugh Hefner would find offensive, stuff the average adult would find deeply repulsive and abhorrent (not just a little bit, the exact language is "patently offensive"). Adult content in general (obscenity & indecency) is banned from broadcast media during daytime hours to keep kids from seeing it; subscription-based services are exempt from such rules, which presumably means that the adults who pay for the subscription are supposed to be the ones preventing kids from using it to view adult material, if such is possible. I expect this is why anything which does manage to qualify as obscene is typically very hard to get to unless you really want to see it, so nobody who might report it ever actually finds it.
  It's worth mentioning that obscenity laws apply whether Net Neutrality is a thing or not, so having it will be a net reduction in the avenues through which content may be censored or policed. Now if only they'd ban ISPs from selling your data to brokers...

This alone is enough to answer why people need to vote for Biden next term!!!

Finally, I remember the Ajit Pai era all too well when the FCC was auditioning for lucrative future revolving door private gigs. Rather than looking out for consumers.
- Ajit Pai didn't have to audition for anything. His employment was already guaranteed. He just had to do his assigned task. You see the same with NASA's Kathy Lueders and SpaceX. The US is totally blind when it comes to the concept of conflict of interests.
  PS: When I typed 'Ajit Pai', my phone auto corrected it to 'Ajit Paid'. I guess even my phone knows!

That is the worst misrepresentation of Net Neutrality I've ever seen. This "article" makes it sound like the government is protecting you. It makes me want to vomit. They get away with this because nobody reads the actual bills. They just take what the media writes and accepts it as truth.
- Can you elaborate? 'cause I sure as hell ain't gonna look it up
  
  Arstechnica has a good article explaining.
  Now, for the user above, I'm not entirely sure what they're talking about since this isn't a bill that has been passed, but net neutrality is to protect consumers - it's to ensure large companies cannot stack the deck to make you use their preferred (owned) services.
- I get the feeling you cheerlead for big business and corporations over working people and unions.
  Troll alert.
- This comment is the worst misrepresentation of penguins I've ever seen. It sounds like a red herring. It makes me want to vomit. People get away with this because nobody actually knows what penguins are. They just take what the media writes and accepts it as truth.
  On a serious note, plenty of people here surely know what net neutrality is. Net neutrality is the guarantee that your ISP doesn't (de-)prioritize traffic or outright block traffic, all packets are treated equally. In other words it means you don't have to pay $5 extra for high speed access to Lemmy because Reddit and your ISP (say Comcast) would prefer Lemmy not exist.
  
  On a serious note, plenty of people here surely know what net neutrality is. Net neutrality is the guarantee that your ISP doesn’t (de-)prioritize traffic or outright block traffic, all packets are treated equally.
  That’s true but it’s also the common (but overly shallow) take. It’s applicable here and good enough for the thread, but it’s worth noting that netneutrality is conceptually deeper than throttling and pricing games and beyond ISP shenanigans. The meaning was coined by Tim Wu, who spoke about access equality.
  People fixate on performance which I find annoying in face of Cloudflare, who is not an ISP but who has done by far the most substantial damage to netneutrality worldwide by controlling who gets access to ~50%+ of world’s websites. The general public will never come to grasp Cloudflare’s oppression or the scale of it, much less relate it to netneutrality, for various reasons:
  Cloudflare is invisible to those allowed inside the walled garden, so its existence is mostly unknown
  The masses can only understand simple concepts about their speed being throttled. Understanding the nuts and bolts of discrimination based on IP address reputation is lost on most.
  The US gov is obviously pleased that half the world’s padlocked web traffic is trivially within their unwarranted surveillance view via just one corporation in California. They don’t want people to realize the harm CF does to netneutrality and pressure lawmakers to draft netneutrality policy in a way that’s not narrowly ISP-focused.
  Which means netneutrality policy is doomed to ignore Cloudflare and focus on ISPs.
  Most people at least have some control over which ISP they select. Competition is paltry, but we all have zero control over whether a website they want to use is in Cloudflare’s exclusive walled garden.
- I’ve always wondered, what do Comcast’s boots taste like?

It’s worth noting that the FCC’s so-called “Open” Internet Advisory Committee (#OIAC) tragically gives two seats on the board to:
Cloudflare
Comcast
Both of whom are abusers of #netneutrality, especially Cloudflare. A well-informed Trump-free administration should be showing Cloudflare and Comcast the door ASAP.
Sure, Trump would just bring them back. But it’d at least be a good symbolic move.
Indeed, as someone else pointed out, the needed change should come from pro-netneutrality legislation. And the legislation needs to be broad enough to block Cloudflare’s broad discriminatory arbitrary attack on access equality, not just tinker with speeds at the ISP consumer level.
- Whether the legislation is appropriate at the state or fed domain is unclear. Certainly if the orange tyrant takes power again, I would probably want state govs to be able to protect consumers from netneutrality abuses.

- relevant username

🤖 I'm a bot that provides automatic summaries for articles: ::: spoiler Click here to see the summary The US government on Thursday banned internet service providers (ISPs) from meddling in the speeds their customers receive when browsing the web and downloading files, restoring tough rules rescinded during the Trump administration and setting the stage for a major legal battle with the broadband industry.
The net neutrality regulations adopted Thursday by the Federal Communications Commission prohibit providers such as AT&T, Comcast and Verizon from selectively speeding up, slowing down or blocking users’ internet traffic.
The latest rules show how, with a 3-2 Democratic majority, the FCC is moving to reassert its authority over an industry that powers the modern digital economy, touching everything from education to health care and enabling advanced technologies such as artificial intelligence.
The vote marks the latest twist in a years-long battle between regulators on the one hand, who say consumer protections are needed to ensure all websites are treated equally, and ISPs on the other who describe the rules as heavy-handed government intervention.
Whether it is throttling content, junk or hidden fees, arbitrary pricing, deceptive advertising or unreliable service, broadband providers have proven over the years that without proper oversight, they will not hesitate to use their power to increase profits at the expense of consumers.”
In past legal battles over net neutrality, courts have deferred to the FCC, ruling that it has wide latitude to regulate ISPs as it sees fit using the authority it derives from the agency’s congressional charter, the Communications Act of 1934.
Saved 72% of original text. :::

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