So captured Congressmen and the cable lobby rebranded the much rumored Title X after activist groups started referring to it as "Title Xfinity."
Sen John Thune, a primary sponsor of this bill, has taken over $50,000 in political contributions between AT&T, Comcast, NCTA, Time Warner Cable, U.S. Telecom, and PACs associated with these groups.
We're not talking about a well-reasoned GOP alternative to "Obama's plan to regulate the Internet." This is a bill written by cable lobbyists to hamstring the FCC while throwing a bone to the American public.
Title II gives the FCC the authority it needs to prevent modern day monopolies from screwing up principles of net neutrality we've all enjoyed since day 1 of the Internet. These GOP plans should be viewed with a massive dose of skepticism, especially in light of the political contributions they've accepted in recent elections.
That's kind of misleading (not your fault, I'm sure...the tech press has done a terrible reporting job).
He was President of the National Cable Television Association, the major cable industry trade group. They did do lobbying, but he left that job in 1984. At the time he held this position, it was just about television. The members of NCTA did not offer internet service or telecommunications services, for the simple reason that there was no public internet yet. The cable companies were all relatively small--the consolidation that led to the small number of giant companies we have now had not happened yet.
The other telecom group he was involved with that does lobbying is CTIA, which is the major trade group for cellular and wireless. He was their President from 1992 to 2004. As I said, they do some lobbying. They also do a lot of testing and evaluation of devices, develop standards and certifications, administer the short code system, put on a couple major trade shows, do safety campaigns and educational programs to teach responsible wireless use (e.g., don't text while driving), and assorted other things along those lines.
The regulations for wireless phone service he negotiated with the FCC in the mid '90s are similar to the Title II proposal that seems to be on the way--which is an approach that the current CTIA objects to for internet. (And note that this approach worked well for phone. All the carriers massively expanded their infrastructure, cellular voice is quite competitive, ubiquitous, and cheap).
Between those positions, and after the latter, he's been involved with a bunch of companies as founder, President (or CEO or similar), or board member. These have been in a variety of areas, including aerospace component repair, investment banking, wireless providers, cloud services, and content providers. (He's also was on the PBS board, and was a trustee of the Kennedy Center, and wrote a couple history books on the civil war--he seems to have very wide interests).
Taken as a whole, he's been involved heavily in organizations or companies that have reason to be on pretty much every side of any telecom issue, so if he does have some prejudice toward any past employer there is no reason to believe it would be toward ISPs. His actions certainly don't show signs of pro-ISP prejudice, considering that most of his proposals have pissed them off.
Several big name tech companies are against net neutrality rules: Intel, Qualcomm, Cisco, IBM, Juniper Networks, Corning, Panasonic, dLink, Broadcom, Ericsson, Alcatel-Lucent, among many other notable tech companies.
It's ignorant to assume only those who support this bill benefit from political contributions. It almost seems as if the people who are most knowledgeable about networks (ie companies that actually build the darn thing) are against net neutrality rules.
Peter Thiel and Mark Cuban are against government regulation of the internet. Even Eric Schmidt says he aligns himself and Google with Verizon on net neutrality. OH NO. They're paid shills!
Mark Cuban is delusional when it comes to the telecom industry. He thinks that it is currently operating as a free market. Basically, he is opposing regulation because he doesn't understand that the industry is already regulated by the governnent in a way that prevents any chance of a free market. If he wasn't too stuck on the glory days of his first tech startup to educate himself on this subject, he might change his mind.
This bill leaves plenty of holes for ISPs to abuse. Here is a few pieces of that article:
- Allows discrimination in violation of the principles of the Open Internet.
>For example, these principles would not have prevented AT&T from limiting FaceTime to particular tiers of service – as it tried to do in 2012. It would not address discriminatory use of data caps, such as Comcast has used to favor its own streaming content over that of rivals. It would not address potential issues arising at Internet interconnection, the gateway to the last mile. Even worse, by eliminating any flexibility on rulemaking or enforcement, the bill would prevent the FCC from addressing any new forms of discrimination and threats to openness that arise.
- Does not effectively block ‘fast lanes.’
>Even with the protection the draft does provide – addressing blocking, fast lanes, and throttling – it opens a huge, undefined loophole of ‘specialized services.’ As this draft reads, Comcast or AT&T or any other provider can offer its over-the-top online streaming service as a ‘specialized service’ and give itself prioritized service. Companies could essentially sell prioritized service to specific applications or content simply by calling these fast lanes ‘specialized services.’
- Consumers lose protections while special interests gain new ones.
>But while consumers lose, Hollywood wins. The draft contains a special carve out so that broadband providers can act as Hollywood’s special enforcers
- Enforceability.
>This draft would prevent the FCC from providing more clarity about what behavior runs afoul of the stated Internet openness principles. By requiring that the FCC only hear complaints, only the most well-heeled and well-lawyered companies and individuals may be able to enforce their rights.
This bill is a wolf in sheep's clothing if I've ever seen one. Hopefully The President sticks to his statements and vetos this if it gets pushed through.
No, you actually dont. All ISPs operate on oversubscribing each available meg. If they did what you are proposing, the only options would be 1 mb up/down stream, 3 MB up/down speed, and 5 mb up/down speed.
Many ISPs have 100-10,000x over subscriptions per meg
I think the idea here is that a user could prioritize their Netflix traffic over their Dropbox traffic. It would be great actually if they offered QoS configuration to end users.
Consumer please select one:
[ X ] $99/mo - make Comcast-NBC-Universal content faster, 100 GB/day
[ ] $199/mo - make all content the same speed, 1 GB/day
Because this has worked so well in the past with cable. [/sarcasm]
Seriously, you can't buy a cable package without also paying for a bunch of bundled channels that nobody wants. Why would literally the same people behave differently just because it's internet instead of cable?
Based on the text quoted in the article, I think it's relevant to note that traffic can't be prioritized "based on compensation or lack thereof by the sender to the broadband Internet access service provider." I may be reading it wrong, but to me that says specifically that ISPs can't hold content providers hostage for payments, but says nothing about throttling end users' access to content.
Theoretically the goal is to allow some forms of desired prioritization without giving these natural monopolies a huge club to beat service providers up with.
We want to be able to do prioritization of packets. QoS is not inherently evil. A smarter network can fully serve more clients for the same $$$ of infra, by understanding and prioritizing packets which are more or less sensitive to latency and/or packet loss.
The problem is we simply can't trust the ISPs, and there's no choice / no competition to switch to when they misbehave. And as we can see, it's very difficult to write a law which only allows these "acceptable" forms of QoS.
For example, if a customer wants lower latency on their VPN tunnel used for 4K HD video conferencing from home to the office, is it OK for Comcast to offer a higher priced plan to the consumer to get that? I think we want to keep these options open, and saying it has to be an opt-in service and show up on the consumers bill is an interesting middle-ground.
The other part is ensuring the baseline service is actually providing what they say it is, and if you can't get a reliable 5Mbps netflix stream to work 95% of the time on your "50Mbps" plan then they are failing their baseline SLA and customers should be entitled to refunds.
> And as we can see, it's very difficult to write a law which only allows these "acceptable" forms of QoS.
The IP header has QoS bits. It's not hard to write a law that doesn't prohibit ISPs from honoring those bits, or even from charging customers for a given amount of bandwidth at a given level of service. As long as any service/application can tag their packets however they like, and as long as the ISP is treating all equivalently tagged packets equivalently, there is no network neutrality problem with that. And it provides a clear line.
Trying to put significantly more complicated logic than that into the middle of the network in order to try to recognize specific types of traffic is inherently defective anyway. The ISP would end up picking winners and losers based on what traffic it recognizes for prioritization. And it would inherently bias the future of the internet against innovations because new protocols would be unrecognized until they became sufficiently popular and would never become sufficiently popular if they can't be prioritized but have to compete against incumbent protocols that are.
That would not work. Most users don't care/don't know about about QoS, nor they want to learn. There was/is a ton of research on user-driven QoS, micro-payments, per-flow reservations, etc. etc. The result: there is no nice or simple scheme to a) expose QoS knobs to users b) align incentives of ISPS/ContentProviders/Users for micropayments, c) affordable equipment that can do per-user crediting across the Internet.
tel·e·com·mu·ni·ca·tion
ˌteləkəˌmyo͞onəˈkāSH(ə)n/
noun
communication over a distance by cable, telegraph, telephone, or broadcasting.
the branch of technology concerned with telecommunication.
plural noun: telecommunications
formal
a message sent by telecommunication.
plural noun: telecommunications
But sure, let's pretend that the FCC shouldn't have the right to regulate ISPs, or that somehow ISPs aren't telecommunications companies</s>
I agree with you. Government regulation of the internet is going down the wrong hole. It's odd that opposing opinions can't be discussed on HN. They're just downvoted into oblivion and a hivemind forms.
Sure. At least I can hold them accountable for selling themselves. Instead we get organizations that are making laws without accountability. I mean, Obama appointed a guy who was formerly a lobbyist for the cable and wireless industry as the head of the FCC! Fox meet hen house.
I'm very well aware of the revolving door between regulatory agencies and the industries they're tasked with regulating.
That said, you do realize that the Tom Wheeler whose appointment is your go-to example of regulatory capture is the guy who appears to want to classify ISPs under Title II, don't you? That is, a former lobbyist for the telecoms is proposing a regulation that's counter to their interests, so they're buying a law to bar him, and the regulatory agency he works for, from doing that. Which is the corrupt side, again?
Also, hold them accountable how? With an incumbency rate > 90%, and congresscritters being all but necessarily for sale in order to finance their campaigns, how exactly does the farce of democracy and republicanism (note: small-r) that we have in the US punish the bad actors?
It sounds like the intention is actually much better than net neutrality - it claims to be trying to encourage a more competitive market. Proper competition would make net neutrality irrelevant, and would actually serve people better. For example, speeds would go up as providers actually compete for customers instead of having local monopolies.
Sen John Thune, a primary sponsor of this bill, has taken over $50,000 in political contributions between AT&T, Comcast, NCTA, Time Warner Cable, U.S. Telecom, and PACs associated with these groups.
We're not talking about a well-reasoned GOP alternative to "Obama's plan to regulate the Internet." This is a bill written by cable lobbyists to hamstring the FCC while throwing a bone to the American public.
Title II gives the FCC the authority it needs to prevent modern day monopolies from screwing up principles of net neutrality we've all enjoyed since day 1 of the Internet. These GOP plans should be viewed with a massive dose of skepticism, especially in light of the political contributions they've accepted in recent elections.