Net Neutrality and worthless bureaucrats

[Highlord Laan]

link

The FCC's newest deepthroating of of the companies that own it is up for Notice of Proposed Rules Making on May 25th. Now, I fully expect the bottom dwelling vermin that run it to completely ignore any and all public comment in favor of more bribes and Caribbean vacations like they always do, but hey, no harm in us trying.

[TronPaul]

There's a good article from Netflix and an absolutely hilarious response from Comcast about Netflix's needing to pay Comcast for an interconnect.

Netflix: The Case Against ISP Tolls
Comcast: Comcast Response To Netflix

My favorite part of Comcast's response is that the legal boilerplate is twice as long as their response.

[Gaidin]

Remind me again, did the FCC have a choice in trying to play by the court's ruling?

[Simon_Jester]

Well, the FCC could, if the initial article is right and I understand it correctly, just respond by striking the current laws and re-establishing the idea that Internet services are a form of telecommunications services, obliged to be neutral between customers under the longstanding pre-2002 precedent.

[Gaidin]

That's, so far as I can tell, not something the FCC plays a lot of games with since they have to regulate the technology use as much as the communication. That kind of rule is asking to have what is functionally 56k and DSL rules applied to high speed network technology and it's not exactly something that would fly.

[Simon_Jester]

Could you expand on that?

[Gaidin]

Could you expand on that?

Sorry, had stuff to do or would've responded sooner than the late morning.

One of the FCC's main required goals is to modernize itself. That includes as the ISPs use better technology, however they do use it, whether actually does their customers any good. If the FCC were to call shennanigans on the ISPs and say they're going to govern them with old policies just because Verizon has a ruling that says that the FCC can't hold them under Title II, then odds are the ISPs would have fair odds of a good case to call shennanigans themselves again because the networks are relatively new technology by comparison, and one of the purposes to the FCC is rules of use of such things(fair or otherwise), and the ISPs will try to get out from under net neutrality however they can. What the courts would say to that, who the hell knows. But the FCC hasn't really ever shied away from that particular purpose anyway, and it's not about to for one particular group. If it's told by a legitimate authority that it's got to find a different way to handle a matter it'll do it, because when it tries to find a way to do something it usually thinks it should be done. As it is, you have a system that lets the FCC closely monitor the market, transaction by transaction. Will they actually check every one of them? More than likely not. Their budget's not nearly that large. But a bad transaction, the kind they'd likely define as to look for, will probably stick out, and they don't have to use past bad transactions as precedent as I understand it. Actual net neutrality needs more than the Communications Act of 1934, that much is obvious. But good luck, with this Congress.

[slebetman]

If the FCC were to call shennanigans on the ISPs and say they're going to govern them with old policies just because Verizon has a ruling that says that the FCC can't hold them under Title II, then odds are the ISPs would have fair odds of a good case to call shennanigans themselves again because the networks are relatively new technology by comparison, and one of the purposes to the FCC is rules of use of such things(fair or otherwise), and the ISPs will try to get out from under net neutrality however they can.

You do realize that the so-called "old rules" don't restrict implementation in any way do you? We went from relay switched to electronic switched to packet switched to IP telephony all under the old rules. And yes, (TCP)IP telephony -- the same TCP/IP protocol we use for data.

The "old rules" merely state that you can't restrict other carriers data from being transmitted on your network and you must bill all carriers the same. They don't impose how the billing should be done and left that up to the carriers themselves to decide what is fair.