I was recently at a conference in DC called "Transforming Communities: Broadband Goals for 2017 and Beyond" which was largely focused on public policy related to the lack of real broadband in America. Gigi Sohn, who is the counselor to the chairman of the FCC, spoke.
She was very candid about the position of the FCC and the fact that she was finally able to speak her mind because this was going to be one of her last public appearances as a government official. One thing that stuck me was what she said about Tom[1]: "He actually believes that the consumer, the american people, are his clients. He's said that from the first day and he'll say that the day he leaves. Trust me, he doesn't like any of the companies [laughter]". The loss of the current administration of the FCC (including but not limited to Tom) will be a great loss for the American people in my opinion.
The conference was interesting and somewhat sad, because it was planned before the election and probably with the assumption that the new administration would not be totally hostile. Instead of the original direction of "here's what we've done and how we plan to carry these goals forward" it ended up being more of a retrospective on progress that had been made at the federal level that was about to be erased.
From the people I saw, there did not seem to be anyone there representing the new administration.
What FCC-related promises has Trump made? I know he's said a lot of unsettling things, but nothing springs to mind regarding net neutrality or the like.
If he ran for president in 4 years he would have my vote. So few politicians realize that they are supposed to be working for the people, not the mega corps.
It's worth noting that whenever there is a change of parties in control, the incumbent party is always going to lament the fact that it's the end of the world. Time will tell if the new FCC administration is actually bad for the consumer.
While I in many scenarios in theory could agree with you, this portrayal is very disingenous unless you think Net Neutrality is somehow bad for consumers, because going off party politics on these issues, this WILL be bad.
Any candidate put forth by the republicans will attempt to do so, yes. And in the meantime they have a 2-1 majority and will likely aim for it even before that happens.
True, but fighting practices often requires naming them so people know what you're talking about. "Bias" is a technical term already, so...
In actuality it's a form of double-billing, of collecting from both the sender and receiver even though both they've both paid for access to the other already.
I think Net Neutrality is bad for consumers, because it entrenches dependance on eg. Comcast. Instead, if we'd just let Comcast do whatever it wants with its networks (yes, we have stupidly built a lot of laws/rules around network sharing, that enable nasty behavior by Comcast, et. al.), then they'd jack up the price for whatever they want and (in a handwaving way) we'd have a market for citizen built mesh-networks.
Those are great things.
as a further stretch of the imagination... Fuck Video Bandwidth... why are we encouraging more Netflix with Net Neutrality? Do we really want more television?
Fuck codifying anything about Comcast's business into legal frameworks (laws/regulations/etc...)... let's do what humans have done for many many thousands of years, and communicate among ourselves, instead of through the king's network.
And, to be sure, Comcast is King. Well, money is... Or we wouldn't be worried about FCC chair change-over.
So what you're arguing is that NN is artificially keeping the cost of network access down? That's actually an argument I haven't heard before. Thus the only companies that can afford to eat the cost of NN are huge ISPs. I don't know whether this is true or not but I'm at least interested.
NN is largely independent of the type of content being sent over the network. NN helps Netflix because they're in competition with services that are owned by or partner with ISPs -- it doesn't, on the surface, seem to foster the creation of more streaming services.
Comcast was extremely anti-NN because they want to push cable and their own streaming services via network restrictions. I'm not sure what part of CC's business is begin codified into NN regulations or what nasty behavior it enables.
Do we really want more of one of the most vibrant artistic media right now?
Do we want them pushing new boundaries in the way they tell stories?
Do we want them bringing delight to more people - and more diverse groups who were previously ignored by network television?
Erm, yes.
I know it's fashionable amongst certain filter bubbles to be snippy about TV (and sometimes about all forms of entertainment), but actually, it's a pretty remarkable time for the artform.
Many of those of us who are in favour of art, stories, beauty, reflection of humanity in the mirror of fiction, all that stuff, do indeed want more of it.
You're likely being downvoted for assuming lamentation is related to the party that was elected, rather than the person. We're in a unique situation here.
I do agree that we should wait and see when it comes to the new (FCC) administration, however.
I had a chance to meet Tom Wheeler to discuss net neutrality in the summer of 2014. It was coming off of a bad press cycle for him (John Oliver calling him a dingo), so I didn't know what to expect.
He was extremely reasonable and very receptive to the needs of the tech community and small businesses. I came away from the meeting pleasantly surprised and have been happy with his actions during his tenure. Sad to see him go.
John Oliver was hardly alone in their skepticism that a former lobbyist would make for a good FCC chairman, but I think everybody can agree that he has been a pleasant surprise.
The most useful analogy I've seen is the "ala carte internet" one.
"Get Facebook, Twitter, and Google for just $9.99/mo!"
"Add on the video package and get Netflix and Hulu for only $24.99/mo more!"
"News junkie? Get BBC, NY Times, CNN for $7.99/mo."
The reality is of course much more nuanced than that (what's more likely is we'll see these sites being offered bandwidth cap exemptions and faster loading; not outright blocks if you don't pay up), but it conveys the message in a easy-to-digest fashion for the lay person. They're used to this already with their cable packages.
Optus in Australia offers "free social" including Facebook and Twitter. For most normal people, network neutrality takes that away (that's how the big players will spin it).
Keep in mind, Wikipedia benefits from non-neutral networks in some developing countries where Wikipedia doesn't count towards the bandwidth cap.
For the average person paying 60 bucks a month for internet today while only using Facebook, Twitter, Gmail, and Netflix, this sounds like a great deal.
Which will accelerate the move Facebook, Twitter, etc are already making to rehost all that content on their own servers to provide an "integrated experience" for their users.
Those fees are on top of the $60/month for internet. Regular internet of course being limited to 512kbps and 1GB/month ($25 per each additional gigabyte).
It's coming too, because it is a great deal for ISPs (more money! Huge kickbacks for the senior management!), and a great deal for megacorp incumbent media companies who don't have to worry about any of those pesky upstarts screwing up their monopolistic business models. No more Netflix like services appearing and eating your lunch, you can effectively cut them off at the ISP.
Right, there are plenty of people who would be happy with basically Facebook and Gmail alone. And the cable companies will be more than happy to extract $40-$60 a month from granny that uses maybe 1GB of bandwidth from those two sites at best.
This puts say, Hacker News, in a very bad position.
As well as any new startup that wants to compete against the major players with billions of dollars.
Already there are people strong-armed into AT&T's DirecTV Now, which is zero-rated on AT&T's wireless network. With the pitiful bandwidth caps on mobile data, how can Netflix possibly compete with that?
Yeah, you should just roll over and die so Time Warner/Comcast/Viacom/etc... bottom line isn't threatened in any way no matter how lousy and overpriced their product is. Geez, the nerve of some people.
I mean, the real problem is that we have a private utility.
I think things like net neutrality can have market solutions if we divorce the last mile operators (to become a utility) from customer ISPs, who merely operate a contract with various backbone networks to connect their clients to servers they want.
With last mile paid by taxes, ISPs are only dealing with the cost of backbone transit rates, where there is vibrant competition (and the market seems healthy). This competition to make a good transit deal (to get a cut from clients) is healthy as well, and is how much of the world operates. I think that switching off the US rent-seeking model to something like that would be a long-term solution to issues like net neutrality.
Change the incentives to change the behavior.
The real explanation is we should use the free market to solve our problems, and government for the portion where a market cant properly operate (ie, the last-mile netwotk).
In New Zealand, our broadband market is structurally separated.
The the access provider for both the copper and fibre network (right to the customer premises) is a regulated wholesale only provider, which is required to provide open access to its network on a non-discriminatory basis between all access seekers (retail telecommunications companies).[0]
This almost entirely resolves the net neutrality debate in New Zealand.
[0] This is a slight simplification: Chorus is the network owner for the copper network, and about 70% of the fibre network. The other 30% of fibre network is also built, owned and operated by wholesale only providers on a comparable basis.
NZ used to have expensive and slow internet (we don't have much TV cable here, so it was all ADSL), but it's gotten a lot better in the last few years. Currently I have 1000mbit down / 500mbit up fiber with unlimited data for $130nz/month (90usd).
The US has basically that model for many other natural monopolies, and it works alright.
I think we could do with a bit more government investment in infrastructure, because government is really the only entity that can drop a trillion dollars, then wait 40-50 years for its returns. (Well, them and pension funds, but neither has exactly shown great financial prudence lately.)
I just... Have a hard time articulating why infrastructure is important, because it's just so glaringly obvious from my perspective that it is. I mean, we see infrastructure everywhere in nature -- from the layout of bacteria mats to ant colonies. The idea that our society can be vibrant without having to perform those basic functions is absurd.
So it makes sense that the lives which depend on the services should control the final delivery network when it's not possible to deploy more than one or two -- eg, FTTH should be utility, cellphones should be a market; roads should be (largely) public, etc.
If the US's power is its people, then infrastructure is what allows us to maintain and focus that power.
Net Neutrality legislation to me is definitely attacking the symptoms, not the problems. In my experience, in places where there is competition, net neutrality is not something you need to worry about.
Private doesn't even have to be a problem if competition is maintained. In Sweden there's a mix of public, privatized-minority-government-owned, co-op and private providers and competition is quite healthy.
Only on the wired side, wireless carriers in Sweden are moving closer to US standard than their neighboring countries. Finland having unlimited cap options, and Norway and Denmark at least twice the cap per price compared to Sweden. Telia just got served for going against net neutrality principles on exempting some services from their caps.
But that's because Sweden has open carrier fiber network, while the wireless network is carrier specific.
> But that's because Sweden has open carrier fiber network
The last mile isn't some nationwide open carrier network like Australia's planned NBN. In some places there are municipal open access networks, in some places it's co-ops of homeowners, but in many places it's all private networks (in every apartment I lived in in Malmö, it was all private fiber - either Telia, Tele2, Ownit, etc). But even though it was private it was better than what you can get in most US cities.
> but games are only interesting if the rules are reasonable
I completely agree with this.
> But couldn't a lot of that be addressed by requiring a certain number of different spectrum owners?
I suppose it could, but is that not the case in the US? I believe it only works if you can expect that cartels won't exist, which unfortunately is not a safe assumption. It's also an expensive barrier to entry for new actors.
Community owned last-mile utility is what has worked on electricity, phones, and forementioned fiber in Sweden. Anything else has proven to somehow fail to be competative. I feel comfortable in drawing an assumption off that. I wish more people agreed or that I was proven wrong.
Likewise games stop being fun if the rules can't enforce a reasonable playing ground.
The difference between phones and FTTH is that I don't think we have enough spectrum to assign a little share to everyone, whereas we do have space to route fibers to everyone.
The question then is how to best regulate the allocation of spectrum. Because cell networks are relatively easy to deploy (on top of an existing fiber network, and relative to the work of the fiber buildout), it seems to make more sense to break regions (city or county) up in to 10 or so spectrum slices, and lease them out to carriers. Regions are free to choose to have some or all of that operate as a utility, I suppose, but I think a regular co-op or corporation likely performs as well, as long as you require that fundamental carrier diversity.
Then just a bit of regulation about unlocked phones (when you pay in full!).
I keep feeling like the debate over Net Neutrality is ignoring the elephant in the room: that ISPs have access to inspect your traffic at all.
We don't need rules to enforce a neutral internet if we create a traffic system where 3rd parties can't see your destination before you get there. We don't need to have a debate or try to explain the reasons at all if we use better encryption and routing protocols.
This is all technically doable, I just feel like we haven't allowed privacy to be a high enough priority, and we won't really get net neutrality until we decide to make privacy more important than giving ISPs and government the ability to look at everything we do online.
How about if the road company threatened to put speed bumps on the roads unless the restaurant companies paid to not have them installed, and Burger King paid but McDonalds didn't? Oh, and you already paid the road company a toll to use the road to drive to the restaurants in the first place.
"The customer is free to choose a different road company. And the road company is free to choose its business model. The free market will decide which road company offers the best price/performance ratio in the end."
This is the heart of it. Free market economics is a wonderful thing and as a civilization we have reaped enormous rewards from it, I'm a true believer, but if your market produces natural monopolies that are highly stable then that's not really a market anymore and it's certainly not free or fair.
Adam Smith, the father of free market economics, was very clear about this. Markets must be well regulated in order to remain free and fair.
thats not devil's advocate as much as it is a "racketeering advocate" [1].
[1] Racketeering, often associated with organized crime, is the act of offering of a dishonest service (a "racket") to solve a problem that wouldn't otherwise exist without the enterprise offering the service.
If all roads were owned by companies, should it be OK for UPS to charge FedEx or ambulances more to drive on its roads?
This is imperfect, obviously, but I think it gets close to the core issues fairly concisely.
Frankly, I, as a citizen, think you should be allowed to sell the pipe, what goes over the pipe, or what the consumer connects to the pipe, but only one of the three. I like that this has reasonably clear divisions and provides competing interests that keep the other parties in check.
That's because this analogy misses the point. We are in a thread about the difficulty explaining a problem I suppose.
Discriminating based on the type of traffic is arguably a good thing so long as it's done in good faith. Real time connections like VOIP and streaming ought to get higher priority.
It's the destination that really matters. Since UPS owns the roads and partners with Amazon, shipments from Jet.com are limited to 15mph while trucks carrying Amazon packages can go 60mph.
Or if you want something that's more like actual shipping a better example might be only UPS is allowed to deliver packages on the roads they own (like last mile ISPs), and because of their partnership with Amazon, only packages from them can have next-day shipping.
They do charge different kinds of vehicles different prices to drive on toll ways and many cities have freeways w/o tolls and a parallel express lane you can choose to pay a toll to use.
But can we truly say that these for-profit, mostly un-regulated telecom providers whose mandate is to make money for their shareholders, will put that money towards "wear to the roads" and "upgrading the road system"? How many homes in America don't have access to Broadband internet? IN 2016?
Even more, how do we know that these telecom providers will only charge as much as is needed for the maintenance of the roads, and not just slap on more costs?
We can't even really blame the telecom companies for this, either, as they do have a responsibility to their shareholders to make as much money as possible, but in a monopolized market, as ISPs are in most cities in America, the government has to step in at some point to protect the consumer's interests.
> But can we truly say that these for-profit, mostly un-regulated telecom providers whose mandate is to make money for their shareholders, will put that money towards "wear to the roads" and "upgrading the road system"?
Yes, because of competition or the threat of competition. This works for CPU vendors and toll roads; why shouldn't it work for internet service (which is rather fungible)?
> How many homes in America don't have access to Broadband internet? IN 2016?
I don't know; what are you trying to tell me? Are you saying it's too little or everyone has broadband internet?
> We can't even really blame the telecom companies for this, either, as they do have a responsibility to their shareholders to make as much money as possible, but in a monopolized market, as ISPs are in most cities in America, the government has to step in at some point to protect the consumer's interests.
Assuming a monopoly:
a) Wouldn't antitrust law work if the ISP tried to prioritize their own pages (like their streaming video services)?
b) If people wanted net neutrality the ISP would offer such a plan. But then you might say the ISP will price that too high. But why didn't they price normal non-neutral internet service too high then? The threat of competition forces them to price plans reasonably.
There's a difference between treating all cars the same and all trucks the same vs. treating trucks operated by a specific company differently. Imagine if the fee to cross the bay bridge was different based on what company you worked for? Or imagine that the fee to cross the bridge depended which neighborhood in SF you were driving to?
"If you want the Internet to continue working exactly as it has since it was created, a fair and level playing field for both Google and Grandma, then you're in favor of Net Neutrality.
If instead you want the telecom natural monopolies to take more control of the Internet and change how it works to bias whoever can pay them more, then you're against Net Neutrality."
The problem with this is you aren't really explaining why there needs to be a rule. Which is actually the biggest problem with getting net neutrality implemented. It's sort of a solution in search of a problem.
There hasn't been many largescale violations of it even when violations were legal.
Comcast blocking bittorrent is the only clearly bad example of a net neutrality violation I can think of. AT&T zero rating DirecTV streaming is the second but a lot of consumers see free and don't care.
True, which is why I intentionally framed the second line as "take more control" and "change how it works", implying a change from the current status quo. Maybe that's too subtle though.
I was watching an industry spokesperson explain (falsely) that net neutrality forces some companies to fall under one set of regulations, and others to fall under a different set. Getting rid of net neutrality meant that all companies would play by the same rules.
I use a water company analogy. If you use the water for irrigation, you pay $X. If you use it for showering or dishes you pay $Y. If it's for drinking or cooking you pay $Z. Different applications for the same commodity that makes no difference to the provider outside of volume, which you already pay per unit. Should you pay more per unit if you water your lawn, if you have a pool? This is what the data providers are doing to the 'other' supply pipe coming into your home.
I think that's a bad analogy. I'm in support of net neutrality but your analogy just made me want to support different pricing for water.
Water is a finite, possibly scarce resource, and there are shortages in places in the US. If I lived in one of those places, I would sure as hell want some asshole filling his pool during a shortage to pay more than the rest of us pay for basic drinking water. Similarly, I would want companies that bottle that water up and sell it at a premium to pay more than everyone else.
Municipalities already limit outdoor water usage for exactly this reason. You can drink all the water you want but you can only use it outside to water your grass or fill your pool on odd or even days. Your analogy is saying that shouldn't be allowed, because internet.
Internet connectivity is all about maximum capacity. Everything past that is just sunk costs.
It doesn't cost anything more to use it at maximum capacity than it does to just leave it on standby. (The end points MIGHT use a TINY bit more power, but we're talking on the order of cents per month for terrabytes/month of traffic; it's a rounding error.)
I think you should pay more per unit for a pool or massive outdoor fountain than for drinking and showering. And the water company does, too -- many water companies charge very little for the first X gallons (for basic needs) and then charge a higher price for usage over that.
It's not a line-item comparison, it's an explanation of how I pay an agreed upon price to use their resource and delivery system. And what my bits represent does not deserve a premium as long as I pay the agreed upon price per volume, IMO.
The ISPs already offer and charge accordingly for home, business and commercial accounts(all pay more for more volume & speed).
Utilities are a natural monopoly because everyone uses them so they end up commoditized (the more marginal the product, the more volume is required, until you end up with a handful of the largest players).
We seem to have no problem letting the other natural monopolies like electricity, water, sanitation, education, mail, roads, bridges etc etc etc be run by the government as part of the commons. But we freak out when the government runs the internet because big brother.
I might suggest that the real issue is not the bits whizzing around but who is watching. Which would mean that net neutrality is a smokescreen. Fix privacy with free https everywhere (among other things) and people might just realize that they don't need to pay 30% more for advertising and dividends on what could otherwise be a commoditized utility like everything else.
This actually happens in Ireland for electric "Storage Heaters", which charge up overnight when electricity is cheap and plentiful, but it's not charged at the usual night rate...
(This may actually no longer be a thing, storage heaters aren't used all that often anymore..)
At least in the mainland UK, I think those kind of plans were replaced by Economy 7/10 tariffs that offer the same rate for all off-peak electricity usage regardless of what it's used for a long time ago.
There is no magic explanation that's going to suddenly convince people when your opponent has no compunction about lying. You need to have your best, shortest explanations available and articulate them, of course, but you also need to be willing to call out dishonesty and get into a fight over it if it persists even though this will make your life unpleasant some of the time, eg by closing some career choices or making enemies of people.
... so one thing I've never understood is why the networks/ISPs aren't then held accountable for what's on their networks?
As in, they can regulate all they want, but then they're legally liable for everything on their networks. So if a kiddie porn packet goes over it, they're complicit by virtue of not regulating it.
Obviously, I'd prefer net neutrality but I've never understood why that threat doesn't have teeth.
I also have never understood why, if a utility has right of way on my property, I don't have say over things like net neutrality. It seems like if they don't want net neutrality, I should arbitrarily be able to price the cost of them using my property, as well as damages from any removal. It's not like they don't make use of public lands.
... or the arguments against municipal broadband...
... or why ISPs are not subject to antitrust statutes...
With net neutrality, all websites you visit are equally fast and equally accessible. Without it, someone else is allowed to choose for you which ones are fast, and which ones are accessible. As a consumer of a web without net neutrality, you lose some ability to choose, and you may lose some access. It is fundamentally about the freedom to choose, not about payments or bandwidth numbers, but choice.
As many of us are burgeoning web site creators and entrepreneurs, lack of net neutrality gives advantages to existing businesses who have more money than their competitors. It allows bigger sites to drive traffic to them and away from competition. This will make it harder, not easier, to start new businesses that rely on internet traffic.
Prices for electricity depending on the brand of the manufacturer. For X dollars you can power Bosch, Philips and Electrolux. For additional XX dollars you can power Amica and Whirlpool products. If you have cheap noname brand toaster, sorry no service for you. or pay extra. We are sorry but we no longer support Samsung products in this plan, would you like to upgrade your plan?
> What is the best way to explain the concept that can be quickly understood by those that are non-technical?
"What if your mail carrier had sole power to decide how quickly (or if at all) you got your mail?"
It's probably not a particularly accessible analogy for most of us here, but it's easily relatable across generations without getting bogged down in technical details.
Currently you get to choose which type of mail you're sending, you get to choose your discount. It's not about the discounts. It's about the carrier making the decision which one you get, and taking that choice away from you.
Yeah, "types of mail", not "sources of mail". The difference here is that PF Chang's and my local Chinese place are equally as capable of sending me bulk mail.
I think he's talking about explaining it to the average person. They're not going to watch an 11 minute video about it. Their attention span is measured in seconds. This is the explanation against net neutrality:
It means Spotify doesn't count against your data allowance!
It's the electric company charging different rates depending on the brands of your appliances (even if they use the same amount of electricity). They can also charge the brands themselves for good placement on this list. And they have their own private brand, which gets the lowest tier of rates. They initially present this as a special discount, and raise the price of everything else later to compensate.
> What is the best way to explain the concept that can be quickly understood by those that are non-technical?
The only internet path to Comcast ISP customers is through Comcast. Comcast shouldn't be allowed to use that monopoly to destroy their competitors in other markets like TV.
"If you like paying for Netflix twice -- once to Netflix and once to Comcast, Time Warner, or whomever you already buy internet from -- then you want to repeal Net Neutrality."
Or:
"If you think that Comcast, Time Warner, and other internet providers should not control where you choose to go on the internet, then support Net Neutrality."
Companies build private roads.
To drive on those roads, they install a toll-booth at each entrance onto the road (like your house, office, warehouse, shops, etc) - every vehicle gets charged to enter the road network.
Large road companies usually come to some agreement that they'll join their roads at large intersections, but don't install toll-booths there, because it's good for each of them - after all, they still bill every car entering their road network, and better connections between road networks means more users of the road (and thus more revenue).
Usually when roads get congested, they make them wider, and where two road networks meet - each company pays to upgrade it's side of the road network.
This is how things have worked until recently.
Some road companies have decided that instead of upgrading their network, they'll make many of the lanes reserved for 'preferred road network users'.
Now, if you order from a store affiliated with the road company - things will work like they used to. But if you order from an unaffiliated store - that delivery will take much longer (or maybe not happen at all, if the road is too congested and the driver turns around and goes home)
Yeah, but isn't it in the private roads' owners benefit to reduce congestion, so they create HOV lanes? And what if they want to promote certain kinds of cars like electric and hybrid and therefore allow them to drive in the HOV lanes? Shouldn't they be allowed to?
Edit: Not that I necessarily agree, but this seems like a flaw in the analogy.
FWIW HOV lanes actually increase congestion in practice, because the benefit from getting a small number of additional people to carpool is less than the efficiency loss from operating the lane at less than its carrying capacity during congestion.
And the correct analogy for what they want to do is that the road company also owns a car company and is restricting the lanes you can use and charging higher tolls for not buying one of their cars, because they want to monopolize the car market.
It's not that this isn't hard to understand, it's that it's too long of an explanation. There needs to be a concise and succinct point that can be expounded if people are interested in learning. There is some merit in trying to attract your listener and keep them engaged.
You're paying for Internet service, yet without Net Neutrality the ISP can opt to not give you the service you're paying for until they get protection money from someone else.
Imagine if toll roads looked inside cars and trucks before deciding how much to charge. Or charged more for e.g. Ford cars until the manufacturer paid protection money.
This isn't really news, more of a mere formality. The federal government department heads are all expected to resign or be fired when there's a regime shift in the Oval Office (party change).
Incorrect. FCC commissioners serve a term and Wheeler's term was up June 30, 2018, so this is an early resignation and opens up a spot for Obama or Trump to fill.
There's a few independent commissions like the FCC where the members are meant to have a partisan split with the party that controls the White House has the majority. To make that work, the tradition is that the chairman steps down when the White House changes hands.
Kevin Martin (R) resigned on January 19th 2009 to allow Obama to select a chairman; William Kennard (D) resigned on January 19, 2001 to allow Bush to select a chairman; Alfred C. Sikes (R) resigned on January 19, 1993 to allow Clinton to select a chairman, etc.
This has actually been a matter of contention this year; back in March Wheeler was asked by the Senate Commerce Commission if he would follow the tradition and refused to commit, which raised a number of eyebrows. Apparently he thought better of it (or was just having fun keeping people guessing).
> opens up a spot for Obama or Trump to fill.
No, as per normal his resignation is effective on inauguration. The entire point is to let the incoming president fill the spot.
This resignation is very bad for consumers. I'd hoped that Wheeler would stick it out and at least be present to bring consumer perspectives to the discussion and get consumer concerns on the record in commission meetings. But I can understand why he wouldn't personally want to finish out his term as a lame duck dissenter.
If congress is in session it'd require confirmation. The exception is a recess appointment but that's not going to happen as they're already keeping congress continuously open to block Garland's recess appointment.
That trick of procedurally gavelling open a session and immediately closing it to avoid the recess disgusts me beyond words. The GOP basically opted to treat the Constitution as a dead letter through tricks such as these and refusing to even dignify Garland's nomination with a hearing. Besides the political ramifications I think it's sad that a guy who's widely regarded as a decent hardworking jurist will have his legal career remembered only as a political football.
Democrats used to hold the Republican party's stances and the Republican party used to hold the Democrat's. Saying that something was invented by Democrats is essentially saying it was invented by people who would agree with today's Republicans.
The point that I was making was about how traditions and accepted practices govern (no pun intended) how government is run. If one party opens up the option of blocking recess appointments (by having the Senate continuously open), then they can't complain when the opposition does the same.
On the flip side, I expect to see a lot of the reverse as well with large numbers of Democrats refusing to act on or otherwise stalling legislation as retribution for how Republicans have acted the past few years. We're in for a fun ride.
I agree that the Democrats made their bed on that one, but they were at least holding hearings for most of Bush's senior nominees rather than trying to obstruct all his appointments. The refusal to even hear a supreme Court nominee this year shocked me. It would be understandable if Scalia had died close to the election but his seat has been empty for nearly a year now.
Not that I intend the conversation to devolved into "but the Democrats did..." and vice versa, but the only thing unique for Garland is the delay at that exact position.
Priscilla Owen was denied a vote for an entire presidential term[1].
No, Garland's situation is unique because no one has pulled this nonsense with the Supreme Court, regardless of how close to the election it was. Tit for tat politicking is usually reserved for the lower courts and Democrats were far more accomodating to Bush's nominations for the Supreme Court.
Priscilla Owen was retribution because the Republican senate refused to fill Garwood's seat during Clinton's second term (obstruction that lasted just as long as Owens, 97-01) and she was viewed as too conservative (contrary to what the the Frontpage Mag article says). They're not even in the same ballpark.
That seems to be the rule. Whatever past government set a lower standard, the new government can take that as useful approved governing tool.
Really people wonder why politician sometimes fight for nonsensical minor tweaks that look like a waste a taxpayer money, but that's exactly it. Most of the government way of working is ruled by tradition rather than law and new laws are created in case of abuse.
After a few cycle of those little games affecting both big parties, they will most likely get tired of it and vote a law that prevent that to ever happen again.
Exactly my point. A "nuclear" level of the same standoff is regarding changing cloture rules. The party in power can do it as a rule change (which can't be filibustered) but nobody has done so till now because they don't want to not be in power when that goes in effect.
Amusingly enough now I am the one to tell you that Harry Reid did in fact do this in 2013, albeit for lower-court appointments. So I guess it was more of a tactical nuke than a strategic one, but that may well be cited as precedent next month. I think there's a high likelihood of the Senate doing exactly that at the beginning of the next term or soon after.
Yep, and I expect the democrats to give Trump the hell that the republicans have given Obama, especially if they get back congress in 2018. There is no room for niceties anymore.
Thankfully, the Republicans have been laying out the battle plans of obstruction for two decades. Already there are a bunch of state Attorney Generals frothing at the mouth to sue the Trump administration to stop everything from nominees due to conflict of interest to blocking deregulation and neutering Department secretaries, the same tactics used by Republicans to obstruct all manners of policy.
It's four more years of the same just with slightly different players and the Democrats already know what to do.
No it isn't. Congress is only in session part of the time. Lawmaking - as opposed to politicking - currently requires a quorum and that legislators actually go on the record with both arguments and votes. It's where the rubber of governance meets the road and politicians can't pander to all and sundry while shrugging off criticism by saying 'they misspoke' and so on, but must instead commit to some sort of position (even if they obfuscate that by engaging in bullshit legislative tricks like poison-pill amendments). When Congress is in session it's doing (in theory at least) the Nation's business. When it's in recess the politicians can rest, schmooze their constituents, and so on - conducting their own political business rather than the nation's.
Now all this sounds very fine and idealist, but for lawmaking to be valid and have credibility then there needs to be some sort of formality to the process so that the citizenry can find out what their elected representatives are actually doing on their behalf, eg by consulting the Congressional record. Of course much of what happens in the legislative chamber is theatrical most deals are negotiated and brokered behind closed doors, but the lack of accountability that inheres in such arrangements is why there is a requirement for formalities in the first place.
So because there are formal rules on how laws are made, whether Congress is in session or not does matter. When it's only being kept in session by a technicality without any actual legislative work being performed, that says to everyone looking that the party engaging in such behavior regards rules as an obstruction to be got around rather than a standard for governing their own behavior, and that attitude is likely to promulgate itself among the population in various ways.
If you think recess appointments are a silly anachronism, amend the constitution. Unfortunately, I feel there's a particular faction in the country that actively aims at the undoing of the union in favor of a weak federation of states or several regional confederacies. That would not be so bad if the USA were its own planet, but as it's an imperial-scale power sharing the world with several rivals and many smaller national and corporate actors, a deconstruction of the federal system will create all sorts of power vacuums, and you know how that turns out.
> Unfortunately, I feel there's a particular faction in the country that actively aims at the undoing of the union in favor of a weak federation of states or several regional confederacies.
This is off-topic, but I don't think that the number of people who genuinely want to do what you describe is effectively none. I suspect that you're actually referring to people who want the government of the United States and the governments of the several states to actually obey the federal and state constitutions. They (and — full disclosure — I) would argue that things for which there's no constitutional provision (e.g. drug prohibition) simply shouldn't exist, or amendments should be passed to permit them.
It's hard to reconcile your logic with Hamilton's from Federalist #67:
The ordinary power of appointment is confined to the President and Senate JOINTLY, and can therefore only be exercised during the session of the Senate; but as it would have been improper to oblige this body to be continually in session for the appointment of officers and as vacancies might happen IN THEIR RECESS, which it might be necessary for the public service to fill without delay, the succeeding clause is evidently intended to authorize the President, SINGLY, to make temporary appointments "during the recess of the Senate, by granting commissions which shall expire at the end of their next session."
Given the joint nature of appointments, and that the legislature is a co-equal branch of government, it seems reasonable that if the Senate would prefer to remain permanently in session so as not to diminish its authority, it's within its right to do so. And that an executive trying to make a recess appointment in this case is exactly the sort of "regard[ing] rules as an obstruction to be got around" that you seem to be railing against.
I disagree, but I applaud the high quality of your argument.
it seems reasonable that if the Senate would prefer to remain permanently in session so as not to diminish its authority, it's within its right to do so
Legally yes, politically no. There's no quorum so it's not possible to transact any legislative business and everyone knows this. That gap between the procedural state and reality delegitimizes the procedure through its self-evident falsity.
If the public perceives the government to be a sham, why keep obeying it? I suggest to you that the emergent political reality is that the constitution is becoming a dead letter and that the Declaration of Independence more closely mirrors national sentiment.
But that gets back to my original point about cell phones and airplanes. If the modern age, if there were an item that Senate leadership deemed sufficiently important, they could call the Senate back from non-recess recess and get their quorum in a matter of days.
Edit: it's also worth noting that serving in the Senate was originally a part-time occupation; recesses of several months were common until the 1930s. That's a very different case than in 2016, where the longest break was five weeks.
If they were actually in session it would be fine. It's faking it that's awful.
A recess appointment seems fair here to me. It's not the rules that the president would be working around, it's a failure of congress to act.
Both sides are supposed to have power here. Ideally if either side refuses to do their job for long enough, the other one should be able to install a temporary appointee.
I thought they were going to enter recess to allow them to invoke a law that allows repealing decisions made by the executive within the last 60 days of sessions of Congress. Maybe I misunderstood an article on this?
The summary is that within 60 legislative session days of a regulation being issued Congress can go through an expedited process (in particular, not filibusterable) to pass legislation that blocks the rule from going into effect. The catch is that the legislation still needs to be signed by the president, or you have to override the veto. But if you get a new president before the 60 legislative session days are up...
What I'm curious to know, is how will any of this truly affect users who aren't necessarily streaming/torrenting/big bandwidth users, like those who focus on education, research, computer sciences, among others. Not meaning to sound too vague, but speaking for myself, most of the Internet-related things I depend on don't necessarily involve constant high-bandwidth usage (like online gaming, for example). If the internet gets completely throttled I want to know what I have to look forward to.
Throttling is far from the only sort of shenanigans ISPs like to play on their subscribers. A very cynical view might be that any (potentially innovative/interesting) network protocols that aren't easily productized will suffer from deprioritization to the point of becoming unusable. The ISP's response will be that you have no business doing that over a home connection, and that you need to pay 10x for a Business class connection.
"Wired.com is not included in your Comcast Internet Basic package. Click here to upgrade to Comcast Internet Extreme for $9.99 more a month, for access to Wired.com and twenty other premium web sites!"
I realize that's satire, but actual net neutrality violations are much cleverer and mostly won't even be visible to users. For example, it's more likely that Wired would (be forced to) pay Comcast a cut of their ad revenue.
"Nah sir, that's just jitter coming from the cord coming from your XFinity box into your computer. We only support Comcast Certified™ cables such as MONSTER. Our records indicate that your local Best Buy has them on sale for $69.99(1) for a three inch, but we can sell you to them now for 20% off(2) for being such a good customer."
1) Price quoted by support agent may not be the most up to date price for the requested service item. It is often times significantly cheaper than what our data reflects.
2) Discount does not include shipping, processing, transaction, or technical support fees. Our discounted price might also remain significantly more expensive than similar services offered by third parties in your area.
Except it's more insidious than that. In Australia, playing Apple Music doesn't count towards your data cap on Telstra Mobile. Hell, even I switched to Apple Music because my home Internet was out for a week and Spotify lost my offline cached tracks (again).
That's funny - I completely missed that your message was satire until I saw the child comments. You see, I had just gotten done seeing this message:
"Here’s The Thing With Ad Blockers We get it: Ads aren’t what you’re here for. But ads help us keep the lights on. So, add us to your ad blocker’s whitelist or pay $1 per week for an ad-free version of WIRED. Either way, you are supporting our journalism. We’d really appreciate it."
This type of thing has been said for years. I placed a long bet with a friend 7 years ago when he said "in 5 years" we'll have what was described above. Hasn't happened. Won't happen.
There's a reason it hasn't happened yet; it's not some sort of deterministic process. Many people worked hard to stop it from happening, and a new FCC chairman could change the status quo.
As another example of a self-defeating prophecy, consider Y2K. There was no major disaster because thousands of people worked incredibly hard to make sure there was no disaster.
Sometimes working in technology feels like working stage crew -- the audience doesn't give a crap about your existence until you screw up.
Only because they figured out that it's more profitable to charge the other side, and that has happened, for example, Comcast getting Netflix to pay them to not throttle their traffic.
Despite Netflix's attempt to glom on to the net neutrality movement, peering agreements are something entirely different and are not going away anytime soon.
The early Internet functioned on a gentleman's handshake - you send traffic onto my network, I send traffic onto your network, over time the balance will mostly net out. The system operated on the presumption that everyone's traffic increased more or less in parallel over time and so everybody's infrastructure would be upgraded in parallel.
The problem is that Netflix now makes up a 37% share of all internet traffic. The traditional way you do that is a CDN, and Netflix used to do that. But in 2012 Netflix decided to save money by shifting away from CDNs into their own datacenters and purchase up all the transit capacity they could. Basically, become their own ISP that took advantage of the gentleman's agreement (because nobody wants to send any significant volume of traffic to Netflix, they have almost no infrastructure costs of their own, so the inherent detente of traffic volume falls apart).
The solution for Netflix was always clear, you either pay peering fees, you pay for a CDN who pays peering fees, or you pay to colocate servers with Comcast so there's no peering involved. The problem is that Netflix doesn't want to pay for their infrastructure. The rules on infrastructure costs for residential players are never, never the same as the rules for industrial users. The fact that you paid for a driveway doesn't mean that you will never have to pay a toll, and heavy users will actually have to pay to remediate the damage to local roads/etc caused by their heavy traffic (used in some states/localities where trucks carrying fracking fluid beat up the roads). Analogously - if you make up 1/3 of all internet traffic and are still growing rapidly, you are going to have to expect to pay for some extra infrastructure along the path your data take, even if it's technically outside the boundary of your datacenter.
An analogous real-world "gentleman's agreement" is the postal delivery system (actually it's formalized in the Universal Postal Union treaty). When you mail a package to Germany, the German post office gets paid almost nothing, they essentially deliver that package at a loss. And the same applies when a German mails a package to the US. The assumption is that this roughly nets out. Then you get someone like China who comes along and subsidizes postage as an easy way to boost exports and help their economy, and suddenly things no longer net out. The US government, as the "last mile" provider here, eventually had to file a WTO suit to get them to stop dumping.
So no, nothing to see here, what Netflix is doing is not part of Net Neutrality, it's a cheap attempt to glom onto the movement to subsidize their infrastructure costs. The same predatory tactics are roundly rebuffed when they're done with other "neutral networks" like the post, and it's been rightly rebuffed with Netflix too. Comcast never shaped any traffic or refused to allow any customers access - they just didn't upgrade their infrastructure to the level Netflix wanted them to until Netflix paid for it, and those links were congested.
I hate having to defend Comcast because they are a shit company with shit customer service, but if you are dropping mass volumes of data onto the network to the extent that infrastructure upgrades are necessary (again: 37% of all internet traffic is Netflix) then yeah, you get to pay for them. Otherwise it's just pushing your Netflix bill onto my internet bill.
That's one interpretation. Many ISPs are happy to peer with CDNs with no money changing hands because this saves money both for the ISP and the CDN. The larger the traffic, the more money saved by both sides.
I don't know about five years. But in 25 I don't know if you'll be able to differentiate your computer from your (old, dumb) TV, except you'll have fewer rights
If you would, could you explain how Wheeler didn't care how technology works and what of the policies his FCC enacted were around people "bending to his will"? Please provide cites. Thanks in advance!
Watch starting at the 3 minute mark. He's over the top & kind of babbling. Compared to IRS tax threat scams, the idea the robocalling is the biggest threat is offensive.
So I watched the video, and he comes off a little clumsy, but I'm not following the argument you're making. Can you explain to me how that bolsters either that he does not care how technology works or how he's about people "bending to his will"?
(I'm not sure that IRS tax threat scams are FCC jurisdiction and not FTC, and the IRS refers to the FTC and not the FCC on that page, but IANAL.)
I'd concede I'm grumpy. The broad swaths he strokes about robocalling being a "scourge" feel, to me, like they are indifferent to the virtual miracle of long distance communication on demand.
Here's the deal- nobody wants to do the hard parts of secure communications. They want them to work, for free, and be easy. Those goals are not compatible with "secure" and "fraud-free."
So I concede, bend to the his will may be provocative- but I don't see an administrator who is being compassionate to the marketplace realities in his behavior.
There are a million different ways to make an uncivil argument on HN. This is one of the very few that are forbidden on HN specifically and by name. No matter how objectionable someone's argument is, don't accuse them of being a shill.
He was the opposite in the recent times. Unlike any of his predecessors, he pushed a tremendous amount of consumer friendly policies and curbed monopolistic abuses of incumbents. He failed to repeal anti-competitive local state laws which ban municipal Internet, but he managed to pass Net Neutrality rules.
It would be a pity if all that effort will be dismantled by corrupted commissioners backed by monopolists who hate competition and progress.
Absolutely, he pushed a lot of things forward, as well as cracking down on obvious things like bandwidth capped accounts advertised as "unlimited" etc.
He's being snarky. (I don't mind the downvotes, but: he really is. Ted doesn't think Wheeler is a cable industry shill. He's trying to make fun of people who do.)
I've covered a lot of Tom Wheeler's work in the last few years. He's probably the best FCC head in the past two decades. If he had a rep previously for being an industry shill, he blew it out of the water in his three years at the helm.
(Meanwhile, Michael Powell made the opposite move: He's currently in charge of the cable industry group.)
This was poorly reported. Wheeler was a cable industry shill over three decades ago when cable was an innovative underdog being oppressed by the broadcast establishment.
Don't worry I got your sarcasm. (For those with short memories, when he was appointed everyone was up in arms because he used to be the CEO of CTIA. Which was a fair enough concern I think, but it turned out he was great in the end.)
He's the lobbyist-turned-consumer-advocate. He has done an incredible number of really good things to protect consumer rights and interests, much to the chagrin of communication conglomerates.
She was very candid about the position of the FCC and the fact that she was finally able to speak her mind because this was going to be one of her last public appearances as a government official. One thing that stuck me was what she said about Tom[1]: "He actually believes that the consumer, the american people, are his clients. He's said that from the first day and he'll say that the day he leaves. Trust me, he doesn't like any of the companies [laughter]". The loss of the current administration of the FCC (including but not limited to Tom) will be a great loss for the American people in my opinion.
The conference was interesting and somewhat sad, because it was planned before the election and probably with the assumption that the new administration would not be totally hostile. Instead of the original direction of "here's what we've done and how we plan to carry these goals forward" it ended up being more of a retrospective on progress that had been made at the federal level that was about to be erased.
From the people I saw, there did not seem to be anyone there representing the new administration.
[1] https://youtu.be/O5drVTSpH5g?list=LLDlLvM2YAVFtSXvebIrlE0A&t...