“Just because the FCC claims it has the power to preempt state laws doesn’t mean that it actually does,” says Hansen. “I can claim that I have the power to manifest unicorns on the Washington State Capitol lawn. But if you look outside right now, there are no unicorns.”
I'm as partisan as they come. And am only too happy to pile on. But I also remember the Clipper chip, SOPA, PIPA... My own state representative voted for internet voting along with the herd after promising me he wouldn't without checking with me first.
Fair play, rule of law, fare and impartial courts, etc. are not partisan issues.
I always found it amusing that the FCC claimed they didn’t have a right to regulate Net Neutrality, but they do have the right to prevent individual states from regulating Net Neutrality.
One can hold that under a limited, federal government structure there are things the Federal government must not do (because it is either explicitly barred from it or it is not one of its explicitly enumerated powers), and that the same constraint applies to the States.
For instance, under the US constitution, freedom of expression limits all levels of government.
I liked the above comment and wanted to tack on my reply to jonwachob91 here.
There are some cases where affirmative rights granted to the federal government also limits the power of the states.
For example, the Supreme Court found in Gibbons v. Ogden (1824) that not only does Congress have the right to regulate interstate commerce, but only Congress does, and that States can't create their own rules for commerce between each other.
(The FCC can claim they don't have the right to enforce Title 2, but that's really for the Supreme Court to decide.)
I think it's worth noting that Title 2 classification is not Net Neutrality, and that the Title 2 classification was based off of an idea of 'forbearance', that the government has granted itself broad sweeping regulatory powers over telecoms but promises not to use a lot of them (rate setting, etc).
Title 2 classification had a lot of problems, and real Net Neutrality legislation is preferable.
This seems so concrete-bound... Moving to the conceptual level, since the initial F in each agency name stands for "Federal" -- in what sense are they not part of the Federal government? are they somehow not subject to the limits imposed by the Constitution?
It seems a somewhat complex issue. One the one hand companies that control the internet and the infrastructure in use often spreads across state lines and regions. The other hand is that it is very difficult to claim the internet infrastructure and needs of a place like Washington or California are analogous to the needs of much more rural parts of the country. I generally find myself against states rights in terms of civil liberties or personal rights and in favor of them with regards to business in their de facto economic region except in the case previously mentioned such as the violation of rights.
It seems plausible that the FCC shouldn't be able to regulate or control policy on net neutrality and that their control of the internet is basically because at the time questions of regulation came up there was not better place to stick the internet. However, now that the internet has become an effective necessity I'd imagine placing it's control under something more akin to the Public utilities commission may make the most sense.
edit: Maybe the real solution is public internet projects, I have heard of several that seemed to go quite well.
How so? Because the federal government has abrogated its responsibility? Surely compliance with 50 different sets of regulations would be much more burdensome than a single national regulation.
As far as I can tell as a non-american: people support states rights when the federal government does something they dislike, and they support federalisation when it does something they do like. Most people aren't very principled about it.
Mostly that's true. More specifically, the Republican Party is a champion of states' rights when it comes to regulating civil liberties or implementing health care, education and anti-poverty measures. They are quiet about states' rights when it comes to control of corporations, where they prefer to have the power centralized but unused.
The Democratic Party, by way of contrast, never talks about states' rights, but supports various individual initiatives that align with their federal policy.
There are very few people who care about states' rights as a concept divorced from particular policies.
The right-wing contempt for local control is going even further nowadays. After the 2016 elections, counties in my home state of Iowa are no longer allowed to set a minimum wage that is higher than the state's level (which is, of course, $7.25)[1].
By traditional conservative thought, a county would only be hurting themselves by setting a minimum wage that's too high; companies and their jobs would leave if it wasn't competitive. Of course, if raising the minimum wage didn't kill jobs, others could point to it as evidence that it may be feasible to increase it statewide. So it's gotta go.
[commentary: I grew up in a conservative family, but I don't recognize the modern Republican Party.]
They are a champion of states' rights where it affects their sponsors' bottom lines and fiercely opposed where it affects their sponsors' bottom lines. Always follow the money.
Unfortunately, these themes are showing to be sadly true about people. Most everyone becomes a civil libertarian when their rights are violated[1], but not when we violate the rights of others[2].
Some pedantry on word choice: federalism is more like equal state/central gov power; confederalism is pro-states rights.
The difficulty in compliance to 50 different regulations is exactly what's going to drive Comcast, AT&T, and Verizon to re-lobby for a legislative (permanent) position of the FCC on NN.
Direct-to-consumer/business ISPs only have to comply with the State regulations that they choose to operate in.
Sonic.net doesn't have to worry about Floridian regulations, but Comcast has to worry about Californian and Floridian regulations because they have operations in both States. That said, they are also large enough to take on that extra burden and still profit, with no loss of competitive advantage.
I'm not worried about making it easier for ISPs to expand across State lines because I don't live in 50 different States. I live in one, and I want the right package of regulations for the place that I live, not the millions of places I don't, for every ISP in my area, not the hundreds to thousands that aren't.
If you believe that nobody should do X, where X could be any public policy on a gradient (whether it's sales tax, income tax, etc), then sure you'd consider this as a bug, but it helps in figuring out the good solutions much faster.
If we can make it burdensome enough to comply with multiple state’s laws, then there will be no inter-state ISP’s. That’d be great for competition in the residential broadband market (at least compared to the status quo).
A better approach would be to simply break up all the big ISPs and telcos, of course.
I live in WA and am amused. I didn't hear anything about this until now.
This isn't quite the same issue as NN, but in Seattle we had a single ISP monopoly (Comcast) until quite recently. Centurylink has started offering fiber in the last few years, but before that there was an uninterrupted decade where Comcast was the only viable broadband option for most homes.
(A number of vendors offered DSL, but it was extremely slow and typically not price-competitive; a small number of vendors offered very fast internet, but only in condos / apartment buildings in or near the downtown core.)
Yeah, and the caveat is still "fiber in certain areas," although that area is expanding and much larger than the previous near-downtown services. For example, I live about 7 miles from the downtown core and have "gigabit" service available over fiber. (Centurylink uses a bunch of splitters for downstream traffic, which is multiplexed, so you're effectively limited to about 600 mbps down.)
Bellingham had a local provider (PogoZone) pop up and they seem to be becoming more and more competitive with Comcast around here. Unfortunately, they service from a cell tower from which my house is obscured by a large hill. I have heard great things about them, though.
Comcast recently upped my bill after 12 months (which they said they wouldn't do). I wanted to downgrade to just internet (currently internet/basic cable), and they allegedly can only offer me 1 package for $110/mo and 400Mbps. I don't need that. So of course I will probably get roped in to paying for another internet/cable package, or internet/cable/phone, just to save a bit of value.
I've always suspected that they use those numbers to inflate how many people are actually signing up for TV. From there you can potentially get better deals, inflate your monthly reports, etc etc.
We have the same issue on the other side of the state in Spokane. In the majority of the metropolitan area, Comcast is your only viable option. Where I live, I can get up to around 250 Mbit Comcast or 1-5 Mbit CenturyLink.
In the north-central part of town (Garland 'hood) I'm getting 40Mb service from CenturyLink and it's generally pretty reliable though throughput really drops during the mid- and late afternoon. I didn't know that Comcast offered such high data rates here though so thanks for the tip.
There's also Wave, but they're not available in all parts of the city, so certain people like myself are basically forced to give Comcast money. I'd be thrilled if we had more options.
Has there been a resolution as to who was generating the fraudulent comments on the FCC proposal? I believe they’re real I’ve just been wondering why someone/some organization would do that, unless it was some conspiracy by the ISPs, but they don’t need fake comments when they have lobbyists.
It would be interesting for someone to identify regions in states that have similar internet conditions before NN. We might have some interesting data to peruse if the curr situation holds for a few years.
You've been using Hacker News primarily to do ideological battle and using multiple accounts to do so. That clearly violates the guidelines, so we've banned this account.
I really don't understand this law. ISPs offer me faster internet for a higher price. But is illegal for ISPs to offer Netflix faster internet for a higher price. What is the distinction?
In any event, this is pure virtue signalling, since the federal government clearly has supremacy over state laws for national telecommunication networks, and this will be overturned by the courts.
No, you can't pay your ISP to get "faster internet", only to get more bandwidth between your wall and whatever backhaul provider owns the physical fiber lines. There is no way to make the internet "faster" other than reducing the number of hops you have to make to get to the destination, or by increasing the speed of packets on the networks, which should already be roughly speed of light. Therefore if they are proposing "fast lanes" it isn't about speeding you up, but rather about slowing everyone else down.
Net Neutrality doesn't prevent ISPs from selling more bandwidth to netflix, it only prevents ISPs from treating the traffic differently due to the identity of either the sender or the receiver. This means that Comcast can't slow your traffic down just because you are sending data to and receiving data from netflix instead of using Hulu (which they partially own).
The article states, "All internet service offered in Washington would have to be free from blocking or throttling of legal online content. Nor could it be subject to a system of premium-priced “fast lanes” that offer better bandwidth to content providers that pay extra for the privilege."
So, the law does prevent ISPs from offering "faster" internet, however you define it. I still don't see the distinction between allowing consumers to pay for faster internet, but prohibiting content providers from doing the same thing. I pay more for 250 mbps. Why can't Comcast offer Netflix additional speed for more money, which would be illegal under this law? As I understand it, slowing down your competitors is already illegal under the FTC rules.
That is not entirely correct. One can sort packets by their type and make sure those that require expedient delivery (VOIP calls, streamed video, gaming calls) get out first. Smart profiling at this level would certainly speed up the overall experience; some consumer-grade routers have settings exactly for this kind of thing. It's not much different that different kind of mail handled by postal services. And while postal services probably cannot easily speed up the average delivery time for all their mail, they can certainly deliver certain mail much faster than the rest of it. For a price.
I agree with you for the most part, but it's a bit disingenuous to interpret "Faster Internet" as just referring to latency, people are almost always talking about bandwidth + latency when using that term (really just how long files/webpages take to download on average - which equates to that).
ISPs can certainly charge Netflix more for more bandwidth. If a video provider wants an Internet connection, it can get bids from companies like Cogent, HE, Sprint, and maybe even Comcast. NN says, among other things, that Comcast can't say "hey Netflix, if you don't pay up, we'll throttle that traffic that you try to send our customers from your lovely Cogent connection".
That's not how that works. Net Neutrality is about preventing ISPs from limiting or throttling access to different parts of the internet. Under Net Neutrality Netflix can buy faster access to the internet at a higher price all it wants, they just can't buy access to you at a higher price. Without Net Neutrality an ISP could simply block you from having access to Netflix, or youtube, or facebook, or twitter, or amazon. Or they could throttle that traffic so that the experience was much worse than it would be otherwise. They could then force you or those companies to pay extra to "unlock" access.
Because broadband internet access in the US is substantially provided by effectively local monopolies there is a huge potential for abuse here, specifically in the form of "rent seeking". Without Net Neutrality there is a huge potential for ISPs to monetize access to you, to carve up, control, and censor what they allow to run over their pipes. This isn't hypothetical, it's happened. ISPs have blocked access to VOIP and voice chat services (like skype) because it competed with their own offerings. They've blocked access to specific webpages because they disagreed with the content on those sites. They've blocked access to streaming video. They've intercepted and redirected search queries (to sites like google) to their own commercial content. They've blocked payment services that competed with their own services. And so on.
"The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people."
Yes I know that is a supposed truism inherent in the Constitution itself.
My question:
The FCC explicitly decided that it didn't want to enforce NN provisions (it gave up that power), so why can't states regulate it themselves?
Basically, if the federal government decides it is going to regulate an area, the states can't make contradictory regulations. So, if the federal government says, ISPs can charge what they want for internet access, the states can't make a rule that says they can't. By removing the NN provisions, they did not give up regulating ISPs, they just moved the regulation back to where it was before Obama made up the new rules right before he left office.
You had a decent comment if you had just stuck with your first line. It's a valid question.
You went completely off the rails with your second, and you should take a moment and review the Bill of Rights before you comment again because it's hilariously wrong.
“Just because the FCC claims it has the power to preempt state laws doesn’t mean that it actually does,” says Hansen. “I can claim that I have the power to manifest unicorns on the Washington State Capitol lawn. But if you look outside right now, there are no unicorns.”
I hope it succeeds.