Net Nuetrality

[delcecchi]

Right. I admitted I wasn't sure which side I should be on, except I didn't think what Obama was proposing did much with respect to net neutrality and seemed to be a bad idea.

Even the chairman of the FCC thinks regulating under Title II is not a good idea.

[laker1]

Its sad Congress doesn't get involved,they passed fewer bills than any congress ever and they admitted they only worked a couple of days a week.

[swamptiger]

Quote:

Its sad Congress doesn't get involved,they passed fewer bills than any congress ever and they admitted they only worked a couple of days a week.

The less they get done, the better. Unless they wanted to roll back some existing legislation, which is doubtful.

[Big Dave2]

The less they get done, the better. Unless they wanted to roll back some existing legislation, which is doubtful.

Amen!

[LMITOUT]

Its sad Congress doesn't get involved,they passed fewer bills than any congress ever and they admitted they only worked a couple of days a week.

Good.

It's frightening that people think that bills HAVE to be passed and signed. No they don't. In fact, if zero laws were enacted over the past 6 years I think most would consider it a smashing success.

[Bear55]

This is kind of backyards thinking as well, we have the capability to make bandwith meaningless but like everything out there they want to sell you inferior products and then endlessly upgrade them.

[Slabasaurus]

Even the chairman of the FCC thinks regulating under Title II is not a good idea.

In the interest of full disclosure... he's bought and paid for by the large ISPs so it's not a shocker that he'd oppose anything that would ensure the net operates as it does today.

Not saying he's right or wrong with not supporting reg under title II, just sayin his motivations aren't exactly objective.

[delcecchi]

he is a tool of the ISP's? Huh. Who appointed him?

[Slabasaurus]

he is a tool of the ISP's? Huh. Who appointed him?

You know who appointed him.

Funny, it wasn't the ISPs - though they seem to have an awful lot of influence over the guy.

[delcecchi]

You know who appointed him.

Funny, it wasn't the ISPs - though they seem to have an awful lot of influence over the guy.

Actually I don't know who appointed him. Barry?

[swamptiger]

The FCC is directed by five commissioners appointed by the U.S. president and confirmed by the U.S. Senate for five-year terms, except when filling an unexpired term. The president designates one of the commissioners to serve as chairman. Only three commissioners may be members of the same political party. None of them may have a financial interest in any FCC-related business.[2][4]

------------------------------------------------------

Thomas Edgar Wheeler (born April 5, 1946; Redlands, California)[1][2] is the current Chairman of the Federal Communications Commission.

He was appointed by President Obama and confirmed by the U.S. Senate in November 2013. Prior to working at the FCC, Wheeler worked as a venture capitalist and lobbyist for the cable and wireless industry, with positions including President of the National Cable & Telecommunications Association (NCTA) and CEO of the Cellular Telecommunications & Internet Association (CTIA).

[delcecchi]

Couldn't find the original Dylan version.

[swamptiger]

How about "It Ain't Me Babe"?

[delcecchi]

That's good too, but "gotta serve somebody" seemed to fit the FCC better. But apparently Dylan enforces his copyright so nothing on youtube.

[swamptiger]

I've heard somebody regularly polices ___tube for Dylan originals. Not sure if it's he himself or on his behalf, however. Many of those songs are copyrighted by someone other than him.

[delcecchi]

I've heard somebody regularly polices ___tube for Dylan originals. Not sure if it's he himself or on his behalf, however. Many of those songs are copyrighted by someone other than him.

His performances pretty much not to be found. You can find his songs, but not his performances.

[swamptiger]

It’s not that Bob Dylan doesn’t like his fans or their videos. His label Sony thinks it’s losing advertising money when we watch videos that they don’t control.

"Incredible Shrinking World of Bob Dylan"

http://njnnetwork.com/2010/05/incredible-shrinking-world-of-bob-dylan/

[Bear55]

I've heard somebody regularly polices ___tube for Dylan originals. Not sure if it's he himself or on his behalf, however. Many of those songs are copyrighted by someone other than him.

I think its all automated these days and they are pretty good at it. Try uploading a video with any copyrighted music, the stop the upload pretty darn fast, its actually impressive.

[Kidd]

[delcecchi]

The first one is his song but a gospel performer.

[Kidd]

Check again, that's Dylan.

Wait a minute, let me check.

No, that's Dylan and Mavis Staples.

[delcecchi]

Meanwhile back at the on-topic front, an interesting piece from WSJ

Quote:

The Many Wars of Tom Wheeler

Saving the Internet is a dirty job but somebody’s got to do it.

Frantically all year Tom Wheeler has been trying to save the Internet from President Obama for the benefit (he thought) of President Obama. His method has been pretty obvious to the naked eye: trying to rouse traditional Democratic interest groups to outflank the net-neut wing of the Obama base.

Just last week, Mr. Wheeler, the Obama-appointed chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, floated $1.5 billion in new Internet subsidies for public schools. Suitably fluffed by this move will be Democratic teachers unions and public officials everywhere.

In March, he tossed out a long-standing broadcast precedent for no obvious purpose except to punish its biggest beneficiary, Sinclair Broadcast Group , which sponsored the partisan Swift Boat ads against John Kerry in 2004.

In July, he inserted himself in a squabble over Dodger broadcast rights to please the California Democratic delegation.

In September, based on no obvious authority except a desire to curry favor with the Democratic multicultural vanguard, he tried to bully Redskins owner Dan Snyder into changing the team’s name.

We’ve lost count as well of Mr. Wheeler’s public statements lavishing panderage on Netflix and Netflix viewers even while quietly trying to turn back Netflix’s draconian and self-interested net-neutrality proposals.

No signal was so patent, though, as his campaign over the summer to rally the heart and soul of the Obama coalition by reinstating minority handouts, aka racial spoils, at the FCC.

Recall that FCC’s minority-and-small-business program was reformed in 2006 by the Bush administration after the NextWave and Mario Gabelli fiascos. We detailed in August how Mr. Wheeler was plumping again to make 25% and perhaps even 40% discounts available to qualified minority bidders in upcoming FCC spectrum auctions.

Mr. Wheeler’s apparent quid pro quo here was support by the NAACP and other civil-rights groups for his mild version of net-neutrality regulation vs. the full-on utility regulation favored by the net-neut crazy groups. And just last Thursday the Rev. Jesse Jackson obliged by visiting the FCC to lobby against President Obama’s own endorsement of heavy-handed utility regulation.

In fact, it’s fair to say Mr. Wheeler’s frantic efforts came to naught when President Obama suddenly two weeks ago called for the sweeping “Title II” treatment that Mr. Wheeler had been quietly resisting. Nor is it any derogation of Mr. Wheeler to say he partly brought his trouble on himself, after he floated an internal draft (never released) that a media leak characterized as allowing Internet “fast lanes” (whatever that means). No two words were seemingly better calculated to stir up a ditzy segment of the Obama youth vote.

But let’s have a moment of political truth. Mr. Obama doesn’t give two hoots about Title II or fast lanes or the overheated regulatory ideas of the net-neut crowd. Mr. Obama has gone to that place presidents sometimes go, where America and its people and their interests are a small indistinct dot in the distance. All that matters is polls, scoring points with the base and presidential vanity.

The Washington Post forthrightly describes the origins of the White House’s sudden, post-election intervention in the Title II debate: Mr. Obama wanted to “galvanize allies in Congress as well as young, tech-savvy progressives in preparation for the 2016 campaigns. . . . ‘I see him almost salivating over a congressional fight, or a fight with the carriers,’ ” said an Obama insider.

Hence his precipitous embrace of a regulatory agenda that, according to the Post, his own FCC experts consider “drastic” and “simplistic.”

Broadband may be one of America’s important industries. Broadband may be a foundation of our future prosperity. But the goal here is generating immediate political rents for Democrats, which the net-neut fight certainly has succeeded in doing (ask Rev. Jackson), regardless of any depressive pall the effort might cast over one of the few industries in Obama’s America generating capital investment and jobs.

Lesson: Not all presidents grow in office; some get smaller.

Meanwhile, the person who should be commanding Washington’s proverbial strange new respect is Mr. Wheeler. His efforts may be clumsy and counterproductive in some instances. But he has energetically sought to solve what threatens to become a major problem for the U.S. economy: how to appease, quiet or otherwise corral the president’s net-neut constituents without doing damage to broadband investment. From the perspective of a certain hard-eyed political realism, Mr. Wheeler deserves your admiration even as the president forfeits it.

[swamptiger]

Responding to massive online criticism about proposed net neutrality rules, Federal Communications Commission Chairman Tom Wheeler wants everyone to know, “I am not a dingo.”

A flood of online criticism about the rules recently caused the FCC HSOforum to crash after comedian John Oliver, host of “Last Week Tonight” on HBO, incited viewers like Internet trolls to post public comments on Wheeler’s controversial proposal.

“The Internet is not broken and the FCC is taking steps to fix that,” Oliver said on his show.

Oliver echoed concerns from numerous critics including Google that the rules could enable Internet service providers to charge for premium traffic, thus raising costs for consumers and increasing the costs of business for smaller companies that can’t afford to pay the fees.

During an episode of his news satire show, Oliver took aim at Wheeler’s past as a lobbyist for his willingness to take that risk with the proposed rules. Wheeler previously served as president of the lobbying group for the cable industry and as president for the lobbying arm of cellphone carriers.

“That is the equivalent of needing a babysitter and hiring a dingo,” Oliver said on his show, joking that the telecom companies are now “overseeing their own oversight.”

[PurpleFloyd]

So, if this doesn't pass, will it be referred to as Net Polarity?

[LMITOUT]

Birds of a feather...

[Finns]

Update?

[delcecchi]

from wsj http://www.wsj.com/articles/robert-m-mcd...=net+neutrality

Quote:

The Federal Communications Commission is about to answer the most important question in its 80-year history: Does the agency intend to protect the open Internet, or is it lunging to seize unlimited power over the Web? We’ll find out on Feb. 26 when the FCC votes on “net-neutrality” rules that would treat the Internet like a public utility, with regulators potentially setting rates, terms and conditions for providers.

Meanwhile, the new Congress is maneuvering to change the net-neutrality equation, with hearings in the House and Senate beginning Wednesday. Republicans circulated draft bills on Friday to pre-empt the FCC’s overreaching new rules while still attaining the White House’s ostensible policy goals. Even congressional supporters of net neutrality, wary of increasing FCC power over something as vast and crucial as the Internet, are working to draft an alternative.

While Republicans and Democrats try to work out a deal, FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler should hit the pause button on next month’s vote and let the elected representatives of the American people try to find common ground. At the end of this constitutional process, all sides may be able to claim victory.

For years Washington has debated how to keep the Internet open and free from government or private coercion. Regulation proponents have argued that new rules are needed to prevent Internet service providers, such as phone, wireless and cable companies, from blocking or degrading the online content or applications consumers want. Though no market failure exists, and regulators have never conducted a study to diagnose the alleged potential illness, the FCC has twice tried to impose new rules on the Web. Each time it lost in court.

The tragedy of this debate is that no one, including phone, wireless and cable companies, has ever contested the goals of keeping the Internet open. It has been open and freedom-enhancing since it was privatized in the mid-1990s because it is protected under existing antitrust and consumer-protection laws. Instead, the fight has been over how much regulatory power the FCC should wield.

Mr. Wheeler says the FCC will apply Title II of the 1934 Communications Act—a Depression-era law designed to regulate phone monopolies—to today’s dynamic and decentralized Internet. In November President Obama called for this embrace of Title II—a radical departure from Clinton-era light-touch policies and a clear loser for the Internet and consumers.

Having worked under its mandates for seven years as a senior commissioner on the FCC—and for even longer as a telecommunications attorney—I am all too familiar with Title II’s power and breadth. Bringing down the blunt command-and-control instrument of Title II onto the Internet will cause collateral damage to America’s world-leading tech economy.

As “tech” and “telecom” companies morph to look like each other by deploying their own fiber and wireless networks embedded with software and content to better serve consumers, the contagion of Title II will spread to regulate most such companies under its “mother-may-I-innovate” dictates. The Supreme Court said as much in 2005 with its prescient ruling in National Cable & Telecommunications Assn. v. Brand X Internet Services.

In a report last month the center-left Progressive Policy Institute determined that Title II regulation could trigger state and local regulations, taxes and fees costing consumers “a whopping $15 billion” a year. And that’s “on top of the adverse impact on consumers of less investment and slower innovation that would result.”

Trying to refrain, or “forbear,” from applying most of Title II’s 1,000 heavy-handed requirements while selecting only a few (as proposed by Chairman Wheeler and the White House) will make an FCC order impossible to defend in court because picking and choosing between who gets regulated and who doesn’t will look arbitrary and politically driven to appellate judges.

It’s time to consider a different path—one that leads through Congress—to end the net-neutrality fiasco. Although the legislative process can be perilous, Congress can provide all sides with a way out.

Net-neutrality supporters could achieve their long-sought goals of restating protections for consumers and tech startups; doubly ensuring that Internet service providers could not unlawfully block or throttle content and applications or impose anticompetitive prioritization requirements; and creating congressionally defined enforcement authority for the FCC. They could also enjoy, for the first time, the certainty that a court cannot hand them another loss.

For opponents of new FCC rules, the bills could take Title II off the table; restore regulatory certainty; protect free speech; and create a legal firewall that would protect investment and innovation in the Web’s computer-network infrastructures from more government meddling. This would also send a strong signal to foreign governments and international regulatory bodies that they should not smother the Web with antiquated rules designed in an era when people held their phones with two hands.

The FCC stands at a fork in the road. If the agency rushes down the Title II lane, it will own the consequences—decreased investment in the Internet, a hobbled tech sector and new taxes and fees on consumers. Running in this direction would reveal that having unlimited power over the Internet economy was what the FCC wanted all along.

If the agency takes a different path, however, the FCC can attain its stated policy goals, be protected by legislative certainty, and bask in the glow of achieving statesmanlike bipartisan consensus. The future of the Internet, and America’s digital economy, deserve no less.

Mr. McDowell, a former commissioner of the Federal Communications Commission, is a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute and a partner in the communications practice at Wiley Rein LLP in Washington, D.C.

And http://www.wsj.com/articles/gop-lawmaker...=net+neutrality

Quote:

OP Lawmakers Propose Net-Neutrality Legislation

Bill Avoids Utility-Like Rules That Obama Proposes

By

Gautham Nagesh

Congressional Republicans unveiled draft legislation on Friday that would ban broadband providers from blocking, slowing down or speeding up access to specific websites but avoid using utility-like regulations to do so.

The bill from Senate Commerce Chairman John Thune of South Dakota and the leaders of the House Energy and Commerce Committee is designed to protect net neutrality—the principle that all Internet traffic should be treated equally—without applying the part of telecommunications law that regulates common carriers.

“By turning the FCC away from a heavy-handed and messy approach to regulating the Internet, this draft protects both consumers who rely on Internet services and innovators who create jobs,” Mr. Thune said in a statement.

President Barack Obama has called for the utility-like regulations, and many expect the Federal Communications Commission to go that route when it circulates proposed net-neutrality rules next month. Net neutrality supporters said the draft shows Republicans are now seeking a compromise after fiercely opposing any net neutrality rules for many years.

“This is a huge political shift. We now have bipartisan consensus around the key points,” Public Knowledge Vice President Harold Feld said in an interview. “This is clearly a direct result of the enormous political pressure that has come not just from the president, but from small business and the grass-roots, constituencies that Republicans care about.”

However, he and other net-neutrality supporters said the plan doesn't go far enough.

The bill would explicitly ban broadband providers from blocking or slowing down websites or applications. The providers would also be banned from taking money to make some websites load faster than others, known as paid prioritization, and must publicly disclose data about the performance of their networks.

The FCC has been grappling with how to regulate broadband providers since a federal court threw out the agency’s last set of net neutrality rules last January. In November, President Obama called for the agency to implement the strongest possible rules by regulating broadband as a telecommunications service under Title II of the Communications Act.

The broadband industry believes such a change would stifle investment and saddle them with outdated regulations designed for the landline phone network. The draft bill would require that broadband remain a lightly regulated information service and would prevent the FCC from expanding its existing legal authority over providers beyond what is needed to police net neutrality.

The latter provision could prevent the FCC from overturning state laws that ban cities and towns from building their own broadband networks, as President Obama urged the agency to do on Wednesday during a speech in Iowa.

Democratic Senator Edward Markey of Massachusetts criticized the bill, calling it “a legislative wolf in sheep’s clothing” that would help the broadband providers more than consumers.

“Rather than pursuing this damaging legislative proposal, the FCC should use the clear authority granted them by Congress to vote on strong net neutrality rules in February and reclassify broadband under Title II. The future of the Internet as we know it depends on it,” Sen. Markey said in a statement.

Many congressional Republicans had been staunchly opposed to any net-neutrality rules, so the new measure is seen as a compromise in that it would include such regulations without applying the utility regulations. It is unclear whether the measure would get enough support to pass Congress, or whether President Obama would sign it.

Net-neutrality supporters are already concerned that while the draft bill would ban sites from paying for faster speeds, it could also tie the FCC’s hands when it comes to preventing other types of anticompetitive conduct that could arise in the future. Mr. Feld argued the bill doesn't go as far as the previous net neutrality rules thrown out by the court.

“This would be a step backward,” Mr. Feld said. “I recognize that these guys are trying to put something out there. But we are nowhere near close enough at this stage to be able to say this is acceptable.”

Write to Gautham Nagesh at [email protected]

Popular on WSJ