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FCC Raises Definition of Broadband to 25 Mbps (1 Viewer)
- Thread starter cstu
- Start date
MaxThreshold
Footballguy
jonessed
Footballguy
If you control the delivery mechanism you don't need much else anyway.
Title II gives a lot of power to the FCC. Just because they promise not to use all of those tools today doesn't mean they won't down the road.
FreeBaGeL
Footballguy
Ideally? How about the ISPs that received tax breaks and subsidies to deliver those speeds in the first place, but instead gladly accepted those benefits while making the conscious decision to deliver far less in the name of wildly excessive profits.
These greedy crooks half-assed their infrastructure to quintuple their profits on the assumption that no one was going to actually use that much bandwidth anyway. Of course, that didn't stop them from promising and advertising that much bandwidth and accepting all the benefits that came with it. Now we're at a point where, god forbid, people are actually starting to use all that bandwidth they said they built the infrastructure for but actually didn't. Their solution to their greed catching up with them is to try and blame the consumer for using what they were supposed to have built the infrastructure for in the first place.
njherdfan
Footballguy
There are a lot of misconceptions about what today's vote did and didn't do. A couple points:
- There were two issues at today's FCC meeting. One was Net Neutrality, which got all the hype, but which will have little to no impact on consumers' daily lives. The second issue was the preemption of state laws that regulated the creation of muni broadband networks. This will have a much bigger impact on consumers.
- ISPs are rational economic actors. This means that they won't spend money to expand their networks or increase their services unless they need to, and they rarely need to. Because of the massive cost of building a network, it's very rare for an incumbent cable ISP to face any sort of real competition, but that competition is the only thing that leads to increased construction.
- One real-world example of what I'm saying is Fios. When Verizon launched the service, consumers loved it, but Verizon has essentially stopped building out because it didn't lead to massive profits right away, and Verizon was able to get those kind of profits by offering its old, inferior service. That's not a great situation for the American consumer, but it's unclear how exactly that can be fixed.
njherdfan
Footballguy
Mario Kart
Footballguy
Did the Internet break? Why are they trying to "fix" something that isn't broken? Seems fine the way it is to me.
GoFishTN
Footballguy
FreeBaGeL
Footballguy
It was about to. Comcast was already getting started with "fast lanes" (which of course were actually "not slow lanes").
cstu
Footballguy
Todd Andrews
Footballguy
Guy is pretty funny. Best argument in favor of net neutrality I have read in a while.
GoFishTN
Footballguy
This is one of the best things that's happened in this administration. Do you all not understand Netflix was already paying Comcast because they were slowing their traffic? This is not how it should be.
Amused to Death
Footballguy
So you disagree with this conservative site?
- Conservatives had made many gains in recent years thanks to the power of the Internet. In terms of organization, it has become an indispensable tool. In political communications, it allows us to finally bypass the liberal media and to get our message out more effectively. These gains must be preserved!
- Under the new rules, there is nothing to stop the cable and phone companies from now allowing consumers to have access to speech that they don't support. What if a cable company with a pro-choice Board of Directors decides that it doesn't like a pro-life organization using its high speed network to encourage pro-life activities? Under the new rules, this could happen - and it would be legal!
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SaintsInDome2006
Footballguy
Or they could just stop building out and keep the money. If you built apartment buildings on the premise that people would rent them and buy the condos, but then a new rule says you could only rent/sell for cost, would you keep building buildings?FreeBaGeL said:
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Jack White
Footballguy
The Net Neutrality Scam
By Ryan McMaken
Yet again, the government wants to fix a problem that doesn’t exist. According to the Obama administration and the FCC, it is necessary to regulate internet service providers so that they don’t interfere with people’s access to the web. The claim immediately prompts one to ask: Who is being denied access to the web?
In the past twenty years, access to the internet has only become more widespread and service today is far faster for many people — including “ordinary” people — than it was twenty years ago, or even ten years ago. Today, broadband in Europe, where the internet is more tightly regulated, has less reach than it has in the United States.
The administration’s plan is rather innocuously called “net neutrality,” but in fact it has nothing at all to do with neutrality and is just a scheme to vastly increase the federal government’s control over the internet.
What is Net Neutrality?
We don’t know the details of the plan because the FCC refuses to let the taxpayers see the 300-page proposal before the FCC votes on it today. But, we do know a few things.
Currently, ISPs are regulated by the FCC, but as an “information service” under the less restrictive rules of so-called Title I. But now, the FCC wants to regulate ISPs as utilities under the far more restrictive Title II restrictions. For a clue as to how cutting edge this idea is, remember this switch to Title II regulation would put ISPs into the same regulatory regime as Ma Bell under the Communications Act of 1934.
So what does this mean for the FCC in practice? According to FCC Commissioner Ajit Pai, “It gives the FCC the power to micromanage virtually every aspect of how the Internet works.” More specifically, Gordon Crovitz at the Wall Street Journal writes:
[With Net Netruality,] bureaucrats can review the fairness of Google’s search results, Facebook’s news feeds and news sites’ links to one another and to advertisers. BlackBerry is already lobbying the FCC to force Apple and Netflix to offer apps for BlackBerry’s unpopular phones. Bureaucrats will oversee peering, content-delivery networks and other parts of the interconnected network that enables everything from Netflix and YouTube to security drones and online surgery.
The administration insists these measures are necessary because — even though there is no evidence that this has actually happened — it is possible that at some point in the future, internet service providers could restrict some content and apps on the internet. Thus, we are told, control of content should be handed over to the federal government to ensure that internet service providers are “neutral” when it comes to deciding what is on the internet and what is not.
Can Goods Be Allocated in a “Neutral” Way?
The problem is that there is no such thing as “neutral” allocation of resources, whether done by government or the marketplace.
In the marketplace, goods and services tend to be allocated according to those who demand the goods the most. Where demand is highest, prices are highest, so goods and services tend to go to where they are most demanded. This makes perfect sense, of course, and also reflects the inherent democracy of the markets. Where larger numbers of people put more resources is where more goods and services will head.
It is this mechanism that drives the marketplaces for food, clothing, and a host of other products. Consequently, both food and clothing have become so plentiful that obesity is a major health problem and second-hand clothing stores, selling barely-worn discarded clothing, are a boom industry, even in affluent neighborhoods. Similarly, cell phones have only become more affordable and more widespread in recent decades.
For industries where new firms may freely enter, and customers are not compelled to buy, companies or individuals that wish to make money must use their resources in ways that are freely demanded by others. Unless they have been granted monopoly power by government, no firm can simply ignore its customers. If they do, competing firms will enter the marketplace with other goods and services.
Although goods allocated in this fashion are — according to the administration — not being allocated “neutrally,” the fact is that more people now have more service at higher speeds than was the case in the past. Furthermore, even if firms (or the government) attempted to allocate goods in a neutral manner, it would be impossible to do so, because neither society nor the physical world are neutral.
In his recent interview on new neutrality, Peter Klein used the analogy of a grocery store. In modern-day grocery stores, suppliers of food and drink will negotiate with stores (using so-called “slotting allowances”) to have their goods advertised near the front of the store or have goods placed on store shelves at eye level.
If government were to tell grocery stores to start being more “neutral” about where it places goods, we can see immediately that such a thing is impossible. After all, somebody’s goods have to be at eye level or near the front of the store. Who is to decide? A handful of government bureaucrats, or thousands of consumers who with their purchases control the success and failure of firms?
In a similar way, bandwidth varies for various ISP clients depending the infrastructure available, and the resources available to each client. And yet, in spite of the administration’s fear-mongering that ISPs will lock out clients of humble means, and the need to hand all bandwidth over to plutocrats, internet access continues to expand. And who can be surprised? Have grocery stores stopped carrying low-priced nutritious food such as bananas and oatmeal just because Nabisco Corp. pays for better product placement for its costly processed foods? Obviously not.
Who will Control the FCC?
All goods need not be allocated in response to the human-choice-driven price mechanism of the marketplace. Goods and services can also be allocated by political means. That is, states, employing coercive means can seize goods and services and allocate them according to certain political goals and the goals of people in positions of political power. There is nothing “neutral” about this method of allocating resources.
In the net neutrality debate, it’s almost risible that some are suggesting that the FCC will somehow necessarily work in the “public” interest. First of all, we can already see how the FCC regards the public with its refusal to make its own proposals public. Second, who will define who the “public” is? And finally, after identifying who the “public” is, how will the governing bodies of the FCC determine what the “public” wants?
It’s a safe bet there will be no plebiscitary process, so what mechanism will be used? In practice, bureaucratic agencies respond to lobbying and political pressure like any other political institution. Those who can most afford to lobby and provide information to the FCC, however, will not be ordinary people who have the constraints of household budgets and lives to live in places other than Washington, DC office buildings. No, the general public will be essentially powerless because regulatory regimes diminish the market power of customers.
Most of the interaction that FCC policymakers will have with the “public” will be through lobbyists working for the internet service providers, so what net neutrality does is turn the attention of the ISPs away from the consumers themselves and toward the regulatory agency. In the marketplace, a firm’s customers are the most important decision makers. But the more regulated an industry becomes, the more important the regulating agency becomes to the firm’s owners and managers.
The natural outcome will be more “regulatory capture,” in which the institutions with the most at stake in a regulatory agency’s decisions end up controlling the agencies themselves. We see this all the time in the revolving door between legislators, regulators, and lobbyists. And you can also be sure that once this happens, the industry will close itself off to new innovative firms seeking to enter the marketplace. The regulatory agencies will ensure the health of the status quo providers at the cost of new entrepreneurs and new competitors.
Nor are such regulatory regimes even “efficient” in the mainstream use of the term. As economist Douglass North noted, regulatory regimes do not improve efficiency, but serve the interests of those with political power:
Institutions are not necessarily or even usually created to be socially efficient; rather they, or at least the formal rules, are created to serve the interests of those with the bargaining power to create new rules.
So, if populists think net neutrality will somehow give “the people” greater voice in how bandwidth is allocated and ISPs function, they should think again.
By Ryan McMaken
Yet again, the government wants to fix a problem that doesn’t exist. According to the Obama administration and the FCC, it is necessary to regulate internet service providers so that they don’t interfere with people’s access to the web. The claim immediately prompts one to ask: Who is being denied access to the web?
In the past twenty years, access to the internet has only become more widespread and service today is far faster for many people — including “ordinary” people — than it was twenty years ago, or even ten years ago. Today, broadband in Europe, where the internet is more tightly regulated, has less reach than it has in the United States.
The administration’s plan is rather innocuously called “net neutrality,” but in fact it has nothing at all to do with neutrality and is just a scheme to vastly increase the federal government’s control over the internet.
What is Net Neutrality?
We don’t know the details of the plan because the FCC refuses to let the taxpayers see the 300-page proposal before the FCC votes on it today. But, we do know a few things.
Currently, ISPs are regulated by the FCC, but as an “information service” under the less restrictive rules of so-called Title I. But now, the FCC wants to regulate ISPs as utilities under the far more restrictive Title II restrictions. For a clue as to how cutting edge this idea is, remember this switch to Title II regulation would put ISPs into the same regulatory regime as Ma Bell under the Communications Act of 1934.
So what does this mean for the FCC in practice? According to FCC Commissioner Ajit Pai, “It gives the FCC the power to micromanage virtually every aspect of how the Internet works.” More specifically, Gordon Crovitz at the Wall Street Journal writes:
[With Net Netruality,] bureaucrats can review the fairness of Google’s search results, Facebook’s news feeds and news sites’ links to one another and to advertisers. BlackBerry is already lobbying the FCC to force Apple and Netflix to offer apps for BlackBerry’s unpopular phones. Bureaucrats will oversee peering, content-delivery networks and other parts of the interconnected network that enables everything from Netflix and YouTube to security drones and online surgery.
The administration insists these measures are necessary because — even though there is no evidence that this has actually happened — it is possible that at some point in the future, internet service providers could restrict some content and apps on the internet. Thus, we are told, control of content should be handed over to the federal government to ensure that internet service providers are “neutral” when it comes to deciding what is on the internet and what is not.
Can Goods Be Allocated in a “Neutral” Way?
The problem is that there is no such thing as “neutral” allocation of resources, whether done by government or the marketplace.
In the marketplace, goods and services tend to be allocated according to those who demand the goods the most. Where demand is highest, prices are highest, so goods and services tend to go to where they are most demanded. This makes perfect sense, of course, and also reflects the inherent democracy of the markets. Where larger numbers of people put more resources is where more goods and services will head.
It is this mechanism that drives the marketplaces for food, clothing, and a host of other products. Consequently, both food and clothing have become so plentiful that obesity is a major health problem and second-hand clothing stores, selling barely-worn discarded clothing, are a boom industry, even in affluent neighborhoods. Similarly, cell phones have only become more affordable and more widespread in recent decades.
For industries where new firms may freely enter, and customers are not compelled to buy, companies or individuals that wish to make money must use their resources in ways that are freely demanded by others. Unless they have been granted monopoly power by government, no firm can simply ignore its customers. If they do, competing firms will enter the marketplace with other goods and services.
Although goods allocated in this fashion are — according to the administration — not being allocated “neutrally,” the fact is that more people now have more service at higher speeds than was the case in the past. Furthermore, even if firms (or the government) attempted to allocate goods in a neutral manner, it would be impossible to do so, because neither society nor the physical world are neutral.
In his recent interview on new neutrality, Peter Klein used the analogy of a grocery store. In modern-day grocery stores, suppliers of food and drink will negotiate with stores (using so-called “slotting allowances”) to have their goods advertised near the front of the store or have goods placed on store shelves at eye level.
If government were to tell grocery stores to start being more “neutral” about where it places goods, we can see immediately that such a thing is impossible. After all, somebody’s goods have to be at eye level or near the front of the store. Who is to decide? A handful of government bureaucrats, or thousands of consumers who with their purchases control the success and failure of firms?
In a similar way, bandwidth varies for various ISP clients depending the infrastructure available, and the resources available to each client. And yet, in spite of the administration’s fear-mongering that ISPs will lock out clients of humble means, and the need to hand all bandwidth over to plutocrats, internet access continues to expand. And who can be surprised? Have grocery stores stopped carrying low-priced nutritious food such as bananas and oatmeal just because Nabisco Corp. pays for better product placement for its costly processed foods? Obviously not.
Who will Control the FCC?
All goods need not be allocated in response to the human-choice-driven price mechanism of the marketplace. Goods and services can also be allocated by political means. That is, states, employing coercive means can seize goods and services and allocate them according to certain political goals and the goals of people in positions of political power. There is nothing “neutral” about this method of allocating resources.
In the net neutrality debate, it’s almost risible that some are suggesting that the FCC will somehow necessarily work in the “public” interest. First of all, we can already see how the FCC regards the public with its refusal to make its own proposals public. Second, who will define who the “public” is? And finally, after identifying who the “public” is, how will the governing bodies of the FCC determine what the “public” wants?
It’s a safe bet there will be no plebiscitary process, so what mechanism will be used? In practice, bureaucratic agencies respond to lobbying and political pressure like any other political institution. Those who can most afford to lobby and provide information to the FCC, however, will not be ordinary people who have the constraints of household budgets and lives to live in places other than Washington, DC office buildings. No, the general public will be essentially powerless because regulatory regimes diminish the market power of customers.
Most of the interaction that FCC policymakers will have with the “public” will be through lobbyists working for the internet service providers, so what net neutrality does is turn the attention of the ISPs away from the consumers themselves and toward the regulatory agency. In the marketplace, a firm’s customers are the most important decision makers. But the more regulated an industry becomes, the more important the regulating agency becomes to the firm’s owners and managers.
The natural outcome will be more “regulatory capture,” in which the institutions with the most at stake in a regulatory agency’s decisions end up controlling the agencies themselves. We see this all the time in the revolving door between legislators, regulators, and lobbyists. And you can also be sure that once this happens, the industry will close itself off to new innovative firms seeking to enter the marketplace. The regulatory agencies will ensure the health of the status quo providers at the cost of new entrepreneurs and new competitors.
Nor are such regulatory regimes even “efficient” in the mainstream use of the term. As economist Douglass North noted, regulatory regimes do not improve efficiency, but serve the interests of those with political power:
Institutions are not necessarily or even usually created to be socially efficient; rather they, or at least the formal rules, are created to serve the interests of those with the bargaining power to create new rules.
So, if populists think net neutrality will somehow give “the people” greater voice in how bandwidth is allocated and ISPs function, they should think again.
FreeBaGeL
Footballguy
This guy has changed my mind. I am now completely against net neutrality because Comcast should be allowed to slow traffic to this guy's site so the internet is not subjected to such ridiculous drivel.
The guy's primary argument that he repeatedly refers back to is that internet speeds are faster now than they were 20 years ago. LOL. "Hey guys, the internet is faster than back in the AOL dial-up days so obviously that means everything is awesome!"
He tries to paint the picture that the internet situation is much worse in Europe than it is in America, when we all of course know the complete opposite to be true.
Perhaps worst of all (although I don't know how it can get any worse than harping on the fact that the internet was slower 20 years ago as if that means something) is that he never even addresses the most forefront issue, the ISPs. He focuses only on content. He says "none of these bad things have happened yet" when in fact they have (Comcast has already held Netflix's bandwidth ransom), and he makes direct note of how new companies should be able to enter a market on fair terms which is exactly what net neutrality protects and prevents the ISPs from disrupting.
What a nutjob.
Amused to Death
Footballguy
This why I'm not sure why conservatives are so against NN. It protects small business, which they beat their drum so much for back in '12 elections. If you allow the ISPs to charge for higher bandwidth, only the big company's will be able to afford it. And when they start collecting big fees from Netflix, my monthly cost to them goes up.
Comcast is a great example (ppl. should really watch the John Oliver piece). I also wonder if this wasn't related to the issue youtube had with Verizon a while back.
GoFishTN
Footballguy
An error occurred
You have reached your quota of positive votes for the day
Before you post in this thread, read everything FreeBaGel has posted. You won't need to post.
Edit: As an aside, the ISPs (specifically Verizon) brought this upon themselves. They could have played along with the net neutrality rules that were in place, but they got greedy and gambled they could make more money. No one should feel sorry that they lost.
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Sand
Footballguy
TwinTurbo
Footballguy
TwinTurbo
Footballguy
Sand I usually agree with most of what you post. But if Verizon were a person, they would be Tony Soprano. They are the last guy I want having control over how I access the internet and have already proven time and time again that they will not act in the best interest of consumers. Comcast is an equally horrible company. This is not the Feds vs. corporate visionaries, it's the people vs. a small group of corporate bullies. Finally somebody punched Verizon back in the face. And they only have themselves to blame after stealing everybody's lunch money for years.
Sand
Footballguy
I'll say this - there's a reason that these rules were classified until the vote (and maybe still). Let's see what's under the covers.
Maelstrom
Footballguy
I don't trust the feds. I don't trust Comcast and their ilk even more than that. That is pretty low if you are less trustworthy than our gov't. (and it makes me sad to even say that statement)
Jack White
Footballguy
The Commish
Footballguy
