Court rules on Net Neutrality

Does anyone else think this is a big deal?

A federal appeals court on Tuesday dealt a sharp blow to the efforts of the Federal Communications Commission to set the rules of the road for the Internet, ruling that the agency lacks the authority to require broadband providers to give equal treatment to all Internet traffic flowing over their networks.

I know this argument’s been going on for a while, but this is a pretty important legal decision. I certainly do not believe that everything on the internet should be free, but I do think everything should remain consistently available. This looks to me like one of the first steps to a highly-segregated internet 10 or so years down the road. Comcast is all innocent right now, claiming they only want to throttle heavy bittorrent users. But they’re a business, and with continued legal sign-off on this type of behavior they’re going to start expanding the concept. So will other ISPs. At a minimum, it’ll mean an additional layer of fees for unrestricted access to certain content.

I can’t remember where I saw this but someone said,

“Best case scenario, this pushes congress to finally legislate net neutrality. Worst case, nothing happens and everything goes to shit.”

This should probably be in P&R though.

Anything that prevents the government from regulating the Internet is a good thing, IMO.

Yeah, good point. I look forward to the day when the contract dispute between Comcast and ABC means that all my internet traffic to abc.com gets slowed down, or when Comcast decides that they want to prioritize all the web traffic to the gaming websites and forums that they own.

You don’t think Comcast is going to strike a deal with a movie studio that basically says unless they give comcast.com their trailer exclusively that they’re going to “streamline” traffic away from apple.com and other sites hosting it?

I’m torn. This does put the fire under the legislative to get off their duffs and address the issue but at the same time I don’t know if they’re well informed enough to do so properly yet. Congress is notoriously behind the times tech wise.

This is a great time to join the EFF and start writing letters to your congresspeople.

Sure, Comcast could do that, if they feel like losing customers. Why involve the government?

That’s kind of an alarmist headline. From what I’ve seen in the summaries, they didn’t rule on net neutrality, but rather on whether or not the FCC has the authority to force net neutrality. Plus, it’s not like the FCC was burning up the tracks to do anything about net neutrality anyway.

Because some of us don’t mind the government getting involved to prevent consumers from getting screwed. In fact, that is what government is supposed to do: protect its citizens. If Comcast is allowed to make money through special deals with content providers, it isn’t unreasonable to assume other ISPs will follow suit (and the money).

Don’t underestimate the amount of money at stake here. There is a reason Comcast vigorously fought the FCC on this issue.

Personally, I believe the internet has become important enough that it should be regulated like a utility.

LOL, I want to live in the magical world where you do, where there is tons of competition for high speed consumer-grade internet. Here there is Comcast and AT&T. That’s it.

Really? Who would they lose the customers to?

I might have a colored history with DSL clouding my viewpoint, but I don’t see the cable companies as having anything other than a full monopoly.

If all cable monopolies were struck down overnight, then I might start agreeing with you. Till then, we need Net Neutrality.

Most markets have a duopoly thanks to the government, so you’re stuck with two companies that have no incentive to compete.

Since it’s the government that got us here (stagnated overpriced broadband), I’m not convinced MORE government is the answer. As you pointed out, more competition is the answer.

Stagnant overpriced broadband is the government’s fault? Care to back up your assertion with an explanation and perhaps some facts?

Net neutrality was and is a dumb idea.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for regulating anticompetitive practices in business, but net neutrality was not a good answer.

Any regulation that says that my ISP must let my 911 VOIP call fail because bittorrent traffic is choking the network is not well thought out.

What a delightfully mad assertion.

To start, no, probably not. What would be the point for any of the parties involved? The Internet is not particularly regulate-able and people are going to find the content they want to find. If Comcast decides to try and stop people from getting to that particular file because it’s on a competing website, they’ll get it somewhere else, whether through peer-to-peer, newsgroups, or some as-yet-uninvented technology. Trying to grab that kind of exclusive access in that way is sort of like trying to make an amoeba move to the west by shouting at it and maybe throwing a couple of toothpicks.

For second, even if that were a concern the one body that I WOULDN’T want regulating it is the FCC. Most people have access to more than one option for internet connectivity. It is still possible to vote with your dollars, and it’s one hell of a lot less possible to lobby millions of consumers than it is to lobby the people sitting at the FCC. If you’re looking to avoid having the law approve network service providers shaping bandwidth for competitive reasons above and beyond performance concern, you should want to keep the government as far away from the subject as possible.

For third, the entire net neutrality debate at this point is a canard. There’s no abuse that has led to significant capital loss. It’s a problem looking for a person to have it at this point. Apple hasn’t been run into the ground by AT&T or Verizon because they wouldn’t give up their exclusive content. Amazon hasn’t been run into the ground by any preferred commerce site by any provider.

For four, there’s absolutely no reason for any service provider to even try to do a thing like that without bandwidth concerns. Shaping peer-to-peer traffic is questionable, but ultimately they do it to improve performance, because it’s cheaper to throttle this particular kind of traffic that is, in many cases, performing some sort of illegal activity than it is to install new hardware. It doesn’t hurt that it also helps to protect some other property that they’re vested in, but they’re not forbidding access to anywhere and most legal activities online are no harder today than they were any number of years ago. Further, that sort of thing is practically unenforceable if you’re trying to filter based on source. If TOR can circumvent the Great Firewall, I’m pretty sure that I can find a proxy tool to go look at the trailer for Clash of the Titans 17: The Squeaquel that will let me get to it. If consumers want to get to the content, there’s not much that the providers can do mechanically to prevent it.

I really don’t get what the big deal is here. I don’t want the FCC regulating cable internet because it’s a short step from there to regulating cable television and then a quick hop and I can’t get my Dexter episodes full of titties and fuck. I don’t see any abuse actually happening and it’s not like the problem would even be that hard to circumvent if it did occur. Revision3 is still broadcasting. Whatever the thing is that Mevio is doing is still running. Mostly what I see is people assuming that big businesses are going to do something bad to them just because they’re big businesses without considering whether or not it would even be a reasonable idea for the businesses to try it in the long term. In this case, it wouldn’t.

You’re right. Because since nobody has done it yet, they never will. We shouldn’t try to head off malfeasance at the pass, it’s much better to wait for it to happen and then deal with the consequences.

It’s better to wait for somebody to commit a crime and then figure out how to deal with it than jailing them preemptively. Action to protect net neutrality presents many options for the law to be co-opted, misused, or poorly drafted. If there hasn’t been a problem yet, and we don’t have significant reason to believe there will be a problem in the future, it makes little sense to attempt to craft law whether through legislation or judiciary action to address the potential issue.

Next week, aliens from the planet Omicron Perseii 8 could land on our planet and start eating people. Would you argue that we need to build a global defense laser network to head off this horrible event?

Don’t mind Brian, Menzo. He is like this on most political subjects.

If you’re relying on VOIP to get through to 911, it’s your own damn fault.