Net Neutrality: Comcast Blocking Netflix

Do online petitions like this make any difference at all? Reddit is directing readers there today.

You remember the web blackout from last time right?

Wikipedia is a powerful allied in this sort of battles. Hope they can help now.

The problem is that the FCC is openly corrupt in Trump’s America and openly does not care about what people want. Trying to convince them is basically useless when the expensive suit they are wearing is paid for by comcast dollars.

The only thing you can really do is try to go convince your politicians, but they are also probably taking the comcast dollars.

Not to mention comcast might have helpfully posted a bot message supporting ending net neutrality using your info.

Don’t get me wrong, it is still worth trying, but i don’t have a ton of hope given the state of the FCC and the (lack of) backbone of republican politicians.

Now if we could get Twitter to spam Trump and the rest of the royal family with net neutrality messages when they use twitter, it might do something…

Ladies and gents, my junior Senator from Iowa replies…

How “burdensome” is it to treat traffic equally? The only argument she made which holds up is “stifling investment,” as such a regulation restrains an avenue for profit (bilking websites for extra cash to treat them as preferred data). But investment in the field seems perfectly fine right now, and the businesses have significant protections built in. I think this requires a “legislative solution” to protect unfettered consumer access to information, imho, but I have zero faith it will ever get done (just like every other time I’ve heard that phrase used).

It’s all a bullshit argument.
Letting corporate monopolies control the internet is not a good thing.

And that’s what they are… Because they intentionally avoid competing with each other in a given region. I have effectively one choice for decent broadband. Comcast. And they suck. I don’t actually WANT to use them, but I have no choice.

And the reply from my other Senator (Chuck Grassley), is almost a copy/paste of exactly the same thing. Shocking.

https://www.opensecrets.org/orgs/recips.php?id=D000000461&type=P&state=IA&sort=A&cycle=2014

https://www.opensecrets.org/orgs/recips.php?id=D000000461&type=P&state=IA&sort=A&cycle=2016

Is it though?

That said they are fairly egalitarian in their spend.

https://www.opensecrets.org/orgs/recips.php?id=D000000461&type=P&cycle=2016&sort=A&state=

Actually all the cable companies seem to roughly be the same. Why bet on one party when you can buy them all. Plus they hire lots of former government officials for lobbyist positions.

When I moved from NH to CA and stuck with Comcast, my cable bill went down $100. Because there’s no competition in NH, but in CA Comcast has to compete with AT&T U-verse.

(I have since switched to U-verse because Comcast started having tech issues.)

Ya, it’s part of why you have to tell Comcast where you live to get a quote… it’s bullshit, because it’s the same fucking service.

The free market COULD work for telecommunications, but effective monopolies prevent it.

It’s possible that with newer wifi technology, this may cease to be an issue, when ISPs will be able to start up without huge investments in infrastructure.

LOLWUT? Ask South Korea how finite a resource their internet bandwidth is. That statement is nearly as ridiculous as Trump’s belief that a person’s energy is a finite resource.

If America took over control of it’s own electric, telephone and fiber infrastructure we could have blindingly fast internet, crystal clear telephone and rock solid electric service to everywhere but the most rural areas. Instead we let big telecommunications companies (and their pet politicians) get away with charging everyone ridiculous rates for terrible service, while promising for decades to improve infrastructure but doing fuck all about actually delivering on that promise.

We should be passing legislation hitting telecommunications companies with huge penalties if they don’t meet specific infrastructure upgrade milestones (without passing to costs on to consumers), not giving them carte blanche to charge other companies outrageous fees to carry their content and then double dipping by charging consumers ridiculous fees to receive that same content, all the while stifling competition so that there is only one choice for service in most areas.

Mostly I posted that so everyone could see how useless Iowa’s Senators are and always will be. Even our new Governor thinks that bandwidth is finite. Of course, she flunked out of community college twice. What can you do?

Elect… someone… else?

He’s from Iowa, you’re from Utah. Nice try Kevin, now come back with a real answer :P

Sigh. It’s so depressing, isn’t it?

Especially since we already fucking paid them to do just that, and they all decided “nah, we’re just gonna pocket your tax money. Thanks guys!”

On April 26, a nonprofit called American Oversight filed a Freedom of Information Act (FoIA) request asking the FCC for all records related to communications on net neutrality between Internet service providers and Chairman Ajit Pai or Pai’s staff. The group asked for “correspondence, e-mails, telephone call logs, calendar entries, meeting agendas,” and any other records of such communications.

The group also asked for similar records related to FCC communications with members of Congress, congressional staff, and members of the media. But American Oversight’s lawsuit against the FCC says the commission hasn’t complied with the requests.

“The FCC has made it clear that they’re ignoring feedback from the general public, so we’re going to court to find out who they’re actually listening to about net neutrality," American Oversight Executive Director Austin Evers said in the group’s announcement of its lawsuit. “If the Trump administration is going to let industry lobbyists rewrite the rules of the Internet for millions of Americans, we’re going to make them do it in full view of the public.” (Evers was previously a US State Department lawyer.)

The Federal Communications Commission should investigate whether Verizon Wireless violated net neutrality rules by throttling video applications on its mobile network, advocacy group Free Press says.

Free Press is asking people to sign a petition that will be delivered to the FCC.

“Late last week Verizon Wireless customers started to notice something suspicious: Videos from Netflix and YouTube were slow,” the call for signatures says. “Verizon Wireless couldn’t explain why. When reporters asked the wireless giant to comment, the company first said it was just a temporary network test with no impact on user experience. But Verizon later admitted that, temporary test or not, it was indeed ‘optimizing’ video streams.”

Due to an apparent lapse in security, random people have been uploading documents, images and executable malware to fcc.gov via their public comment webform. On the FCC website right now (PDF link):

Context: The FCC.gov Website Lets You Upload Malware Using Its Own Public API Key (Hacker Noon)

Somewhat incredibly I am the first tech writer on the planet to break this story, but even more incredibly the FCC lets you upload any file to their website and make that file publicly accessible using the FCC.gov domain.

Or rather they don’t, but they have somehow not realized that they are letting people do it and telling them how in their own documentation.
[…]
People seem to be experimenting uploading different filetypes, so far they have managed pdf/gif/ELF/exe/mp4 files up to 25MB in size, which means that you could easily host malware on the FCC.gov website right now and use it in phishing campaigns that link to malware on a .gov website.

You know what could’ve prevented that? If the free market had been able to compete for the FCC’s web security contract without the interference of the government!

THE INVISIBLE HAND SPEAKS!