Posted on 02/05/2017 8:06:26 PM PST by entropy12
WASHINGTON In his first days as President Trumps pick to lead the Federal Communications Commission, Ajit Pai has aggressively moved to roll back consumer protection regulations created during the Obama presidency.
Mr. Pai took a first swipe at net neutrality rules designed to ensure equal access to content on the internet. He stopped nine companies from providing discounted high-speed internet service to low-income individuals. He withdrew an effort to keep prison phone rates down, and he scrapped a proposal to break open the cable box market.
In total, as the chairman of the F.C.C., Mr. Pai released about a dozen actions in the last week, many buried in the agencys website and not publicly announced, stunning consumer advocacy groups and telecom analysts. They said Mr. Pais message was clear: The F.C.C., an independent agency, will mirror the Trump administrations rapid unwinding of government regulations that businesses fought against during the Obama administration.
With these strong-arm tactics, Chairman Pai is showing his true stripes, said Matt Wood, the policy director at the consumer group Free Press.
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
The slant in this piece is amazing. First they presume they are “consumer protection” regulations, which is a nice way of saying free $#!^ for people who don’t pay for it.
Second, they lie and say that the FCC is stopping companies from providing services at discounted rates. The FCC is saying no such thing; they are simply saying the government will not subsidize said discounted rates.
The New York Times is slime, stinky sticky slime. They are the enemy of a free people. I pray I live long enough to see that paper fold and its title consigned to the ash heap of history.
Hell yeah. And I like those stripes.
Good. I’m anti-Net Neutrality.
Changing net neutrality makes me nervous.
Anything else is simply a red herring. if you want some content from some provider there's absolutely nothing your provider can do to stop that. Just ask the people in China with the worst, most censorious provider on the planet, expect maybe North Korea. They get the content they want through Tor. However they can't do streaming video since that can be throttled just like what your provider would do if you are overusing bandwidth.
Then there is the "I paid for the BW" argument. No you didn't. You don't pay enough to get your own HD streaming connection through the network
The Supreme Court already said the government doesn’t have the power to implement Net Neutrality.
Obama did it anyway.
Net neutrality = socialized internet.
Net neutrality is another name for freebies = welfare..
Oh yes, BHO issued dozens and dozens of EO’s, and the media had zero problem with it, there were no street riots, no unhinged actresses, no marches by conservatives, and no lawsuits by republicans in the 9th circuit. In other words the country club republicans just turned the other cheek.
I wish I understood net neutrality. My gamer sons think it’s very important. I tend not to trust a government, not that I trust corporations either. Which is the most freedom oriented way for the consumer?
There are some people who do pay for the bandwidth.
When I lived in the city, I could get "standard" cable modem speeds for one price and for a higher price I could get 25Mbps. The extra speed was worth the relatively minor cost.
Now I live out in the sticks and the best I can do is microwave internet. They still have a tiered pricing plan, even though they do not like to sell the highest one. But I am still paying for my bandwidth.
There is certainly a socialist faction in the internet user community that believes the net is a "public utility" somehow owned and controlled by some larger organization. They believe they have a "right" to unlimited use of this "public utility". They are dead wrong. The only part of the network that the FCC has any legal hooks in regulating to the telephone and cable companies. They provide the raw network paths between points to that large body of private businesses that run ISP businesses and server farms. The phome companies have to make a capital investment for their network equipment and generally are guaranteed a small, fixed rate of return over an allowed equipment service life. Rates are adjusted periodically to ensure a net profit for the "common carrier". They are content agnostic. It's bandwidth between two points with an agreed level of reliability of service. The telco business isn't very glamorous. I spent 12 years there as a network and IT engineer before moving on to more interesting work as a DoD contractor.
Thanks for your comments. I work in the software industry and must confess I have/had that “public utility” thought. In my defense, I wasn’t aware of the things you point out. I now understand quite a bit more thanks to your effort. You’ve gone a long way to turning me around.
Behind all the smoke and mirrors of the first week, this was one of the all time best moves by Trump.
When you pay for long distance wifi bandwidth you are the closest to actually paying mainly because the backhaul can support every user on the tower. Cell service is the same: tower limited. That’s why cell service providers generally cap downloads. But the people with cable are generally not paying for the bandwidth. The cell company oversubscribes their shared links. That’s a problem, they are misleading their customers. But that has nothing to do with “neutrality”.
He uses up some bandwidth although that's not the limiting factor for gaming. He needs low latency. "Neutrality" is the notion that the provider cannot force you to buy their services or some particular service over the one you want. In your son's case, if he is connecting to the game server of his choice and not some shlock server that Cox chooses instead, then his Cox service is neutral. Claims otherwise are specious. To argue that the desire for more bandwidth and lower latency is a desire for "neutrality" is completely incorrect.
+10
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