Tech FCC Chairman Ajit Pai: Why He's Rejecting Net Neutrality

[Denny Crane]

Terrific video.

 

[Denny Crane]

The guy is brilliant, knows his shit, and dispels a lot of the misinformation about net neutrality rules.

I watched the whole thing last night. No yelling and screaming or even anything partisan about it.

 

[Natebishop3]

Because deregulating has always gone so well.....

Monsanto?

The banking crisis in 2008?

Telecommunications Act of 1996

We're giving these corporations more and more rope, and they're hanging US with it. This isn't good Denny. The founders didn't consider massive corporations with no ties to any countries when they drew up the framework of this country. There's no chance in hell they would have left the door open for this kind of corruption.

 

[MarAzul]

I like the talk this guy talks.
Ha! The less reason I have to need my FCC license the better.

 

[HailBlazers]

Because deregulating has always gone so well.....

Monsanto?

The banking crisis in 2008?

Telecommunications Act of 1996

We're giving these corporations more and more rope, and they're hanging US with it. This isn't good Denny. The founders didn't consider massive corporations with no ties to any countries when they drew up the framework of this country. There's no chance in hell they would have left the door open for this kind of corruption.

Corporations are people too @Natebishop3 . Sheesh

 

[Denny Crane]

Why should the government favor Google over Verizon?

Why should the government penalize T-Mobile for allowing streaming services to cost 0 bytes of data on your plan?

What was the harm before, when there was the lack of these new regulations?

People misuse the "Corporations are people" statement by the Supreme Court. If they weren't treated as such, state governments could lawfully discriminate against minority businesses - and that's all it means.

 

[MarAzul]

People misuse the "Corporations are people" statement

You are too kind Denny! Pretentious misunderstanding is intended to obfuscate while hiding behind a feel good position.

 

[Denny Crane]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporate_personhood

Corporate personhood is the legal notion that a corporation, separately from its associated human beings (like owners, managers, or employees), has at least some of the legal rights and responsibilities enjoyed by natural persons (physical humans).[1] For example, corporations have the right to enter into contracts with other parties and to sue or be sued in court in the same way as natural persons or unincorporated associations of persons. In a U.S. historical context, the phrase 'Corporate Personhood' refers to the ongoing legal debate over the extent to which rights traditionally associated with natural persons should also be afforded to corporations. In 1886 it was clear that the Supreme Court had accepted the argument that corporations were people and that "their money was protected by the due process clause of the 14th Amendment"—an Amendment that was made to protect African Americans' rights (Zinn 261).

 

[Natebishop3]

Why should the government favor Google over Verizon?

Why should the government penalize T-Mobile for allowing streaming services to cost 0 bytes of data on your plan?

What was the harm before, when there was the lack of these new regulations?

People misuse the "Corporations are people" statement by the Supreme Court. If they weren't treated as such, state governments could lawfully discriminate against minority businesses - and that's all it means.

.......................

Oh I don't know, maybe because the FCC could see what the telecommunication industry was trying to do and stopped them? Are you kidding?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Net_neutrality_in_the_United_States

In the United States, net neutrality has been an issue of contention among network users and access providers since the 1990s.[1][2] Until 2015, there were no clear legal restrictions against practices impeding net neutrality.[3][4][5][6] In 2005 and 2006, corporations supporting both sides of the issue spent large amounts of money lobbying Congress.[7] Between 2005 and 2012, five attempts to pass bills in Congress containing net neutrality provisions failed. Each sought to prohibit Internet service providers from using various variable pricing models based upon the user's Quality of Service level, described as tiered service in the industry and as price discrimination by some economists.[8][9]

In April 2014, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) reported a new draft rule that would have permitted ISPs to offer content providers a faster track to send content, thus reversing its earlier net neutrality position.[10] In May 2014, the FCC decided to consider two options: permitting fast and slow broadband lanes, thereby compromising net neutrality; and second, reclassifying broadband as a telecommunication service, thereby preserving net neutrality.[11] In November 2014, President Barack Obama recommended that the FCC reclassify broadband Internet service as a telecommunications service.[12] In January 2015, Republicans presented an HR discussion draft bill that made concessions to net neutrality but prohibited the FCC from enacting any further regulation affecting ISPs.[13] On February 26, 2015, the FCC ruled in favor of net neutrality by reclassifying broadband as a common carrier under Title II of the Communications Act of 1934 and Section 706 of the Telecommunications act of 1996.[3][14][15] On April 13, 2015, the FCC published the final rule on its new "Net Neutrality" regulations.[16][17] These rules went into effect on June 12, 2015.[18] However, a more recent attempt, in April 2017, is being considered by the newly appointed FCC chairman, Ajit Varadaraj Pai, to compromise net neutrality.[19]

The internet should be a utility. It's not like television. They shouldn't be able to charge us extra to visit ESPN.com or Netflix. The web should be like your water bill. You can pay to turn it on or you can pay to turn it off. Major corporations like Comcast have been trying to get shit passed to fuck us over. The FCC was trying to prevent that from happening. The only "regulation" that they passed was to prevent them from changing anything. That's it. It was passed to keep the internet the way that it is.

Anyone who is against that is a fool.

 

[MarAzul]

Anyone who is against that is a fool.

So, do you mean one fee is fair for everyone? No matter whether you use 5GB or 55GB a month?

 

[Denny Crane]

.......................

Oh I don't know, maybe because the FCC could see what the telecommunication industry was trying to do and stopped them? Are you kidding?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Net_neutrality_in_the_United_States



The internet should be a utility. It's not like television. They shouldn't be able to charge us extra to visit ESPN.com or Netflix. The web should be like your water bill. You can pay to turn it on or you can pay to turn it off. Major corporations like Comcast have been trying to get shit passed to fuck us over. The FCC was trying to prevent that from happening. The only "regulation" that they passed was to prevent them from changing anything. That's it. It was passed to keep the internet the way that it is.

Anyone who is against that is a fool.

The government shouldn't pass what Comcast wants and it shouldn't pass what Google wants. You would side with google, I don't think government should side with either.

The internet isn't a utility, nor is it exactly like Television. You get a lot of shit for free, and you have to pay for a lot of stuff (and people do). And someone has to pay for the infrastructure that has increasing needs even if the customer base doesn't grow.

Netflix isn't free. Amazon Prime isn't free. HBO Now isn't free. CBS online isn't free. Many sites, like GitHub, are free but only for a limited use. ESPN similarly offers free content and charges for Insider. These FCC rules don't make those services free.


These FCC rules didn't exist all along and there was absolutely nothing wrong with the way things worked.

Plus, the proper regulating agency is the FTC, not the FCC. It's the FCC's job to bleep the word "shit" from broadcast TV and otherwise regulate SPEECH.

Why do I say things were working fine?

Netflix hosts on Amazon's infrastructure and competes with Amazon video. Amazon would be squashing Netflix as competition if there were monopolistic actions going on.

That's one example.

Another is Frontier Communications (my ISP) has a channel you tune to to watch Netflix. It's an actual channel in the guide. Netflix competes with their on demand (pay per view) service. The Netflix channel was there before the FCC's rules.

The FCC didn't prevent anything from happening except for TWC and others slowing down or stopping their build out of even faster consumer broadband (TWC has stopped with all its MAXX plans, for example).

These FCC rules make it so Netflix maximizes profits while the only way to justify the massive infrastructure project that is required to roll out city-wide/nation-wide faster internet is to charge the consumer higher prices. Or only roll out the faster services piecemeal as the old infrastructure needs repair. Charging higher prices for access only limits the availability to those who can afford it. Bad for consumers all the way around.

My view is Netflix can and should factor into its business model the cost of their content delivery and charge accordingly. The price increase, if at all, would be of little consequence to its customers. Other companies already do this, including Google and Yahoo! and Amazon and countless others.

I can get a lot more technical about this, since I spent a good part of my career building internet infrastructure and managing these kinds of services, but I am sure it would go over the heads of many.

 

[Denny Crane]

This company has been around since the 1990s:

https://www.akamai.com/

Their patents cover methods for distributed content delivery networks. Like I wrote earlier, Google would use Akamai to distribute its content to Akamai servers close to you and close to me, so you get fast delivery from the one close to you and I get fast delivery from the one close to me.

Reachability for Google and other Akamai customers is remarkable. I haven't seen it fail to reach google.com when I use my browser.

Google almost certainly outgrew Akamai years ago. Google provides its own reliable and secure infrastructure for gmail, it's cloud computing service (for which it charges), and so on. They have built out dozens of their own data centers with about 2,000,000 servers. The Microsoft Azure platform has at least 1,000,000 servers. Amazon AWS (where SportsTwo is hosted) has 1.3M servers in multiple locations and their own CDN.

When Google lobbied for this FCC rule, it was to relieve them of the expense burden of building out this infrastructure and placing it on the ISPs.

Netflix also lobbied for this FCC rule, and it's no longer building data centers and is actually shutting them down. They're running almost exclusively on Amazon infrastructure. Again, this shifts the cost of their content delivery to the ISPs.

https://arstechnica.com/information...es-its-massive-migration-to-the-amazon-cloud/

Netflix has been moving huge portions of its streaming operation to Amazon Web Services (AWS) for years now, and it says it has finally completed its giant shift to the cloud. “We are happy to report that in early January of 2016, after seven years of diligent effort, we have finally completed our cloud migration and shut down the last remaining data center bits used by our streaming service,” Netflix said in a blog post that it plans to publish at noon Eastern today. (The blog should go up at this link.)

Netflix operates “many tens of thousands of servers and many tens of petabytes of storage” in the Amazon cloud, Netflix VP of cloud and platform engineering Yury Izrailevsky told Ars in an interview.

 

[Denny Crane]

Thanks to the FCC Net Neutrality deal... Bye bye google fiber. Not coming to a town near you!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Fiber

On August 10, 2015, Google announced its intention to restructure the company moving less central services and products into a new umbrella corporation, Alphabet Inc. As part of this restructuring plan, Google Fiber would become a subsidiary of Alphabet and may become part of the "Access and Energy" business unit.[8] In October 2016, all expansion plans were put on hold and some jobs were cut.[9] Google Fiber will continue to provide service in the cities where it is already installed.

(No need for Google to do this since they now get free infrastructure, the cost born entirely by the ISPs)

 

[MarAzul]

You can pay to turn it on or you can pay to turn it off.

Anyone who is against that is a fool.

On the boat, I pay $35/60days access including 2GB of data. Beyond that, it cost $10/GB. How much should I get for the $35?

 

[dviss1]

No one in here is agreeing with you Denny.

What these corporations are doing us the same way the East India Company did your ancestors.

 

[Denny Crane]

No one in here is agreeing with you Denny.

What these corporations are doing us the same way the East India Company did your ancestors.

It's OK to not agree, but I ask for evidence that these corporations are doing us the same way the East India Company did to our ancestors and more importantly, how these Net Neutrality rules are beneficial.

I've provided evidence (google fiber bye bye, TWC MAXX bye bye) of the harm caused by the rules. The East India Companies that benefit from the rule are Google, Netflix, and others sites that generate massive loads on the ISP's infrastructure without paying for it.

Why favor google over TWC?

Again, I say favor nobody. It's worked since the 1990s without these rules and we've seen TWC MAXX and Google Fiber emerge, plus all the internet companies that have come to be (Amazon, etc.).

 

[Denny Crane]

Net Neutrality rule passed in 2015. This article is from 2014:


http://corporate.comcast.com/news-i...lix-on-x1-to-millions-of-customers-nationwide

Comcast and Netflix today announced the Netflix service will launch on millions of X1 devices across the country next week. Integrated throughout the platform, X1 customers with Netflix subscriptions will be able to easily browse and access over the internet the extensive online collection of Netflix TV shows and movies alongside the live, on demand, DVR and web programming included with their Xfinity TV subscription.