Not quite. Your view seems to be that in a free market, consumers have the choice to use or not use a provider of services if those providers undertake actions that hurt said consumers. Other views suggest that consumers don’t really have that choice and a lot of consumers are beholden to 1 or 2 ISPs and are at the mercy of said ISPs.
Does that represent an accurate summary of the views of yourself and others?
I don’t think there’s any miscommunication, other than I asked what the government should have done that in your opinion would have addressed the issue in a way that was not out of proportion to the “abuses” (your term) that has occurred.
Let me break this down and ask the question again:
This seems to be a relevant question.
Comcast delenda est.
Civil right? Depends on how you define it. Legalistically or constitutionally, probably not, but colloquially, yeah.
Is having phone service, electricity, running water, a safe food supply, and passable roads a civil right? Is your view that no one has a right to those and other services that are provided by or regulated by our government?
If so, then you are consistent that no one has a right to anything that they cannot physically secure the rights to themselves, as was the state of humanity for most of its past. I don’t know that that is a good view to take if we are talking about having a society and civilization where people work together towards greater goals than they can accomplish themselves.
If not, then what is the difference? I would argue that the internet has become something that you need to have access to in order to have any chance of participating in today’s economy.
Much more accurate than other attempts to summarize my arguments here, yes.
Fair enough: my answer then is the government should have sought targeted regulatory authority for ISPs, and crafted rules specific to the abuses mentioned, as opposed to classifying ISPs as common carriers under Title II.
I appreciate that you’re attempting to answer the question, but I just don’t understand what you mean by this.
Are you saying that the FCC could have taken some other enforcement action? Can you give me a sense of what sort of action would have been more appropriate, in your view?
Are you saying that the FCC should have waited until Congress passed some legislation? As I understand it, the title II decision was made in part because of lack of congressional action - does that mean the FCC should have kept waiting for Congress to clarify a national policy on NN?
It could be argued that you(we) already do. There may be plenty of places where cable company broadband over coax doesn’t overlap with phone company broadband over copper but nearly all those places have cell coverage. The backbone 2020 “plan” from AT&T’s CEO Randall Stevenson includes streaming over wireless. That’s probably gonna be done over 5g cell service. If your holding out for phone and cable companies to run fiber so it covers every house in the US your wasting your time. Short of some multi trillion dollar government infrastructure project with heavy oversight, that’s never going to happen.
I have no idea what that’s supposed to mean in practice. What, like, “It your company name’s Verizon, you don’t get to do {this shady shit] we know you’re trying to do right now” ? That’s targeted all right, but… yeah.
I don’t see wireless as replacing wired technologies until they are actually equivalent. Can I get the same speeds, ping times, services and quotas I can get on wired as I can on wireless?
I am not “wasting time” holding out for there to be several broadband options, I am saying that that scenario is not likely to happen. As it is unlikely to happen, that is why we need regulations on the oligopolies or monopolies that are serving our communities.
Long ago, the govt did declare communications to be a necessity, and regulated the telephone company in requiring them to hook up every single home in the United States. There were houses that got phone service before they got electricity. So, really, in order to get every house hooked up to a broadband service would not require a multi trillion dollar government infrastructure project either.
What makes me think that? Now what you say here then means that you did not read the article, nor even the quote provided.
First, once again one has to point that there is an ongoing narrative that the right wing media told people like you that is a false one:
All that needs to be taken into account to point out that yes, the FCC saw a need to regulate, and no, it was not just a partisan issue then; the inclusion of partisanship once again has to be blamed on sources of information that had an interest on making it so. So besides the issues pointed before that led to the regulations, the reasons why the regulations are being dropped are not only because of ideological reasons, but because the same industries that will gain profit from dropping the regulations also influenced the process and continue to do so. And to do that the current leadership of the FCC had to wilfully ignore the majority of Americans and most of the experts.
Even before, Fortune Magazine had the opinion that no regulation was needed, but the (in practice) monopolies of the cable companies and abuses seen told them that regulation was needed.
All need to be aware of that and realize that the real astroturf came from the ones that do want to keep their monopolistic positions, and that the current government is not in favor of the consumers but in favor of the corporations that do not want to see competition.
Whether you choose to call Internet access a “civil right” or something else isn’t as important as acknowledging that it’s an essential service in a modern society, something that’s been recognized by the UN and by many national governments. It’s not just the fringe view of a few posters. And that’s why it needs to be regulated as such.
You seem to be trying out different arguments and all of them are failing. You’ve tried to argue that there’s no demonstrated need for regulation. The history of abuses documented here says otherwise. You’ve tried to argue that the industry is a free market and not a “natural monopoly”. It’s been shown to you that this is manifestly false, for economic and technological reasons, and that’s why most areas have limited choice and competition and some have no choice at all. That’s also why the relatively small number of players frequently colludes in the manner of an oligopoly. Where I am it’s basically Bell with their DSL service or whoever operates the local cable monopoly, and they are in lock-step, as nearly identical as can be given the different technologies. When one introduces either a new feature, a new pricing policy, or some asinine abusive restriction, the other does exactly the same thing at the same time.
And now you’re trying to argue that the Internet is not important enough to be regulated. The world doesn’t agree. The very idea is absurd. We live in the age of the Internet: in news, commerce, education, entertainment, communications and general information the Internet is what defines our times. To be without it is to not be a full participant in society.
Layer 3 routers are racist? Who knew?
So is a credit card. Do people have a civil right to credit?
The FCC should have reported to Congress that legislation was needed in its view to curb the following abuses, and asked for enabling legislation.
You seem to be saying that sure, that might have been better but Congress didn’t act. So obviously the FCC had to do SOMETHING!
And to that I say no: we have a system in which Congress makes laws, and the FCC makes rules to implement those laws. The FCC should not assume the mantle of lawmaker.
Now the FCC has acted in a way you don’t like, and somehow that’s not legitimate, but when they act in a way you like, it’s peachy.
This is the kind of flexible standard that drives me nuts.
In any event, that’s my answer: Congress should have enabled FCC reach here, and the FCC should have proposed rules via the usual Administrative Procedure Act mandated notice-and-comment process. They didn’t get that response from Congress, so they pulled a fast one and reclassified ISPs under a law from 1934, and then claimed “forebearance,” would be used to not apply lots of the mandatory rules that classification entailed.
I oppose this.
Umm, I would certainly think so, as there have been cases of credit issuers sued for racially discriminatory lending practices.
If credit didn’t exist, then no, no one would have a right to it. But, as it does exist, then everyone does have a right to use credit responsibly and build their credit score to be able to further leverage their earning potential and extend their wealth.
Other than credit history, expenses, and income, do you think that there is anything that should allow you to discriminate against one borrower over another? No? Then yeah, it’s a right. Yes? What would that be then?
I’m not sure where you are trying to go with this analogy, but I am thinking it is probably going to be another dead end.
Then what’s the concern? The world will handle it! Surely the world outranks the FCC.
When may we expect a replacement net neutrality rule from the world? Will there be a signing ceremony?
Go ahead. Pluck your new rule from the World Tree upon which you apparently believe it grows.
I certainly agree that no ISP should be able to racially discriminate.
But those who extend credit may refuse to extend it to people for reasons having nothing to do with race, yes?
Nowhere in this thread is the proposition that ISP Net Neutrality is a racial issue. So that wasn’t the analogy I was offering.
Credit offerors can refuse to give credit to people for all sorts of reasons. I’m asking if the person who is denied credit because he has a low-paying job and a high debt-to-income ratio and a history of missed payments is being denied a civil right.
Is he? Since credit cards are an indispensable tool of our modern economy, just like the Internet.
That’s only because of your interpretation. The FCC acted in a way that I liked, and I felt that that was legitimate. Later, when the FCC acted in a way I didn’t like, no one claimed that it was not legitimate. No one has claimed that they didn’t have the ability to reverse their earlier decisions.
We only declare that it is against the best interest of the people of the United States. It is a poor decision, it is a wrong decision, it is a decision that will lead to sub-optimal outcomes, it is a decision that is bought and paid for by large corporations, those sorts of accusations have been validly leveled at the FCC and their decision. Nothing about their authority to make that decision.
If anything is driving you nuts, it is your insistence on making up motivations for your interlocutors that are at odds with how they actually act.