1y ago

FCC moves forward with its plan to restore Obama-era net neutrality protections

www.engadget.com FCC moves forward with its plan to restore Obama-era net neutrality protections

The Federal Communications Commission has voted to move forward with a plan to restore Obama-era net neutrality protections. The rules could be re-established as soon as next spring, but the FCC's effort could face legal challenges.

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"On the other hand, critics say that net neutrality rules are unnecessary. "Since the FCC’s 2017 decision to return the Internet to the same successful and bipartisan regulatory framework under which it thrived for decades, broadband speeds in the U.S. have increased, prices are down, competition has intensified, and record-breaking new broadband builds have brought millions of Americans across the digital divide," Brendan Carr, the senior Republican on the FCC, said in a statement. "The Internet is not broken and the FCC does not need Title II to fix it. I would encourage the agency to reverse course and focus on the important issues that Congress has authorized the FCC to advance."
Lol if prices are down, why does my bill keep arbitrarily increasing? ~~And I'm pretty sure more companies are consolidating (Spectrum acquired Charter not long ago), so competition my ass.~~
Edit: turns out Charter rebranded as Spectrum, my bad
- (Spectrum acquired Charter not long ago)
  Spectrum is actually Charter's trade name; they acquired Bright House and Time Warner not long ago.
  
  Ah that's right, oops. Edited my post, thanks.
- You’re not wrong though. Mine just went up $15/month with CenturyLink’s rebrand as Quantum. That’s with me on their best service, month-to-month fiber.

Ajit pai can go fuck himself

There is no fiber to the curb, and DSL rolled out in the US starting in the late 1990s.
Since then we have cable internet added to the mix.
US broadband speeds are like the US minimum wage.
- There is no fiber to the curb
  Why would you want that now that there's fiber to the home? That's what we have.
  US broadband speeds are like the US minimum wage.
  
  And that's because I'm paying for the lowest tier.
  
  They are not implying all Americans have poor internet, they are implying that most Americans have bad internet and are forced to use it due to non-competition.
  
  My options are Comcast or 100 megabit DSL. Neither are fiber.

Why does the article have to say "Obama-era"? Net neutrality is just net neutral and we don't need to add extra labels to create a headline. Annoying.
- Because we had net neutrality under Obama. And there’s lots of people who don’t know that. I’ve seen numerous posts back on Reddit and recently on lemmy saying corporate dems will never enact NN. When they did, and they are again. I’m glad the article mentions it. Because those history revisionists “both sides” groups are loud and prominent.
  
  I remember it well. We just don't need to add to the already polarized political atmosphere by making it Obama-era thing. I was then and still am a huge proponent of net neutrality.

Fuckin’ finally, jesus tapdancing christ

I love that it was proven a vast majority of the public comments in favor of removing net neutrality laws were fake. But instead of just reverting the law back as a result of this discovery we get to fucking hope it doesn’t happen again while we try to apply the same fucking rules.

Does someone know what's on the photo?
- This is the back side of a network patch panel punched down with wiring that has no strain relief.
  
  Great alt text summary.
- I believe it's a series of tubes

Cannot wait for this to amount to nothing over the next 12 months and seeing all the ~~bots~~ very real people hail it was a win for >!union busting!< Biden come next November
- I’m not sure why you’re upset about restoring net neutrality but go off I guess
  
  I’m not sure why you’re upset about restoring net neutrality but go off I guess
  Because there's a non-zero chance that the service providers will pull the same kinds of stunts that some police departments did in the wake of all of the post-George-Floyd ideas we had about "reform".
  The providers will most likely throw a tantrum at the increased regulation and we will get everything from "weaponized incompetence" to "malicious compliance" along with a petulant toddler level of foot-dragging. They will then probably claim that everything that's going wrong with their services is now due to these new choking, stifling, innovation-killing regulations that are none of those things in actuality and then they'll do their level best to lobby things back to their current state at the very least and more likely an even worse state for the consumer.
  I'm not saying we SHOULDN'T restore net neutrality to the state it was in, I'm just saying that the providers are probably going to be big babies about it and pass the pain on to the customer.
  AT&T, Comcast, Charter, Cox, Verizon, CenturyLink, and T-Mobile have basically invisibly colluded themselves into one big ma bell lookalike by one or more of them setting "market pricing" and waiting for the others to follow suit because "profits".
  Why be competitive when you too can rake in record profits by silently agreeing to the rip-off?
  The least we can do is limit their ability to pull stunts like marginalizing content they don't get make extra money off of prioritizing.
  I can get why someone might not be excited about this because it's going to suck for consumers in the short run and it's really not going to solve the problem at hand, it's just going to do a tiny bit to keep it from progressing even farther into "enshittification" territory as the providers keep moving the pot towards boiling.
  Until we remove the ability for corporations to buy legislation, though, the problem will continue.
  
  There is a very real chance that since we're heading for an election year, the ISPs can just throttle it in litigation for the next 16 months and should the GOP win, then it's moot.
- So you're all in on the ever increasing cost of internet service, then? You are pleased that getting more than 25 mbits requires an extra $30 per month and gigabit rates are well past $150?
  Damn. You be you, but I'd rather not be fleeced while they also strip me of my privacy rights.
  Thankfully we actually got a competitor here recently and went from $90 for 25mbits up, 5 down to $68 for 1gig up/down.
  Yes, that is how bad it is in America. 3 years ago that $90 was $60, after I knocked it down from $90 by dropping my data rate and ditching their minimal cable plan that mostly had shopping channels on it and HBO Max, only viewable on my phone, and I never managed to get it to work.
  Their rates consistently go up by up to 10% per year with zero improvements.
  
  I pay like 120 for 2gbit unlimited bandwidth.
  
  Net neutrality is a bandaid on a bullet wound at this point. Actually, that's not entirely accurate, it's more like a bandaid on a migraine.
  The internet and internet access needs to be nationalized, this isn't 1995, there's no reason the internet should be controlled by a handful of corporations, and no amount of FCC regulation can fix the problems that causes.

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