FCC to Set Net Neutrality Rules

FCC Chair Julius Genachowski
202-418-1000

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Introduce yourself and state your objection:

Hi - my name is
I'm calling to tell Chairman Genachowski [jenna-kow-skee] not to cave on net neutrality. He must reclassify broadband under Title II so he can protect net neutrality and promote universal Internet access. Can I count on him to stand up to the industry pressure and do the right thing?

Pricing models and access models are integrated and to manipulate or regulate one is to manipulate and regulate the other. ISPs should, when it is appropriate, discriminate between sites and applications because not all sites and applications are the same. Forcing them to give equal access when it could degrade their other customers service seems rather selfish. You can't give equal service either, depending upon physical infrastructure like routers, memory, cable, optic, etc and logical setup like subnetting, virtual networks and abstract emulation networks and local usage service could and often does differ. You are supporting legislation that ignores technical hurdles in favor of some egalitarian ideal and then state cavalierly that if they can't fully accommodate your type of usage, your type of service, then they shouldn't exist. You would rather deny yourself and other customers access and force a business to close than allow a business to run in a manner you don't approve of. I believe in freedom of choice and respect your ability to chose whatever you deem to be in your best interest but only as long as it doesn't impinge upon others similar freedom.

Again i detest censorship but all discrimination is not censorship. Its like mandating a bridge can't discriminate based on the size or maximum speed of the vehicle and ignoring the fact that the bridge isn't strong or wide enough to accommodate the size and speeds of the different types of vehicles. Then stating that if the bridge can't accommodate all traffic than the bridge should be closed to all.

if comcast can't handle the load on their network because of innovations in p2p networking, shouldn't they simply upgrade their networks to stay competitive?

If they choose to yes certainly but I don't believe I should have the ability to legislate what I think they should do.

that is the issue i see in the ISP industry: in too many markets, comcast has a captive audience/monopoly so their is no real competition...

there is always satellite and if they abuse a market indiscriminately their competition will readily manifest itself. Its the reason they don't charge hundreds of dollars a month and continue to provide customer service. Because they know they do have competition.

why not just charge those using more bandwidth more money?

That is one of the business models they are currently examining. They have thought about charging bandwidth like electricity and water per unit of download and uploads but again who am I to decide what pricing methodology they should or should not use.

isn't that a better solution than simply making a blanket limit on EVERYONES access to the site/app?

Again you think you should have some sort of say in how they run their business. This is what I don't understand. It's not your company nor is it your or my area of expertise. To dictate the terms of their pricing models would remove their ability to evolve as internet usage has changed. They may eventually upgrade their equipment but this would almost certainly increase cost unless it was done at a time to maximize the use of necessary maintainance and they caught a the bottom of a new technology wave, quad core, ddr3, true emulator level network resource control etc. Subscription fees used to make sense but they are becoming cumbersome so now they are considering alternatives if we mandate a certain model it very well turn into a problem at a later date as technology and usage changes. If they are forced to continue the subscription model and usage continues to diverge they will unfairly burden the group with the resource usage of the minority but a similar problem could occur if the mandate a bandwidth model and usage doesn't continue to change as it is now. They could try to straddle these two extremes and charge a subscription fee with limits like cell phone companies or a base fee with a certain additional fee per unit of bandwidth and so on but they can't try any of these or others I haven't thought of if we mandate it how they should do business in the present. Later youtube or some other site may change their streaming application and prove too much of a burden to their current system. Do we allow the entire system to slow to a trickle or crash for the benefits of a few you tube customers? While I am against censorship and raise hell If I see evidence of this i will try to work against them in the free market. Apple has repeatedly had to respond complaints of censorship and big brother control when they remotely deleted pirated items off their customers kindles they actually ended up apologizing for the whole incident and customers have already debated about possible work arounds, i.e. hacks, to prevent this from happening again. Apple is aware of this and will almost certainly be more discrete in the future. Regulation doesn't always require government intervention sometimes fear of customers and bad pr in the age of information works better then any legislation. Sometimes this isn't the case and I realize this but I would rather wait for an actual problem that can't be resolved naturally before relying upon regulation.

i see a much more dangerous precedent set if we allow corporations to determine what they will and won't allow access to...

You are worried about regulating problem that don't yet exist and dismiss my hypothetical problems that regulation could easily create. This seems a bit conceptually disingenuous. The private sector is much more apt to change and change quickly than the public sector.

tbowman131
"for example, comcast was caught limiting bandwidth to the bitTorrent application for the past few years."

I hope you can appreciate the irony of this comment in light of what it was in response to.

"On a technical note the ISPs may very well be forced to change the current access and/or payment model as the limitations of current broadband technology are reached."

You have given me the perfect example to illustrate my point. Thank you.

Bittorrent is incredibly bandwidth intensive. in fact it is one of the most bandwidth intensive applications in aggregate available. So a ISP can either allow the application to slow down the entire network, or over utilize the network resources to the detriment of other subscribers or limit the bandwidth allocated to this application. This is a fairly common network administration technique being utilized on a large scale.

Without the freedom to limit Bittorrent's bandwidth when necessary the entire network could put under stress that would effect all subscribers "upstream" from them. This would either result in reduced performance or increased expense to upgrade the existing network all to accommodate a small minority of users. How is that for unintended consequences?

Right now you can try to negotiate with your ISP if you don't like what they have to offer and if the demand or displeasure of their customer's is great enough they will relent. Regulation doesn't work that way. Regulations are subject to political expediency.

By the way I'm completely against censorship but this wasn't meant to be a slippery slope argument but an unintended consequences argument. If you increase regulation you increase the regulatory burden on companies and this further limits the ability of smaller companies compete because larger companies are better able to accommodate greater regulation. Of course this is based upon the assumption that the net neutrality law would be subject to regulatory capture.

Some of the worst problems have occurred when we have tried to regulate and legislate against minor problems or against problems that don't exist. The world is a complex place and as soon as you place barriers in place to solve one minor problem you often end up with a dozen major ones AND the original problem. As soon as we try to legislate and regulate internet access we place it in the hands of our government and special interest groups. Any regulation put into place will eventual be used by those being regulated to their advantage and more closely tie our government to big business. So while the idea of net neutrality sounds nice, I would rather deal with ISPs as a consumer and allow ISPs the opportunity to innovate without government interference. Regulations and regulations don't change because the situation does, they change when it is politically expedient. On a technical note the ISPs may very well be forced to change the current access and/or payment model as the limitations of current broadband technology are reached. To deny them this freedom could result in very real throughput problems in the future where the politicians would sight a lack of regulation and corporate greed as the cause and increase regulation that would result in increased problems and more regulation...

Since we are on the FCC topic, - Does anyone had a problem with routers, DOSA or ISP interruption for video bandwidth. I am an IT-CESO 10. I just have accessed AT&T-Pacbell interruptions on video transmission with physical cable connections. I worked several solutions for that and it seems to have been working fine! I did overcame the problem by other technical means, however the initial problem still there. I've got some culprits. Send me an email and we can discuss a work around and fix it!

Good News for a change! I pray that you will never lose your ethical vision to unscrupulous lobbyists. ...and I am happy that so far you are indeed fulfilling the mission that you have been called for. Thumbs up FCC!

Time to take the old Internet out back and put it down, making way for a new Internet model.

"This is about whether I can turn off my cable TV and watch TV over the Internet," said Dave Burstein, editor of the DSL Prime broadband industry newsletter. "Comcast cares about this because they don't want people to turn off their cable TV."

The reason we're in the mess we're in is largely due to DEregulation.

Both sides of the political fence have sold out We the People to the powerful moneyed interests (Democrats slightly less so than Republicans). Net neutrality appears to be one example where they are actually standing up for the people for a real change.

Some of this "NO GOVERNMENT" stuff has gotten ridiculous. Government services and regulatory agencies like the FCC, FAA, USDA, etc. were created to serve us in important and necessary roles and we need the protection and information they provide now as when they were first created. Those conservatives who keep saying they want absolutely no government involvement in our lives are being unrealistic and short-sighted.

These days only time will tell what impact new policies might have on our lives. I just hope things will get better with time and the active involvement of the people.

This country is so fucked up. Every time I hear the gov't doing something that sounds good, my immediate reaction is, "Ok, what's the catch?"

This is kind of hilarious to watch. A lot of people have been up in arms about major ISP's plans to charge tiered access fees through their own hubs for a while now, and here we've got people fighting for comcast...

well there are places that are privately owned (here) and were allowed to voice our opinions, the fcc is not responsible for us.

A excellent article, though from USA today. Unusually I actually agree with the sentiment here as well. Much like environmental regulation this provision would need to be enforced to mean anything and as soon as we get another republican administration it is likely to become true in name only. Second vote up from me in a while.

Also interesting in that this is a shanklinmike post without the ususal peacefreedomprosparity link at the top. Instead it is something called fee.

Seems like a very similar organization though. Time will tell whether or not this is merely new sheep's clothing.

i want to believe this is a good thing.

..Well you know if the government is in charge every thing will get better right ? It is not like they could screw any thing up right? I think they should call it something else "Neutrality Rule" I mean it makes it sound like the government is neutral...LOL

is this the first censorship of the new diversity czar?

I'm normally right there with you on things mike, but it seems like this will give protections.

we should worry anytime someone with a profit motive is in charge of "neutrality"

why is it scary when "we the people" do it? do you not believe in the ability of self-government?

If there's big money to be had, and with the internet there is, big business will be there to swallow it up and gain unfair advantage. Regulation is the reason we have the FCC.

Net neutrality is a much-needed PROTECTION of the public from abuse by extremely large and excessively greedy corporations, against which we are unable to protect ourselves.

Sheesh.

Nice words , wheres the action? It's Monday.