Law Upcoming vote on Net Neutrality laws - How many times do we need to strike this shit down?

FCC plans to vote to overturn U.S. net neutrality rules in December

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The head of the Federal Communications Commission is set to unveil plans next week for a final vote to reverse a landmark 2015 net neutrality order barring the blocking or slowing of web content, two people briefed on the plans said.

In May, the FCC voted 2-1 to advance Republican FCC Chairman Ajit Pai’s plan to withdraw the former Obama administration’s order reclassifying internet service providers as if they were utilities. Pai now plans to hold a final vote on the proposal at the FCC’s Dec. 14 meeting, the people said, and roll out details of the plans next week.

Pai asked in May for public comment on whether the FCC has authority or should keep any regulations limiting internet providers’ ability to block, throttle or offer “fast lanes” to some websites, known as “paid prioritization.” Several industry officials told Reuters they expect Pai to drop those specific legal requirements but retain some transparency requirements under the order.

An FCC spokesman declined to comment.

Internet providers including AT&T Inc, Comcast Corp and Verizon Communications Inc say ending the rules could spark billions in additional broadband investment and eliminate the possibility a future administration could regulate internet pricing.

Critics say the move could harm consumers, small businesses and access to the internet.

In July, a group representing major technology firms including Alphabet Inc and Facebook Inc urged Pai to drop plans to rescind the rules.

Advocacy group Free Press said Wednesday “we’ll learn the gory details in the next few days, but we know that Pai intends to dismantle the basic protections that have fueled the internet’s growth.”

Pai, who argues the Obama order was unnecessary and harms jobs and investment, has not committed to retaining any rules, but said he favors an “open internet.” The proposal to reverse the Obama rules reclassifying internet service has drawn more than 22 million comments.

Pai is mounting an aggressive deregulatory agenda since being named by President Donald Trump to head the FCC.

On Thursday the FCC will vote on Pai’s proposal to eliminate the 42-year-old ban on cross-ownership of a newspaper and TV station in a major market. The proposal would make it easier for media companies to buy additional TV stations in the same market.

Pai is also expected to call for an initial vote in December to rescind rules that say one company may not own stations serving more than 39 percent of U.S. television households, two people briefed on the matter said.

Oh, and Comcast is already lobbying.

I'm so sick of this shit, seriously. The FCC is whoring out for Comcast and AT&T instead of ensuring that American citizens have equal access to the internet.

 

[Marvin]

Like our laws, our bureaucracies are outdated. If Netflix, Google, Facebook, Amazon, etc, who in addition to owning significant internet infrastructure themselves, have the ability to throttle users and bury/censor content just the same, are not under the same umbrella as ISPs when it comes to the internet, there's no point in all of this. There's more to "net neutrality" than the ISPs.

Not all internet infrastructure is created the same. The wires are a much bigger NN issue than servers. Anyone can buy a server, but laying cable requires substantial resources.

 

[Wesley Willis]

Not all internet infrastructure is created the same. The wires are a much bigger NN issue than servers. Anyone can buy a server, but laying cable requires substantial resources.

Buying a server is a far cry from operating a CDN, which have considerable impact on how the net operates, and they aren't part of the neutrality debate either. Simply owning a server is one thing, operating an entire network of them is another.

It's one of the reasons YouTube sold out to Google. They couldn't afford the bandwidth.

 

[Marvin]

Buying a server is a far cry from operating a CDN, which have considerable impact on how the net operates, and they aren't part of the neutrality debate either. Simply owning a server is one thing, operating an entire network of them is another.

It's one of the reasons YouTube sold out to Google. They couldn't afford the bandwidth.

The cost of buying servers increases linearly. The cost of running cables increases much faster than linearly. CDNs are not a choke point on the scale that running cables is.

They're not comparable. Not remotely.

Re youtube: video is inordinately expensive. You can't have a free video service like youtube. Youtube didn't sell out because they didn't have (or couldn't get) a cdn like google does. They sold out because their business model is unsustainable.

 

[Wesley Willis]

The cost of buying servers increases linearly. The cost of running cables increases much faster than linearly. CDNs are not a choke point on the scale that running cables is.

They're not comparable. Not remotely.

But a lot of it used and/or owned by the same companies. The point wasn't that it's all equal in every aspect, rather it can be abused equally. If fast lanes are created for favored content providers, which services do you think they're going to use? It's part of the same picture.

Re youtube: video is inordinately expensive. You can't have a free video service like youtube. Youtube didn't sell out because they didn't have (or couldn't get) a cdn like google does. They sold out because their business model is unsustainable.

This is a circular argument. It was unsustainable due to bandwidth costs.

YouTube was burning through $2 million a month in bandwidth costs before the acquisition. What few knew at the time was that Google was a pioneer in data center technology, which allowed it to dramatically lower the costs of running YouTube.

Steven Levy's book In the Plex details Google's numerous data center innovations. Since the early 2000s, Google had been buying up cheap fiber lines from companies that overestimated demand in the 1980s and '90s. The book quotes Chris Sacca, Google's head of Special Initiatives: “We would want to pick up pieces that would connect our data center, so we’d identify the owner, negotiate, and take it over. Then we’d put optical networking equipment on one end in our data center, the same equipment on the data center at the other end, and now we’re running that stretch of fiber.” Sacca said the cost savings were immense, “We were paying 10 cents on the dollar.” At the end of Google's fiber shopping spree, Sacca said Google owned more fiber "than anyone else on the planet.” When it did have to use someone else's network, Google owned enough fiber that it could get a good deal from other broadband companies in exchange for cheap passage over its own network.

Besides a killer network, Google had data centers all over the world. Lowering the distance data has to travel not only speeds up service, but it costs less when you are running on someone else's network. By 2003, Google was planning to build its own data centers from scratch, including selecting the site the data center was built on. With sole control of a facility, Google was able to completely rethink the way data centers were built.

At the time, the conventional data center pumped the hot server exhaust air into the same room as the servers, and the entire room was air-conditioned. In its own data centers, Google placed servers back-to-back, creating alternating cool aisles, where the servers were, and hot aisles, where the exhaust poured into. This saved a significant amount of money on cooling, the primary cost of a data center. Google also realized that the standard 68-degree data center temperature was too low. Servers worked just fine in an 80-degree room.


Higher room temperatures put more stress on the servers, but Google built all of its own servers, another innovation at the time, and used cheap, rejected parts from other manufacturers. If a part broke, it didn't matter—Google's data centers worked as a single giant computer with tons of redundancies. A server could go down, and the software would detect it, put the machine offline, and keep humming along at slightly reduced capacity. An engineer was then dispatched to fix the busted machine with no downtime.


Google's exact data center costs are a closely guarded secret, but Levy estimates that "by perfecting its software, owning its own fiber, and innovating in conservation techniques, Google was able to run its computers spending only a third of what its competitors paid." Remember YouTube's $2 million-a-month bandwidth bill before the Google acquisition? While it wasn't an overnight transition, apply Google's data center expertise, and this cost drops to about $666,000 a month.

Data centers weren't the only costs Google could save YouTube. Google had the largest advertising platform on the Web, and since Google owned both YouTube and the ad platform, it could cut out the middle man. All the profits went to YouTube without having to share it with a partner.

In January 2007, Google and YouTube announced a new advertising plan. The video site would finally start showing video ads, instead of the standard text and banner ads that normal sites used. Video ads pull in much more money than banners, and everyone visiting YouTube is there to watch the videos. The company also launched overlay ads that showed up on top of the video while it was playing, right where the eyeballs were. Both of these ads would run not only on YouTube.com, but they functioned over embedded videos on other sites, too.

This money wouldn't just go to YouTube. Google also announced a revenue share plan with (formerly) amateur content creators. Make a popular video, slap some ads on it, and you get some of the ad money. YouTube became not only a destination for users to view videos, but content creators had a shot of building a whole career on YouTube's platform.

Ultimately, Google has more work to do. According to The Wall Street Journal, YouTube still isn't profitable: it's currently running as a break-even business. Susan Wojcicki—Googler #16, former senior vice president of advertising & commerce and a driving force behind AdSense—was put in charge of YouTube in 2014. Ads and profitability are still an ongoing project for the platform. But owning the #3 site on the Internet (behind Google.com and Facebook, respectively) has a lot of perks for Google.
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2015/04/cheaper-bandwidth-or-bust-how-google-saved-youtube/​

 

[Chiang Kai-shek]

If worse comes to worse we can always just start our own ISP.

 

[Marvin]

But a lot of it used and/or owned by the same companies. The point wasn't that it's all equal in every aspect, rather it can be abused equally. If fast lanes are created for favored content providers, which services do you think they're going to use? It's part of the same picture.

Yeah, that last part is an argument for network neutrality, but it doesn't apply to web hosts. Just ISPs.

This is a circular argument. It was unsustainable due to bandwidth costs.


YouTube was burning through $2 million a month in bandwidth costs before the acquisition. What few knew at the time was that Google was a pioneer in data center technology, which allowed it to dramatically lower the costs of running YouTube.

Steven Levy's book In the Plex details Google's numerous data center innovations. Since the early 2000s, Google had been buying up cheap fiber lines from companies that overestimated demand in the 1980s and '90s. The book quotes Chris Sacca, Google's head of Special Initiatives: “We would want to pick up pieces that would connect our data center, so we’d identify the owner, negotiate, and take it over. Then we’d put optical networking equipment on one end in our data center, the same equipment on the data center at the other end, and now we’re running that stretch of fiber.” Sacca said the cost savings were immense, “We were paying 10 cents on the dollar.” At the end of Google's fiber shopping spree, Sacca said Google owned more fiber "than anyone else on the planet.” When it did have to use someone else's network, Google owned enough fiber that it could get a good deal from other broadband companies in exchange for cheap passage over its own network.

Besides a killer network, Google had data centers all over the world. Lowering the distance data has to travel not only speeds up service, but it costs less when you are running on someone else's network. By 2003, Google was planning to build its own data centers from scratch, including selecting the site the data center was built on. With sole control of a facility, Google was able to completely rethink the way data centers were built.

At the time, the conventional data center pumped the hot server exhaust air into the same room as the servers, and the entire room was air-conditioned. In its own data centers, Google placed servers back-to-back, creating alternating cool aisles, where the servers were, and hot aisles, where the exhaust poured into. This saved a significant amount of money on cooling, the primary cost of a data center. Google also realized that the standard 68-degree data center temperature was too low. Servers worked just fine in an 80-degree room.


Higher room temperatures put more stress on the servers, but Google built all of its own servers, another innovation at the time, and used cheap, rejected parts from other manufacturers. If a part broke, it didn't matter—Google's data centers worked as a single giant computer with tons of redundancies. A server could go down, and the software would detect it, put the machine offline, and keep humming along at slightly reduced capacity. An engineer was then dispatched to fix the busted machine with no downtime.


Google's exact data center costs are a closely guarded secret, but Levy estimates that "by perfecting its software, owning its own fiber, and innovating in conservation techniques, Google was able to run its computers spending only a third of what its competitors paid." Remember YouTube's $2 million-a-month bandwidth bill before the Google acquisition? While it wasn't an overnight transition, apply Google's data center expertise, and this cost drops to about $666,000 a month.

Data centers weren't the only costs Google could save YouTube. Google had the largest advertising platform on the Web, and since Google owned both YouTube and the ad platform, it could cut out the middle man. All the profits went to YouTube without having to share it with a partner.

In January 2007, Google and YouTube announced a new advertising plan. The video site would finally start showing video ads, instead of the standard text and banner ads that normal sites used. Video ads pull in much more money than banners, and everyone visiting YouTube is there to watch the videos. The company also launched overlay ads that showed up on top of the video while it was playing, right where the eyeballs were. Both of these ads would run not only on YouTube.com, but they functioned over embedded videos on other sites, too.

This money wouldn't just go to YouTube. Google also announced a revenue share plan with (formerly) amateur content creators. Make a popular video, slap some ads on it, and you get some of the ad money. YouTube became not only a destination for users to view videos, but content creators had a shot of building a whole career on YouTube's platform.

Ultimately, Google has more work to do. According to The Wall Street Journal, YouTube still isn't profitable: it's currently running as a break-even business. Susan Wojcicki—Googler #16, former senior vice president of advertising & commerce and a driving force behind AdSense—was put in charge of YouTube in 2014. Ads and profitability are still an ongoing project for the platform. But owning the #3 site on the Internet (behind Google.com and Facebook, respectively) has a lot of perks for Google.
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2015/04/cheaper-bandwidth-or-bust-how-google-saved-youtube/

Bandwidth is an ISP issue.

 

[Jewelsmakerguy]

Necroing, but Pai's undergoing investigations for potential corruption... By the FCC itself:
http://www.dslreports.com/shownews/FCC-Boss-Being-Investigated-For-Potential-Corruption-141261

FCC boss Ajit Pai is being investigated by his own agency for potential corruption. Pai is already facing multiple inquiries into his rushed repeal of net neutrality and the shady events that occurred during it. Now he's facing an additional investigation into whether he gutted decades-old media consolidation rules exclusively to benefit Sinclair Broadcasting. Pai has been dismantling said rules just as Sinclair Broadcasting is trying to gain approval for its $3.9 billion acquisition of Tribune Media.

According to the New York Times, the FCC Inspector General began an investigation last fall into whether Pai is a bit too cozy with the companies he is supposed to be holding accountable.
Late last year, "the top internal watchdog for the F.C.C. opened an investigation into whether Mr. Pai and his aides had improperly pushed for the rule changes and whether they had timed them to benefit Sinclair," the report notes.

"It was unclear the extent of the inspector general’s investigation or when it might conclude, but the inquiry puts a spotlight on Mr. Pai’s decisions and whether there had been coordination with the company," notes the report. "It may also force him to answer questions that he has so far avoided addressing in public."

The Inspector General is a nonpartisan position at the FCC.

Consumer groups have routinely argued that Sinclair's latest expansion would all but decimate diversity in local media reporting. The deal, which wouldn't have even been possible until Pai dismantled numerous protections, would give the already-controversial network control of over 200 local-TV stations nationwide, reaching more than 70 percent of the country.

Opposition to the deal is bipartisan in nature. Conservatives realize that a more powerful Sinclair would likely work to stifle smaller, independent media outlets unfairly. Liberals share those concerns, while also expressing worries that Sinclair's often distorted definition of "news" will erode national discourse further--just as the country is trying to come to grips with domestic and foreign disinformation and its impact on the electoral process.

Consumer groups quickly pounced on the news, arguing that Pai should step back from overseeing his multiple efforts to gut media consolidation rules (or from approving the Sinclair merger) until the inquiry is complete. That is something anyone familiar with Ajit Pai knows won't be happening.

"Until the inspector general’s investigation is complete, Chairman Pai and any other FCC staff subject to this inquiry should recuse themselves from all dealings related to Sinclair’s proposed takeover of Tribune Media," Free Press Senior Counsel Jessica J. González said in a statement. "If the investigation finds that Pai or any other FCC staff did indeed let their own bias and favoritism shape decisions related to the deal, they must not be permitted to vote on this matter and they should be subject to other appropriate ethics-review processes."

Pai is also facing numerous inquiries into Pai's behavior on the net neutrality front, including a GAO investigation into why the agency appeared to have made up a DDOS attack during its net neutrality repeal, and another into why the agency turned a blind eye toward identity theft and fraud during the repeal's open comment proceeding. That's in addition to numerous lawsuits from consumer groups, 23 State Attorneys General, and companies negatively impacted by Pai's extremely unpopular handout to the nation's biggest ISPs.

 

[Secret Asshole]

Good. Pai is a stupid faggot who is so obviously bought its impossible not to notice. Not to mention his two second repeal of net neutrality caused nearly half the states in the union to either sue or make up their own rules. Have fun spending even more money on lawyers to navigate 50 different versions of net neutrality you corporate cocksuckers.

 

[CatParty]

Necroing, but Pai's undergoing investigations for potential corruption... By the FCC itself:
http://www.dslreports.com/shownews/FCC-Boss-Being-Investigated-For-Potential-Corruption-141261

https://kiwifarms.net/threads/ajit-...stigated-by-the-fccs-inspector-general.39554/

 

[Jewelsmakerguy]

https://kiwifarms.net/threads/ajit-...stigated-by-the-fccs-inspector-general.39554/

Ah, didn't notice it there.