Sign a petition to reject Congress’s proposed block of FCC reclassifying Internet:
Title X is the fake cable bill that Comcast wants Congress to create to give the cable industry the power to restrict the open Internet to force Internet users to pay more fees. Please share.
Time for your daily dose of Net Neutrality! As of a few days ago, the FCC’s Chairman Wheeler is now supporting reclassification of the Internet under Title II.
Can you guess what happened next? If you guessed, Congress promptly sold out, you win a cookie!
The US Congress is now making noise about passing a law to prevent the FCC from reclassifying. The proposal would include preventing ISPs from creating fast lanes and some other good things, which sounds like a win, but it’s actually more a backhanded slap because what it would also do is prevent the FCC from reclassifying.
Here is a chance to yell at them (the first of many, I’m sure).
If you’d like more information, read on!
Problem 1 with such a bill:
The reason the FCC exists as a regulatory body is because telecommunications changes too fast to reasonably expect a (deliberately) slow-moving government body like Congress to be able to legislate in real-time. Enshrining this crap in law is not only an attempt to duck the consequence at hand (for which, yes, there are some reasonable arguments to be fielded), but it’s also laying down legal sediment that’s almost certainly going to come back and bite people in the ass some day later when the world of telecommunications changes again.
Problem 2:
The proposal they’re talking about would include regulating mobile/wireless, and we actually need it not to.
In the Washington Post article, we have this:
In addition to incorporating Obama’s principles about blocking or slowing traffic, the legislation would also have to apply to wireless carriers, Grossman added. Aside from a few provisions, wireless carriers have been largely exempted from the FCC’s previous net neutrality rules.
The reason the FCC hasn’t been discussing mobile carriers in this whole mess is because, while it’s almost invisible to most users, they actually work entirely differently. Mobile carriers are in fact exactly where we DO need to consider implementing different-speed traffic lanes. Here’s why:
A given amount of cabling, or in wireless a given frequency, can only carry a finite amount of data at a time.
When it comes to laying down cable for internet, that’s only a temporary problem. You can just lay more cable, or upgrade what you’ve got to a higher quality so it carries more signal.
With mobile, though, the data travels across radio frequencies. The lays of physics mean there are a finite and unchangeable number of radio frequencies (even more limited because you can’t use ones that are too close to each other or they can interfere, and some blocks of frequencies are reserved for special use, such as air traffic control). This means that we can run out of space for mobile internet use.
We already see this effect in places with high population density and a lot of cell phone use. (Ever wonder why your A+ prime mobile iPhone signal sucks when you’re in Manhattan?)
The higher frequencies are more coveted by carriers because you can move more data over them faster (e.g. the difference between 2G and 4G). Additionally, there are some layers of technology you can slap on there to do things like compress the data, so it uses less space (‘LTE’ refers to this kind of technology).
But there’s a hard limit to how much you can do that. And when you’re doing something that doesn’t require badass speed in the first place, then why the fuck don’t we conserve those high-speed layers by bumping your Twitter app down to a slower frequency? In a case like this, the difference between 4G and 2G may be personally annoying to you, but it doesn’t make much actual impact.
The issue here is that in order to preserve net neutrality, this stuff needs to be sorted by type of traffic, not who it’s coming from or to or what kind of premium somebody is paying in order to get their signal prioritized.
from Tumblr http://ift.tt/1ABPRh9