Bill Ready To Ban ISP Caps In the US 439
xclr8r writes "Eric Massa, a congressman representing a district in western New York, has a bill ready that would start treating Internet providers like a utility and stop the use of caps. Nearby locales have been used as test beds for the new caps, so this may have made the constituents raise the issue with their representative."
Re:Has it occured to anyone else. . . (Score:5, Informative)
Gaming of a deregulated energy system by crooked companies like Enron played a major part in those rolling brown-outs.
It's a Stupid Idea, if Competion Exists (Score:3, Informative)
Re:sounds like an (Score:5, Informative)
The summary grossly misrepresents what the congressman is proposing.
This bill doesn't "ban ISP caps". It simply says that ISPs will start to become regulated in the same way that phone companies, for instance, are, so that a given ISP would have to put in a submission to raise their rates, explaining why they need to do so, etc.
Most ISPs solution to this would be to immediately switch all plans to a per-byte type of plan (which works given the comparison with utilities. I don't get carte blanche from the electric company to use it all for free, complaining that "they provide 20A to the house so I should be able to use 20A around the clock for free!"), and this would almost certainly not be in the consumer's best interest.
Re:Just like a utility? What about rolling blackou (Score:4, Informative)
Enron did that, pissed everyone off and suddenly they were put under a microscope.
Unnecessary... (Score:3, Informative)
Just compel the ISPs to state that there is actually a limit to what they will allow you to use, the penalties/limits they impose if you exceed that limit, and what it takes to get past the limit. I'm not sure we should be legislating that Internet service be UNlimited. Sooner or later, someone will claim cell phone service is a 'right', and all plans need to be UNlimited. Not so smart, but it sounds good.
In other words, make them say 'limited' when they try to say 'unlimited', and it is NOT.
Truth in advertising. Yes, an oxymoron. Shouldn't be.
Re:Has it occured to anyone else. . . (Score:3, Informative)
Except California wasn't really deregulated, there were still caps on in-state kWh charges among other weird rules. They called it deregulation, but what they set up was a hodgepodge of conflicting laws that was just aching to be gamed. Or, in other words, the usual government incompetence in trying to set how a market works based not on sound supply/demand principles, but some social engineering agenda. We saw the same exact thing with the mortgage meltdown, largely caused by the effective requirement that banks make loans they wouldn't ordinarily make. This opened up the whole subprime market, which looked like a great investment when you just applied the historical default rates. Many lenders didn't care, since they were able to outsource the risk in the form of mortgage-backed securities, giving paper ROI estimates that were through the roof based again on historical default rates. Surprise, surprise, subprime borrowers default at a superprime rate, and the whole thing collapsed.
FTC not FCC (Score:3, Informative)
As I noted in another comment, [slashdot.org] it's not the FCC, it's the FTC. That's a huge difference. If it were the FCC and the bill passed, it would be worthless. The FTC, on the other hand, has some teeth, and is not totally in bed with industry.
PS, nice job getting modded up twice for essentially the same comment. Maybe it'll happen to me too :-)
Re:sounds like an (Score:2, Informative)
CA was not deregulated (Score:3, Informative)
If you want to say you don't want government involvement, that's fine as an argument, but there's evidence that deregulation in California and abuse of this deregulation by Enron and other such companies had more to do with the situation
CA energy was not deregulated but you like so many other have fallen for the lie that the rolling blackouts in CA were caused by deregulation. Sure some regulations were dropped but others were added. See this post [slashdot.org] of mine.
Falcon
Re:Makes sense (Score:3, Informative)
Well, the United States Constitution is a pretty easy read. Before you say what you said above, you should give it a look. What you are looking for is the 10th Amendment.
The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.