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Democrats The Internet

Democrats Prepare Bill That Would Codify Net Neutrality (theverge.com) 226

According to a new report from The Washington Post, congressional Democrats are expected to introduce a new bill codifying net neutrality in the coming weeks. The Verge reports: The Net Neutrality and Broadband Justice Act -- spearheaded by longtime Senate internet advocates Ed Markey (D-MA) and Ron Wyden (D-OR) -- would reclassify broadband as a telecommunications service under Title II. This would give the Federal Communications Commission new enforcement powers over the internet, including the power to set rules against throttling, blocking, or paid prioritization. [...] The lawmakers could introduce the bill as early as August, a source familiar told The Verge on Monday. The measure would restore the FCC's authority over broadband and allow the agency to investigate consumer complaints and roll out new rules to promote broadband competition and close the digital divide, the source said.

In 2017, the Trump FCC, led by former chair Ajit Pai, rolled back the net neutrality provisions put in place under the former administration. The rules banned broadband providers from throttling and blocking certain lanes of traffic and offering paid fast lanes for specific services. Since the Trump reversal, congressional Democrats have vowed to codify net neutrality permanently. [...] Without an FCC Democratic majority, Markey's net neutrality bill may be the Biden administration's only means of reinstating the open internet regulations.

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Democrats Prepare Bill That Would Codify Net Neutrality

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  • Did they fix this from last time?

  • by swell ( 195815 ) <jabberwock@poetic.com> on Monday July 18, 2022 @10:24PM (#62714586)

    You can stop reading right there. Those darn Democrats have been preparing bills for years. Not sure why or why any journalist would bother printing that or why a Slashdotter would read that. The bills never become law. You'd think everyone would have learned by now.

    • Just give them 62 real seats. And I know everyone likes to point you Obama's supermajority but if you actually look into it he had that super majority for 2 months. After that some people retired or died and were replaced, He used that supermajority to pass the affordable Care act. You think with us here on /. Aging the way we are we'd be happy for a law that didn't cut us off from medical Care. But I think it's pretty reasonable that before matting our entire healthcare system took two months and after th
      • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

        There will never *be* another Democrat supermajority. If the US doesn't tear itself apart in a grizly civil war, the Trumpists will restrict voting rights so severely that it will be impossible to overthrow them. The United States as you know it is dead, its heart has ruptured. We're just waiting for total cell death now.
      • They won't get a 62-seat majority anytime soon.

      • Re: (Score:2, Troll)

        by sabbede ( 2678435 )
        Just because you want something doesn't mean it represents "forward momentum". Calling something progress does not make it so, it's just a cynical attempt to deceive people with a misnomer.

        I, for one, am glad that Republicans obstruct bad ideas and attempts to make stupid changes. I appreciate anyone who points out that the Socialism which has poisoned the Democrats is not progress, but an attempt to revive a system that failed so spectacularly that it caused the horrifying deaths of tens, possibly hund

    • by raymorris ( 2726007 ) on Monday July 18, 2022 @11:46PM (#62714708) Journal

      It'll be interesting to read what they come up with THIS time.

      There are a few different principles that different people call "net neutrality", which are mostly good *in principle*.

      The devil is in the details. If you actually read any of the proposals carefully, and you have any depth of understanding of how the internet actually works on a technical level, they've all screwed it up really, really badly. They all ban basic shit.

      Kinda like back when DMCA was written, everyone - content producers, web hosts, webmasters, everyone was reasonably happy with the compromises in the DMCA. If a host / site is notified of a copyright violation, the uploader gets a chance to object. If they don't object, the content comes down. If the uploader objects, it stays up unless the copyright holder actually files a federal lawsuit. But there was a one mistake - no penalty for recklessly filing invalid DMCA requests. We can see how that turned out. All the network neutrality proposals are like that but 1000X worse because the legislators have zero technical knowledge at all.

      Besides them having no technical knowledge, there are actually legitimately HARD problems. Consider "a web site / service can't pay an ISP to carry their traffic". That's one of the main things you hear for network neutrality, right? That's called "web hosting".

      When you point that out, the proponents say "we don't mean regular web hosting - that's silly". Of course that's not what they MEAN, but it's what they *write*. Try to write a network neutrality law that doesn't make web hosting illegal. It's actually non-trivial to do. If you happen to be a legislature, not an IT nerd, and don't really know what "web hosting" is, writing a workable law becomes close to impossible.

      It'll be interesting to see what they come up with this time.
      They may very well once again try to make it illegal to route traffic such that both voip works (very low bandwidth, very low jitter, via tiny buffers) AND Netflix works (high bandwidth, jitter doesn't matter, uses large buffers). You HAVE to distinguish between Netflix traffic and live chat traffic, or you end up with neither one working worth a damn.

  • by backslashdot ( 95548 ) on Tuesday July 19, 2022 @03:38AM (#62715036)

    Didn't these same fools want TWITTER declared a public utility so they could be racist on it? Republicans are only against neutrality when they perceive that it is biased in their favor.

    • I'd be content returning to a sane world where 'racist' actually means racist and not "I disagree with you".

      • I'd be content returning to a sane world where 'racist' actually means racist and not "I disagree with you".

        If you even believe in race, which has no scientific basis, then you are a racist. You might be little-r racist, where you're unaware of ways in which you demonstrate embedded cultural bias; Or you might be big-R Racist, where you have a whole belief structure around some bullshit you learned from your pappy. Having this pointed out is uncomfortable, and pointing it out is not a great way to make friends, but not addressing it only helps to perpetuate racism.

        Racism was literally invented to excuse white peo

      • Hear, hear.

        I'm approx. 50% German, 40% English, and "muttified" 10%. So if I made a statement that my 60% English, 20% Eastern European, and 20% mutt neighbor is building a new fence over my property line, and it pisses them off that either they were wrong or that it will cost them something to rectify the issue, they scream out racism to get eyes in sympathy with them. Unconditionally. If it were an issue simply addressed as an old, "Dude, how's your wife doing after her trip? Cool, cool. Hey, I notic

    • Racist as in saying that there is objective truth? That people should advance through merit? That 2+2=4?

      The people whose claims you are repeating redefined racism to include those those things. Hell, they redefined it to include a slew of positive things unrelated to race, and somehow to exclude treating people differently on the basis of race. Which they demand.

      So, what are you arguing against again?

    • Kind of like how Democrats (at least on slashdot) see to be against Disney and insane copywrite timeframes until a Republican's comes up with a bill to do something about it?

      Kind of like how the Democrats claimed Twitter should be controlled by the government until Elton Musk was going to buy it and then took a 180?

      Both sides are guilty of it but the downside is that only one side gets called out for hypocrisy.

    • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

      by Tjp($)pjT ( 266360 )
      Conservatives wanted section 203 protections removed from Twitter because it editorializes. Twitter wants common carrier protections despite it censorship policies. No one wants Twitter to be a public utility. Just want Twitter to los the protection it seems to enjoy as a pseudo public utility.

      If you edit/delete posts you aren’t a common carrier. You then ‘own’ responsibility for all your content. You are then liable for that content. Or should be. Socials hide behind protections meant f
      • So, bocking obnoxious tweets is not the same as selectively making certain websites not work? Care to elaborate? Section 230 was a convenient excuse, without section 230 .. sites like twitter, niche websites on various hobby topics, reddit, or even slashdot won't exist and you know it. A forum on motorcycles would never be able to keep things on topic or even block most spam.

  • Ajit Pai, under Trump, correctly removed Net Neutrality enforcement from the FCC. Using ancient POTS regulations to regulate modern communications was both an affront to the powers of Congress and not a modern approach. The article's statement of, "The measure would restore the FCC's authority over broadband..." if entirely false. The FCC never had such authority. It was always executive branch overreach.

    I'm in favor of sensible net neutrality regulations (I have not read this bill to know if it's sensib

    • Are you in favor of Twitter being declared a public utility? You can't both be against net neutrality and in favor of government telling twitter what to do, not unless you are a hypocrite.

      • by mrex ( 25183 ) on Tuesday July 19, 2022 @07:00AM (#62715318)

        Are you in favor of Twitter being declared a public utility? You can't both be against net neutrality and in favor of government telling twitter what to do, not unless you are a hypocrite.

        Yes you can, and it's easy and lawful to do it. Twitter currently claims privileges given under Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. Privileges, not rights. In exchange for those privileges, we the people do get to make demands on Twitter. And we should, because right now they "have their cake and eat it to", because they get all the liability immunity of a content-neutral internet platform, but they also get to exercise the editorial control over their platform like a newspaper publisher. That's unfair and should be rectified with legal reform of Section 230.

    • I 100% agree that the FCC should not have acted like it had this authority without Congress explicitly saying so. I just also think that there's no point to it. We went from not having it to having it to not having it again, and did anything ever actually change? What impact did it have? None. So, why bother?
    • The whole point of the FCC is to regulate communications for the public good. If they can't do that without an act of congress, what's the point of having an FCC, which is by the way literally supposed to have jurisdiction over both broadband access and fair competition in communications? This is literally what they are for.

  • Have you seen any difference in the internet since net neutrality was repealed? Was there any change when it was enacted? I sure as hell didn't notice any. And if nothing changed, then it's just regulation for the sake of regulation, and that is bad in so many ways...

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