Over the last few months we’ve discussed how FCC Commissioner Ajit Pai has been waging a one man war on net neutrality and Title II using what can only be described as an increasingly aggressive barrage of total nonsense. Back in January Pai tried to claim that Netflix was a horrible neutrality hypocrite because the company uses relatively ordinary content delivery networks. Earlier this month Pai one-upped himself by trying to claim that meaningful neutrality consumer protections would encourage countries like Iran and North Korea to censor the Internet.
Now on the surface, it appears that Pai just doesn’t understand technology very well. Of course, once you understand that he was once a regulatory lawyer for Verizon, you realize he’s simply dressing broadband duopoly profit protection up as some kind of deeper, meaningful ethos. As such, lamenting that Title II is “Obamacare for the Internet,” is just political theater designed to rile up the base to the benefit of the broadband industry.
With net neutrality set for a vote this week, Pai has accelerated his master plan to make the largest number of inaccurate net neutrality statements in the shortest amount of time possible. For example, Pai co-wrote an editorial in the Chicago Tribune last week that tries to use Obamacare fears to insist Americans will lose the right to choose their own wireless plans if Title II based rules come to pass:
“If you like your wireless plan, you should be able to keep it. But new federal regulations may take away your freedom to choose the best broadband plan for you. It’s all part of the federal government’s 332-page plan to regulate the Internet like a public utility…take T-Mobile’s Music Freedom program, which the Internet conduct rule puts on the chopping block. The “Un-carrier” allows consumers to stream as much online music as they want without charging it against their monthly data allowance.”
Category: Net Neutrality
AT&T Patents “Fast Lane” For File-Sharing Traffic
Despite the growing availability of legal services, unauthorized file-sharing continues to generate thousands of petabytes of traffic each month.
This massive network use has caused concern among many Internet providers over the years, some of which decided to throttle BitTorrent transfers. Interestingly, AT&T believes the problem can also be dealt with in a more positive way.
A new patent awarded to the Intellectual Property division of the Texas-based ISP describes a ‘fast lane’ for BitTorrent and other P2P traffic.
Titled “System and Method to Guide Active Participation in Peer-to-Peer Systems with Passive Monitoring Environment,” one of the patent’s main goals is to speed up P2P transfers while reducing network costs.
While acknowledging the benefits of file-sharing networks, the ISP notes that they can take up a lot of resources.
“P2P networks can be useful for sharing content files containing audio, video, or other data in digital format. It is estimated that P2P file sharing, such as BitTorrent, represents greater than 20% of all broadband traffic on the Internet,” AT&T writes.
To limit the impact on its network resources, AT&T proposes several technologies to serve content locally. This can be done by prioritizing local traffic and caching files from its own servers.
“The local peer server may provide the content to peers within the same subnet more efficiently than can a peer in another subnet,” the patent reads.
“As such, providing the content on the local peer server can reduce network usage and decrease the time required for the peer to download the content.”
FCC’s Ajit Pai: By Making Sure The Internet Is Open And Free… It Will Inspire North Korea And Cuba To Censor
I should note, upfront, that I’ve had the chance to meet FCC Commissioner Ajit Pai a couple of times, and always found him to be interesting and knowledgeable, as well as engaged on important issues. Yet, for whatever reason, when it comes to net neutrality issues, the former Verizon lawyer (clue number 1) seems to have gone off the deep end, tossed all logic and intellectual honesty out the window, in an effort to just lash out angrily with whatever he’s got. We’ve talked about his incoherent attack on Netflix and his sudden and newfound love of transparency (never noted before…).
But his latest move just strips whatever credibility he may have had on the subject completely away. He’s insisting that the FCC’s new net neutrality rules (which he opposes) will inspire North Korea and Iran to further control and censor the internet (which they already control and heavily censor). And he’s not arguing this in a “they hate us for our freedom” way, but he’s actively lying and claiming that this move — a move to guarantee openness and not censorship online — will give the North Korean and Iranian governments the political cover to censor the internet. Let’s be frank, Pai’s statements are complete nonsense.
“If in the United States we adopt regulations that assert more government control over how the Internet operates … it becomes a lot more difficult for us to go on the international stage and tell governments: ‘Look, we want you to keep your hands off the internet,’” he said.
“Even if the ideas aren’t completely identical, you can appreciate the optical difficult in trying to make that case,” he added.
Anti-Net Neutrality Propaganda Reaches Insane Levels With Bad Actors And Porn Parody
There’s been plenty of propaganda concerning the net neutrality fight, but with FCC boss Tom Wheeler finally making it official that the FCC is going to move to reclassify broadband, it’s kicked into high gear of ridiculousness. An astroturfing front group that’s anti-net neutrality is trying to make a “viral” anti-net neutrality video, and it did so in the most bizarre way, by making an attempted parody porno video, based on the classic “cable guy” porno trope. The video is sorta SFW, since the “joke” is that “the government” stops the homeowner from getting naked with the cable guy, but people at work might still question what the hell you’re watching
The video makes no sense at all. You get the sense that some not particularly internet savvy (or, really, clever at all) telco wonks got together and said “how do we make a viral video — I know, let’s pretend it’s a porn film!” And then tried to shoehorn in some sort of message. But the “message” appears to be that whoever put together the video doesn’t know anything about what net neutrality is.
FCC chair refuses to make net neutrality rules public before approval
FCC chair Tom Wheeler has refused to release the net neutrality rules that the regulator will vote on later this month.
The decision whether to make a document public before it faces formal approval rests with the FCC chair but, despite requests from Congress and two of his own commissioners, Wheeler has refused to do so, leaving the public in the dark over what the regulator will actually approve on 26 February.
Citing “decades of precedent,” Wheeler told the chairs of Congress’ technology committees [PDF] that the FCC works along the same lines as appeal courts and the Supreme Court and commissioners are given the text three weeks before a vote is expected in order to “confer privately, share their views and review drafts confidentially, and then issue their public decision,” claiming “this is commonplace for administrative agencies.”
However, given the extraordinary public interest in the rules – highlighted by the four million public comments received on the topic – not to mention the fact that two of his four commissioners have formally asked Wheeler to make the document public, the decision to keep the document under wraps is raising eyebrows – and hackles.
Commissioner Pai this morning put out a statement complaining about the decision not to release information and highlighting six concerns he has with the proposed plan. “I am disappointed that the plan will not be released publicly,” he noted.
Huge Win for the Open Internet! FCC Officially Embraces Title II
Well done, Team Internet. After a year of intense activism, we may have finally convinced the Federal Communications Commission to change course and craft clear, bright-line rules to protect the open internet, based on legal authority that will actually survive the inevitable legal challenge.
According to an op-ed published today in Wired, in a few weeks the FCC will vote on new rules that start with one crucial step: reversing the FCC’s 2002 decision to treat broadband as an “information service” rather than a “telecommunications service.” This is what’s known as Title II reclassification. According to the highest court to review the question, the rules that we need to preserve the open internet — such as forbidding discrimination against certain applications — require the FCC to treat access providers like “common carriers, ” treatment that can only be applied to telecommunications services. Having chosen to define broadband as an “information service,” the FCC can impose regulations that “promote competition” (good) but it cannot stop providers from giving their friends special access to Internet users (bad). Nonetheless, in May of last year the FCC was still trying to stick with its original decision and, as a result, proposed rules that would actually have undermined the open internet. Millions of internet users spoke out against those rules and called for reclassification. Today, we know our voices were heard.
Google Finally Stops Playing Mute On Net Neutrality, Says New Rules Won’t Hurt Google Fiber In The Slightest
While Google was a major player in the net neutrality fight early on, the company performed a stark about-face on the issue sometime around 2010. Google was responsible for co-writing the FCC’s original, wimpy net neutrality rules alongside AT&T and Verizon, which were jam-packed with loopholes and ensured that wireless networks and devices weren’t covered at all. When called out on this, Google pretty feebly insisted they weren’t being inconsistent, though it was clear to most folks that the company had shifted lobbying strategies in the hopes of fostering a better relationship across both sides of the political aisle.
As a result, when net neutrality supporters needed Google the most during the Title II debate, Google remained silent. Recently, when asked about net neutrality during press events, the company simply refused to comment.
Now that the Title II tide has shifted without Google’s help, the company has re-entered the discussion to once again support meaningful net neutrality rules. We noted a few weeks ago that Google told the FCC in a filing that Title-II based rules could actually help their Google Fiber deployment by streamlining the utility pole attachment process. Now in a conversation with the Washington Post, Google has made its clearest public statement in years regarding support for Title II net neutrality rules:
“The sort of open Internet rules that the [Federal Communications Commission] is currently discussing aren’t an impediment to those plans,” Google said in a statement, “and they didn’t impact our decision to invest in Fiber.”
US Ambassador: No, net neutrality will NOT allow the UN to seize control of the internet from us
An op-ed in the Washington Post by policy wonk Larry Downes last week argued: “The public utility approach would provide opponents of a free and open Internet ample opportunity to call out US efforts as hypocritical, unnecessarily undermining our authority.”
Comcast also argued in a filing with the FCC that “reclassification could have broader implications globally and weaken the United States’ positions regarding international Internet regulation.” New rules “could undermine the United States’ resistance to greater oversight of the Internet by the UN’s International Telecommunication Union.”
This is what’s wrong with politics today
Cable companies and telcos are huge political contributors to Congress. AT&T and Comcast individually spent just under $8m in political contributions last year; the National Cable and Telecommunications Association spent $6.6m; Verizon, $6.3m.
Likewise with lobbying. The cable industry spent more than any other industry except the healthcare industry on lobbying last year. Comcast spent $12m; AT&T, $11m; and Verizon, $10m.
As has been repeatedly noted since the net neutrality debate took hold, those politicians opposing net neutrality rules have been disproportionately compensated by the cable industry.
Surprise! Sprint Supports Title II, By Proxy Highlighting That T-Mobile Doesn’t
Sprint today shocked everyone with an announcement that the company has decided to throw its support behind Title II-based net neutrality rules, shifting the Title II momentum needle just that much further. In a letter from Sprint’s CTO Stephen Bye to FCC chairman Tom Wheeler (pdf, spotted at GigaOM), Sprint argues that it’s fine with Title II, provided the rules allow for sensible network management. To hear Sprint tell it, sensible neutrality rules using Title II and forbearance will also have no impact on its investment strategy, despite plenty of industry hand-wringing on this front