Republicans Defeat Net Neutrality Proposal

LiquidEdge writes "A Republican controlled committee has defeated a bill that would have guaranteed fair access and stopped companies like AT&T and Verizon from charging high-bandwidth sites for allowing their customers to have priority access to them."

Oh, good...

[irishxpride]

Because the free market economy has done so much for improving the free flow of information. Does it seem redundant to make both the sender and the recipient pay for the same bandwidth? What if other countries ban this type of thing, how could you regulate speed in one area, and not in another?

Correct the Headline

[C-Diddy]

A transparently lame and misleading headline. Read the story. The story says the "republican controlled committee" defeated the proposed amendment. According to the story:

"By an 8-to-23 margin, the committee members rejected a Democratic-backed "Net neutrality" amendment to a current piece of telecommunications legislation.

The story does not mention which "subcommittee" of the House Energy and Commerce committee took the action, but the story does say several democrats voted against the measure:

The vote on the amendment itself did not occur strictly along party lines, with one Republican voting in favor and four Democrats voting against it.

Interestingly, the final measure, sans the amendment, was passed by an overwhelming 24-7 vote.

Declan McCullagh: Slanted Libertarian Moron

[Knytefall]

I hope this doesn't get modded (-1, flame) but the article is atrocious. McCullagh's libertarian views are well-known, and obvious to any reader of this article. Lowlights:

"levied extensive regulations" -- why not just levied regulations? it's certainly not an objective fact that the regulations are extensive

"broadband providers will be free to design their networks as they see fit" -- why not "free to charge additional fees to content providers?"

"By 'very large companies,' Markey was not referring to Microsoft, which has a market value of $287 billion, but its much smaller value of $101 billion." Not only is that not a valid metric (market value is a crap metric--Google's market value, for example, is egregiously inflated) but pointless: Microsoft will make the same amount of money regardless of regulation.

The worst one is "the Internet industry is being outspent in Washington by more than a 3-to-1 margin." This ignores the tremendous lobbying the Internet industry does in every state, lobbying public utility commissions to shut out rivals everywhere. In Louisiana, the Internet industry is lobbying the state to shut down the free emergency WiFi mesh network in New Orleans--not only disgusting, but an act that requires money that McCullagh isn't counting.

It's possible to have a rational argument about this, but McCullagh's not-veiled-at-all slant doesn't help. What a moron.

Re:I'm glad, believe it or not.

[ClarkEvans]

Well, this bill was to support the idea that "no external entity should suffer discrimination when trying to get their packets to me".

What's going on is that packets from/to Vonage, and other voice over IP companies are being marked by Comcast, and Verison as 3rd class mail: if they are even permitted. This law was to prevent this pratice.

This law had nothing to do with providers charging more for a T3 over a T1 for a web-service company. That would be brain dead to argue against. This was about network neutrality: that *infrastructure* companies can pick-and-choose what content you can get to and what content you cant (and what content is so damn slow you won't ever use it).

Re:good....?

[Zocalo]

Actually, you've probably got that slightly wrong. It's not so much "who their customers are" as "who their customers *were*". All Amazon, Google, Yahoo! et al need to do is agree not to cave in to the telcos demands for more money (they *are* presumably paying for their own connectivity, yes?) and sit it out - Google has pretty much stated they are going to do this anyway. After a while, once the word gets out and customers start to leave for alterative "single tier Internet" providers, the telcos will either have to quietly drop their demands and rate limits or suffer the inevitable stockholder backlash when their profits start to slide.

Re:Correct the Headline

[theoddball]

The subcommittee in question is the Subcommittee on Telecommunications and the Internet [house.gov], chaired by Rep. Fred Upton [house.gov] (R, MI-6). Upton's not a terrible rep, but he is basically beholden to the telcos. (Check where his lobbying dollars come from. Tons of telco money.)

Rep. Ed Markey [house.gov] (author of the amendment) sits on this subcommittee, and has been one of the guys in Congress who has pretty consistently sided with the /. crowd on telco issues, privacy issues, etc.

On the whole, it's not too surprising that you'd get Dems crossing the lines to support this one. Telecom is an industry where EVERYbody gets paid, regardless of political affiliation.

Re:Makes Sense

[molarmass192]

"regulate the market"

If there was perfect competition in the ISP market, then fine, let market forces rule! However, the 1st tier ISP market today is far more oligopolistic than free market. You can bet that if there was perfect competition, this idea would not even have the slightest chance of gaining traction. Free market capitalism only works in competitive markets, that's why price fixing is illegal in the US. Sadly, the ISP market is beginning to resemble the telephone market, highly concentrated ownership, limited competition.

Simpletons Strike Again

[tsaler]

I have seen on many occasions the wonderful folks here at Slashdot completely butcher the facts and place into an article's title or summary certain statements that just don't mesh with reality. In some cases, they don't even mesh with the actual article that's been linked. This is a case where the article's authors suffer from a guilty conscience about trying to paint with a very broad political brush. Of course, no one here who would be responsible for submitting a summary of the story seemed to care that it was not "Republicans" who defeated the proposal.

Some of the more logical among us, who do not as often subscribe to political stereotypes, might have asked themselves whether or not the "House Energy and Commerce subcommittee," which is actually called the Telecommunications and Internet Subcommittee (but why do research?), would be distributed along 23-8 partisan lines. After all, that's the vote count for the proposal, and both the article title, the post title, and the article summary are quite confident in their claims that Republicans defeated the net neutrality proposal. So it was 23 Republicans versus 8 Democrats, right?

Not really, If you bothered to read on (I know, I know--I'm asking too much), you'd see that one Republican voted for the amendment. Three Democrats voted against it. But just the Republicans defeated the proposal, according to the folks here. Sure, if those three Democrats voted for it, you would have had a 20-11 vote, and then Republicans would have defeated the proposal. But that didn't happen.

And those Democrats, who apparently feel so strongly about this proposal and are so deserving of the support of the Internet community, had no problem going along for the ride and voting 27-4 in favor of the final bill without the Markey net neutrality amendment. Wow! So principled!

Markey, who is clearly an expert on such topics, declared, "We're about to break with the entire history of the Internet. Everyone should understand that." Indeed, because the entire history of the Internet has been based around the ability of broadband providers to offer high-speed video services. What?

Let's go even more abstract: the entire history of the Internet has been one that prohibited the prioritization of network traffic. What what?

It also would have been nice if the people at CNet News would have gotten an interview with Fred Upton, the chairman of the actual subcommittee that did all of this, instead of going to the full committee chairman Joe Barton. In many cases, the full committee chair doesn't have nearly the same kind of expertise on the issue as the subcommittee chairman does. Though with the way CNet News framed this whole thing, maybe they did interview Upton, but he made too good of a point, so they just trashed it and went instead with "Republicans Defeat Net Neutrality Proposal." Alright, got my mini conspiracy theory of the day out.

Re:Declan McCullagh: Slanted Libertarian Moron

[Knytefall]

Heh, I read the article (as evidenced by me quoting the article). I agree with you. Did you read my post? I was providing quotes which are clearly biased to make the telecom companies look like they're NOT double-dipping. The author of the article was trying to make us feel bad for the 'little' telecom companies against 'big bad Microsoft and Google.' I tried to show that in my post. I'm sorry I wasn't clear enough for you to understand that.

McCullagh's (the author) views on this are well-known. He is against nearly ALL regulation. He WANTS the telecom companies to be able to do whatever they please, including double-dip. I was trying to call attention to his own words that show he's not doing a good job covering this stuff.

Wyden's Net Neutrality bill is still alive.

[Futurepower(R)]

Still alive: Senator wants to ban 'fast lane' for Web [com.com].

Re:Contributions come from those who want favors.

[Tweekster]

Just goes to show you have no idea how bad Saddam was.. read a bit of history before making idiotic generalizations

Re:good....?

[nolife]

More often then not, those huge investments they made were only done because they were granted a monopoly in specific regions. Without a monopoly, another ISP or broadband provider would be able to step in and offer a different service and price that may benefit you in some why but that can not happen now. I have Comcast, if they decide to limit me to 512 kbits/sec, I have NO choice but to accept it or move to Verizon DSL (which is not in my area because the CO is too far away). I could go back to dialup but my only choice is Verizon or Comcast for POTS (I don't have POTS now, I use cell and VoIP over my broadband). Wow, look at that would you! The same two companies are my only choice for phone service as well. Imagine that and they can charge whatever they want and provide whatever service level or features they want and there is nothing I can do about it. Great.

Here is an example or what competition without a monopoly can provide...
My average POTS phone bill with Verizon was $50/month.
With MY choice of VOiP provider, I pay about 1/3 of that AND have two numbers (one in a different area code), built in voice mail, find me call forwarding, voice mail to email, unlimited US calling (long distance), and a few more features I'll probably never use.

The ONLY reason and way that this rate setting and preferential treatment of bandwidth in question would work is because the local bandwidth providers have a monopoly. Without that monopoly, people would go elsewhere in a heartbeat. That is why they need to be watched and possibly regulated.

Re:Wow - BIASED?

[Anonymous Coward]

Considering the number of instant, uber-defensive posts that always crop up screaming about how slashdot is so terribly, virulently liberal, I'd say that we probably have a classic problem with the majority feeling like the underdogs. To quote John Stewart:

"Last night, the Republican faithful were angry. After four years of being in charge of the House, Senate, Supreme Court and Executive branch, they were not gonna take it anymore. Yeah! Down with the people who are already down!"

and

"[Dick Cheney blames the defeat of an energy bill on the absence of Kerry and Edwards to vote on it] So let me get this straight, you control the White House, both Houses of Congress, and the Supreme Court, and your administration has closer ties to the energy industry than any administration in history, and those two blockheads stopped you?"

Besides, if the media simply reports both sides of a question when one side is taking bribes and quoting lobbyists as neutral contenders, then the media is clearly not being neutral. They'd be slanted towards the side of the bribetakers and mouthpeices.

Re:Simpletons Strike Again

[iolaus]

3/11 = 27% of Democrats on the committee voting against the amendment. 19/20 = 95% of Republicans on the committe voting against the amendment. I'd say it is completely justified to say the Republicans on the committee defeated the amendment! In your (stupid) definition, unless a vote is exactly along party lines you could never say it was defeated by one party or the other.