Net Neutrality Advocates Want the States to Protect Their Precious Rules
Democrats in the Senate want to bring back net neutrality, too.
Amazingly, we all didn’t die when the FCC voted to rollback the net neutrality rules implemented during President Barack Obama’s administration. Those who desperately want those regulations in place have not stopped fighting. Now they have chosen to place pressure on the states to save net neutrality.
Without the net neutrality regulations, internet service providers have the ability to create slow and fast lanes for certain content and websites. Notice I said “ability” and not that they will. The net neutrality advocates view companies as evil and greedy and do not think of the business consequences one would face if it decided to slow down Netflix or YouTube.
No, they need the federal government or now, in this case, the states to tell leaders of a company how to operate.
State Level
Six states have already put forth legislation: California, Massachusetts, Nebraska, New York, Rhode Island, and Washington. North Carolina, Illinois, and Alaska are currently debating whether to introduce their own legislation.
California State Senator Scott Wiener (D-San Francisco) stated that the state “won’t let the Trump-led FCC dismantle our right to a free and open internet” or allow them to “create a system where internet providers can favor web sites and services based on who pays more money.” (Someone tell Wiener that “free and open” would mean no government regulations)
Washington Governor Jay Inslee said that when the federal government “takes away that protection, we must protect net neutrality for our people, for our businesses and for the virtues of free speech.” (Someone please educate him on the 1st Amendment)
They can moan and whine all they want, but they may not win their cases because the rollback included language that blocked “state and city governments from creating their own net neutrality laws.” They came to this conclusion because “the internet does not recognize state border and transfers traffic between states.” From CNNMoney:
A spokeswoman for the FCC directed CNNMoney to a section of the final order for net neutrality, in which the FCC asserts authority to prevent states from pursuing laws inconsistent with the net neutrality repeal.
“We conclude that we should exercise our authority to preempt any state or local requirements that are inconsistent with the federal deregulatory approach we adopt today,” according to the final order.
In the section, the FCC also stresses that the burden placed on internet service providers by forcing them to “comply with a patchwork of separate and potentially conflicting requirements” across the country.
Bret Stephens at the American Enterprise Institute explained that “[T]he internet is the ultimate form of interstate commerce, which is clearly only within the authority of the F.C.C.”
Interstate commerce. Where have we heard this before? Oh yeah! OBAMACARE! I remember those advocates telling us who hate Obamacare that the legislation is Constitutional since it falls under interstate commerce.
Congress
The advocates may receive some help from Capitol Hill. Democrats have 40 co-sponsors for a bill that would overturn the FCC decision. From CNN:
Democrats announced Tuesday they have 40 co-sponsors for a resolution of disapproval that would overturn a repeal of the regulations, essentially guaranteeing them a procedural vote on the floor.
“Millennials are energized,” Democratic Sen. Ed Markey of Massachusetts, who’s leading the effort, said at a news conference. “They know the loss of net neutrality means the loss of control of the internet, which is oxygen to them. We cannot let that happen.”
This is how it could happen:
Senate Democrats are using the Congressional Review Act, which allows Congress to roll back regulatory actions by the executive branch, in their attempt to reverse the repeal. It’s an effort that will take months. The FCC must first publish its final rule in the Federal Register. After that, Markey has 60 days to introduce his resolution of disapproval, which requires 30 co-sponsors to move to the floor.
Once it gets to the floor, it would go through a motion to proceed, which requires a simple majority of 51 votes. Since Republicans have a 51-49 majority, they could kill the bill if they all vote against it. To pass it, Democrats would need two Republicans to cross over to support the motion to proceed — and that’s assuming all Democrats vote for it.
If Democrats win and the bill gets beyond the motion to proceed, the resolution would again need 51 votes to pass in a final Senate vote.
A similar effort must happen on the House side, where Republicans also are in control. After all that, the measure would head to the President.
Like I said, it may work. Moderate Republican Susan Collins from Maine, who has shown in the past that she has no problems going against her party, has already joined the Democrats fight to save net neutrality. Her spokeswoman Annie Clark said that the senator “believes that a careful, deliberative process involving experts and the public is warranted to ensure that consumers have strong protections that guarantee consumer choice, free markets and continued growth.”
Her counterpart, Independent Angus King, joined Collins, but that isn’t a shock since he caucuses with the Democrats. So assuming that the rest of the Democrats, along with Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT), votes yes, that will put the vote at 50-50. If they can persuade another Republican to join then they wouldn’t have to worry about Vice President Mike Pence’s tie-breaking vote.
An article in the Houston Chronicle caught my eye. I said Alaska is currently thinking about its own net neutrality rules and they also have a somewhat moderate Republican senator in Lisa Murkowski. She has said that she supports the FCC decision to eliminate net neutrality, but she also stated that she thinks “that there is more that needs to be done.” She would prefer bipartisan legislation “rather than an effort to reverse the commission’s action.”
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Comments
Internet is interstate commerce. End of story. And then one wonders why the politicians are determined to do the bidding of Google and Facebook in creating monopolies. Because it will be extremely hard for another business model to be introduced to a closed system that is the opposite of neutral.
Presumably such state-level regulation would apply to any data which used facilities (e.g. routers, data transmission facilities) within that state, even if the data neither originated nor terminated within it?
More good reading on that issue.
BRAVO VALERIE, BRAVO!!!
Everything the MSM and their Democrat slave masters screech about is just the evil MSM and their evil Democrat slave masters self-projecting what they really, really are!
“Project Veritas Outlines Risk of Weaponized Social Media…
There is more than a little connective tissue behind a series of Project Veritas undercover investigative reports on how Twitter surveillance data is utilized, and recent discoveries of how FBI contractors were weaponizing FISA surveillance data against political opposition.
In each example, private company or big government, surveillance data forms the basis for the weaponization. In an era when people don’t think twice before engaging on social media platforms, the Project Veritas series presents a warning worth sharing….There is more than a little connective tissue behind a series of Project Veritas undercover investigative reports on how Twitter surveillance data is utilized, and recent discoveries of how FBI contractors were weaponizing FISA surveillance data against political opposition.
In each example, private company or big government, surveillance data forms the basis for the weaponization. In an era when people don’t think twice before engaging on social media platforms, the Project Veritas series presents a warning worth sharing…..”
https://theconservativetreehouse.com/2018/01/15/project-veritas-outlines-risk-of-weaponized-social-media/
“And then one wonders why the politicians are determined to do the bidding of Google and Facebook in creating monopolies.”
This isn’t a mystery. The Democrats have been leveraging their government/private (i.e. statist, fascist) connections to Silicon Valley for years. They’re using them as a private muscle/spy agency to spy on Americans, and also for all sorts of socio-political research. They are propaganda agencies, only they’re private.
Net Neutrality was Democrats’ side of the bargain; getting carriers to absorb the costs of the bandwidth hogs. It was a digital redistribution scheme.
If you knew nothing else about net “neutrality”, other than that it was promoted by Obama and sustained by the socialist democrats, you would know enough to understand that it is evil.
That makes you a knee-jerk reactionary.
No, it makes us aware that Obama wanted to damage America. So do you.
That makes you a counter-counter-revolutionary.
“…won’t let the Trump-led FCC dismantle our right to a free and open internet…”
I think that ‘right’ is in the the Digital Information Clause of the US Constitution – followed by the Quill & Inkwell Clause.
The internet wasn’t broken before 2015, and it didn’t need fixing.
But leftists love regulation because it brings them power. Obama was a master at weaponizing the existing machinery of government via policy to further his agenda of ‘fundamental transformation.’
Net Neutrality is a ruse for eventual mission creep in order to ban whatever words or ideas leftists deem ‘double plus ungood.’ It’s their stated goal on universities & social media, and leftist want it embedded into government. By any means necessary.
Wouldn’t the president have to sign any congressional repeal of net neutrality? He wouldn’t, that’s my take.
That Evil Obama Edict has already been FRIED!
That’s why the Lying MSM and their Lying Democrat Party Molesters are so unhinged!
If it says Democrat Democrat Democrat on the label label label,
then it’s Daca Daca Daca on the table… (apologies to Libby’s)…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DuoA7gjnxgI
The question is if the internet is a utility and/or a luxury service. The large bandwidth consumers (e.g. Google, Netflix, BitTorrent, etc.) want to share costs with a captive audience a la Obamacare. However, with the former and latter, it would still be metered, but under different regimes (e.g. market/democratic vs monopoly/minority).
So when the progs force something through, they tell us “elections have consequences ” and to lump it. First time ever in my memory, they’re crap gets rolled back and they have a freakin’ cow. Tough learning curve for them. #MAGA
jeeze… typo “their”
Make that “their illegal crap” from their chit obsessed brains gets repealed and………
As it stands right now, we do not know to what extent the Net Neutrality regulations have been rescinded or changed. We will not really know until the FCC publishes its amended rules in the next Congressional Register.
Here is the problem with the internet, without any government regulation. You have three sections of the internet universe; the producers [websites which provide content to consumers], internet service providers and communications companies [individual ISPs and infrastructure providers such as AT&T] and the consumer or end user. We are the consumer and LI is a producer. There is a patchwork of ISPs between us and LI, depending upon our location.
Under the Obama Era Net Neutrality rules, producers could, and did, charge consumers for the use of their sites and products. That would not change under the new rules, presumably. ISPs could offer tiered plans for consumers, based upon throughput speeds. That too would not change. This leaves the consumer to pay for the content they want and the speed at which they receive it. However, under the ONN rules, an ISP could not filter content unless it was illegal or legally objectionable. In other words, the ISP could not act as a unilateral filter on the consumer. This is, of course beneficial to the consumer. It is also beneficial to producers such as Netflix, HULU and other streaming companies, which use high bandwidth, as they can not be charged by an ISP to be allowed to present their product to consumers. Again, this is beneficial to consumers. Under the new rules, as reported, it would now be possible for an ISP to limit or deny any producer access to its customers or to charge its customers for access to certain producers. Not really a good thing, as it forces the consumer to rely entirely upon the good will of the ISP.
And, as we have seen with Twitter, Google and Facebook, relying upon the goodwill of large companies does not work out well.
Finally, the internet is different than cable entertainment providers, television stations and radio stations. It is more like telephone service companies. Because the former are all passive systems, in which the consumer can only receive information, not send it or use the system to communicate, they can be allowed to filter what producers they allow to use their transmission services. However, FCC rules limit the size of such providers and require them to provide balanced access to political candidates. Telephone companies can not require certain entities to pay an extra fee for using their basis service, nor can they arbitrarily ban certain entities from accessing their communications facilities.
Access to the internet, for communications purposes, is going to have to be regulated in some manner to some extent. It has become intertwined with the world society to the point where it is no longer a novelty with limited uses and is now a virtual necessity. The best thing for the world is to allow unfettered access to the net.
all this crap really due to a messed up peering agreement on L1 backbone carriers with netflix few years ago and suddenly its turned into this BS.
peering agreement was fixed, cache servers installed, issue solved.
until it became a political issue.