Posted on 05/14/2017 12:54:52 PM PDT by Tolerance Sucks Rocks
If you're wondering where the Washington, D.C., swamp is being drained as promised, look no further than the Federal Communications Commission and intrepid new Chairman Ajit Pai.
For eight long years, the Obama administration circumvented our deliberative democratic process to impose laws via administrative fiat and his infamous "pen and phone."
And no agency illustrated that malfeasance more than the FCC, where former Chairman Tom Wheeler in particular rammed through partisan policies and midnight regulations of dubious legality, often suffering the wrath of an unamused judicial branch for its shenanigans.
Chief among those Obama FCC misdeeds was its relentless and ongoing effort to impose "net neutrality" regulatory control over the Internet sector by reclassifying it as a "public utility" under laws enacted in the 1930s for copper-wire telephone lines.
If that immediately leaves you perplexed about how the Internet was so broken it required the heavy-handed bureaucratic "fix" of reclassifying it as a public utility under Depression-era statutes, there's a very good reason for that. The Internet wasn't broken. It had flourished and transformed our lives like no other innovation in human history.
But to the Obama administration and the activist political left, "net neutrality" was never about fixing something broken – it was about extending government control over yet another sector of our economy.
In their most innocuous form, net neutrality rules prevent Internet providers from blocking access to lawful websites or slowing down competitors' traffic. No one objects to that. But no Internet provider would do that, either, because any provider that blocked websites would quickly lose its customers.
And more ominously, neutrality activists further demand that all Internet traffic be treated identically and seek a general rule against any kind of differentiated treatment of traffic online. That may sound harmless enough in the abstract. But in the real world, it jeopardizes Internet service and the continuing innovation needed to address ever-increasing network traffic and capacity crunches.
After all, bandwidth hogs like YouTube and Netflix, whose content makes up half of American Internet use at peak hours, impose enormous costs and challenges on network providers. They don't want innovative solutions to defray these costs, preferring a purely "neutral" world where networks must treat them exactly the same as the small neighborhood restaurant that consumes very little bandwidth. This form of net neutrality is like requiring moving companies to treat a studio apartment and a 10-bedroom mansion exactly the same.
And the underlying decision to micromanage the Internet as a public utility using outdated archaic regulations is even more destructive. This overregulation has already reduced broadband investment by $4 billion, putting American jobs on the chopping block if something isn't done.
Nevertheless, Obama's FCC went ahead with these "Title II" regulations and confidently expected to advance its hyper-partisan regulatory agenda even further under a Hillary Clinton administration.
But then fate intervened, and Donald Trump interrupted their march.
Along with judicial appointments, tax policy and other regulatory issues, Trump immediately charted an alternative, more sensible course at the FCC by appointing free-market stalwart Pai as chairman.
Already, Chairman Pai is justifying his appointment by returning regulatory sanity and restoring a badly needed "light touch" approach to the FCC. And now reports indicate that he wisely plans to pull back the flawed utility regulations and revisit the question of net neutrality.
Reducing regulatory uncertainty and government coercion will encourage private innovation and investment, ensuring that consumers enjoy the fruits of that investment and innovation and network jobs continue to flourish as they have for decades.
But the far left and crony capitalists won't go down without a fight. They are extremely well-funded and well-connected at the federal level and are already promising a predictable onslaught of scare tactics, hyperbole and dystopian fantasies in their effort to hold on to government power over the Internet.
These fringe voices will demonize Chairman Pai and falsely claim that repealing the flawed utility rules makes it impossible to protect the Internet – ignoring the fact that Congress is the proper body to consider and enact Internet standards, not a rogue agency seeking to expand its charter.
Fortunately, Americans who believe that the federal government has become too powerful and too arrogant have also found their voice – and a champion in Chairman Pai and his commonsense reforms.
Voters said they wanted the federal swamp drained. At the FCC, that process is well underway.
Timothy H. Lee is Senior Vice President of Legal and Public Affairs at the Center for Individual Freedom (www.cfif.org).
The providers can't provide streaming HD to everyone (all different streams). They simply do not have the bandwidth despite your "paying for that bandwidth". Thus sometimes they have to throttle. But only streaming video, and mainly HD. Anything else that they try to throttle can simply masquerade as any kind of content and this can't be throttled. Censorship or favoritism is a non-issue.
As for cable companies throttling Netflix in favor of their own or someone else's video, that's a specific possibility, but not a problem the government can solve without screwing everything else up. The main problem is that the regulations will enable class action lawsuits which only enrich the lawyers while the victims get a coupon.
There is competition, mainly wireless and it has enough bandwidth to support 480p for every subscriber. But it is improving.
No. Not in many places.
I just spent $430 for one month's Verizon service at our family farm. No Netflix, no movies, just a bunch of kids with their phones/tablets.
And this was just after switching from AT&T because Verizon had a better plan.
The reality is that in many, many places the network providers have an effective monopoly/duopoly, and almost by definition free market principles don't apply.
That is more or less what his intrusion was scapegoated over.
The ISP model is based on a lot of individual users, and ISPs both sending and receiving data at similar levels, with payments exchanged for the imbalance.
Netflix traffic is nearly all one-way, and so results in a huge (half the Internet) imbalance. The ISP attempted to re-balance Netflixs extreme and at that time very unusual usage pattern which exploited a loophole in the model.
Netflix doesn't send out unsolicited data.
The user requesting the content should pay for the bandwidth that they consume.
The ISPs know that charging customers for bandwidth used isn't popular so they're trying to obsfucate the issue.
Me too. I found him extremely intelligent.
The problem I have is probably the same as your farm, the rural wireless services are underprovisioned and overages like your kids produce are expensive. The solution is more provider flexibility to throttle streaming video. I know you said no Netflix and no movies but the only way you can get those overages is when the kids were doing streaming video.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.