So in early August, we adopted a policy that would allow a single entity to do the requisite work on the utility pole—a policy commonly known as “one-touch make-ready.” This policy could substantially lower the cost and shorten the time to deploy broadband on utility poles.
Despite today's vote, the FCC hurt the cause of faster pole attachment when it deregulated the broadband industry last year, according to Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) Legislative Counsel Ernesto Falcon. The FCC's anti-net neutrality vote removed the classification of broadband as a common carrier service—that now-repealed classification "ensure[d] that every broadband provider has the legal right to gain access to many of the poles that run along our roads," the EFF wrote last year.
"I wonder if the anti-net neutrality crowd understands that Title II's regulation of poles and conduit is now limited to telephone/cable TV thanks to [the] Restoring Internet Freedom Order," Falcon tweeted today. "The ISPs that are broadband-only will not get the benefit, thus limiting its positive impact."
States' rights were first employed as an argument by New Englanders opposing the War of 1812. Their more famous Southern exponents were not troubled by the Fugitive Slave Law. I'd argue that there is nearly nobody who has a principled commitment to states' rights, rather than using it as an instrument to their true ends.
I'd like to go a step further and make each state fully autonomous, with a loosely coupled 'union' for a military force (albeit, MUCH smaller than it is currently) and intrastate issues like commerce/roads/etc. Each state would pay taxes to cover those things. State taxes would be > fed, and would cover Medicare, education, medicaid, and decide their own social programs, and legal laws.. This would give more freedom, if you can afford/want to live in a progressive place with universal healthcare move to a state with that, if not move to the deep south, where they no longer have separation of church and state, and everything else Republicans want.
The "State's Rights" crowd is also generally synonymous with the "Rule of Law" crowd. I don't see hypocrisy in supporting the application of law as it is written while opposing the existence of said law itself. Laws are not immutable and there's a process for changing/repealing them (legislation) as well as a separate process for invalidating them based on constitutional merit (judicial). Until both those processes have been tried, I don't see this as an innately hypocritical viewpoint.
I don't think most conservatives who understand NN actually support it. It's just the entrenched political class who stands to benefit from it that support it.
I don’t know. I have mixed feelings on net neutrality. I’m sure I’m to the right of a lot of HN, based on comments, but I lean left on a few issues too.
I’ve recently moved to the greater Seattle area and where I live my choices for internet are Comcast and centurylink. I was pretty disappointed as I had fios at my last house.
In general principle I am pro letting Comcast throttle whatever. Mainly because of property rights. But at a personal level it would totally suck if they throttled Netflix to the point that it affected me.
But forcing Comcast to be “good enough” by law might be an adequate bandaid for the short term, it actually helps reinforce their local monopoly.
>I’ve recently moved to the greater Seattle area and where I live my choices for internet are Comcast and centurylink.
Me too. I moved last year away from flawless 100/100 with a local Seattle ISP, to flawless gigabit for $45 with a local Seattle ISP, and now I'm 5 or so miles south of Seattle and I had to settle with Comcast since Centurylink DSL was my only other choice. Seattle DOES have good ISP's, but only really new buildings & downtown get that luxury.
Comcast does give me good speeds and reliability so far however, for a reasonable price. I still dislike them, and the sign-up process as well as the spam calls I received for weeks were terrible. They tried to get me to sign up for 10 TV channels I already had on my antenna in higher quality so they could gouge me on their TV rental equipment fees.
Property rights are important, but there's also something to be said of an industry that's benefited from billions of taxpayer dollars, failed to fulfill their commitments from that money, and is skirting the edge of antitrust laws. Capitalism unchecked is not healthy for 99.99999% of the population, and there needs to be limits to rights of corporations because of this.
He's trying to tie everything into a ball of legal twine that will take years to sort out. All the while, the ISPs will have free reign to do whatever they want.
> After all, broadband is an interstate service; Internet traffic doesn't recognize state lines.
Hum, it either recognizes both state and nation-state lines, or neither. Since the FCC can regulate ISPs, then it clearly recognizes nation-state lines, and thus state lines.
> It follows that only the federal government can set regulatory policy in this area. For if individual states like California regulate the Internet, this will directly impact citizens in other states.
-- Pai
Interesting argument. Could his reasoning be used to block attempts by states (NC, I'm looking at you!) to interfere with municipal broadband?
Your question has no simple answer because Pai's reasoning is based on suspect premises.
The California bill merely controls which vendors that the State of California can purchases services from. This type of regulation is premised on a long-established limitation on the extent of Federal powers; namely, that the Federal Government has no power to directly regulate State policies, and in particular its choice of vendors. The logic is that a State is a sovereign political entity, and sovereignty means that there must be a bright line somewhere where the State is completely independent.
As that line stands today, the vast majority of legal scholars would tell you that California is well within its rights to control the contractual terms with its vendors, free from Federal constraints.[1] In fact, the original bill was pulled and amended so ensure it fit squarely within these allowances. (At least, that's the story of the committee members who delayed it.) The closest SCOTUS has allowed the Federal government to control contractual policies of the State involved employment, where SCOTUS permitted enforcement of the Fair Labor Standards Act against State government employers. But it was a close call, most of the conservatives were in dissent, and almost all conservatives have subsequently at least paid lip-service to criticisms of that decision.
That said, there may be strong legal arguments that permit the Federal government to interpose themselves between the State and municipalities without moving that bright line. There are many ways to distinguish and distance municipalities from the State itself.
Also, it's becoming difficult to deny at this point that as conservatives have come to dominate the Federal government, conservative policy arguments have become increasingly supportive of stronger Federal regulatory powers. It's excused as a necessary evil for defending laissez faire economic principles[2], but that's just face-saving. And these arguments are being adopted by conservatives across the spectrum, including (and especially?) among jurists.
[1] At least constraints flowing from Commerce Clause powers. Constraints flowing from the 14th Amendment are a different matter because the 14th Amendment imposes explicit limitations on States and explicitly gives Congress legislative powers to enforce those limitations. But even then there's a bright line Congress cannot cross, albeit a more narrowly circumscribed line.
[2] And don't even get me started on the fact that Net Neutrality is, IMHO, a very pro free market policy. It's no more restrictive of a "free market" than are crimes prohibiting fraud. There comes a point at which one's freedom impinges upon the freedom of others to the extent that there's a net loss of economic freedom. Furthermore, there are many examples of market legislation intended to overcome transactional inefficiencies that inhibit or prevent markets from reaching more optimal outcomes. Its why we even have laws at all, rather than relying upon everybody to explicitly contract with everybody else for every little interaction.
I mean it's an argument against a federal system in general, when you think about it. Any regulation California passes is going to affect what is sold all over the country, because businesses can't afford to ignore it and making a special California version is more complicated than just complying in the base product.
For Pai, it's only legal when it serves his monopolistic masters. When it serves the people, it must be illegal. The only thing it poses a risk to, is monopoly abuse by Comcast, Charter, AT&T, Verizon and the like. Which is exactly the point.
And Pai lost all power to preempt anything, when he himself removed FCC from overseeing ISPs and pushed that to FTC.
I believe the entire purpose of passing that law was for California to say "come at me bro" to the Federal government, and force a showdown on the issue. I doubt the California lawmakers ever expected it to actually go into effect, and not get blocked by lawsuits the moment the ink is dry.
There's another bill that ties net neutrality to state contracts. It would forbid the state from signing contracts with ISPs that don't follow net neutrality. They could also tack on taxes to non-compliance ISPs. The State will ultimately win the fight. It was very short-sighted for ISPs to make this federal issue because it would have just ended up with states.
I've said it in the past, but I'm going to repeat myself: if anyone is willing to defend Pai's actions, would you like to do a friendly bet (proceeds to to a GiveWell charity) that as soon as he is legally allowed too he will be given a sinecure at Verizon/Comcast or an RNC friendly lobby shop?
Your bet will prove correct because he will be blacklisted, in a political sense, by other small businesses in that sector. Those small/medium sized businesses could not survive the shitstorm that would follow him. Only a company the size of verizon and comcast could absorb that kind of publicity without suffering from the social media outrage that would predictably ensue.
After his time in the FCC, if he doesn't continue working in government, he needs to work in the private sector, the only private sector business that he could even possibly work in after this, is Verizon/Comcast/ATT/GenericBigCorp, companies which would have some need/desire for his experiences and contacts in the government.
Whether or not you defend his actions, working anywhere else is untenable now...
I am in no way defending Pai, but I generally disagree with the idea that a regulator working in the industry before or after they are done serving publicly is definitive proof of corruption (which you seem to be implying).
That isn't to say that the revolving door nature of these regulators and private industry can't or even doesn't lead to corruption, but what are the alternatives? The regulators should obviously be experts in the industry they regulate. If you forbid anyone high up at the FCC from ever working in the communications industry, what experts are left? You would basically limiting these jobs so they can only be done by academics, which would introduce its own set of problems.
A high-level representative of any industry is going to have personal connections in that industry and personal reasons for not wanting to regulate the industry as it should be regulated in the best interest of the people.
I don't see any benefit to someone in charge of regulating the communications industry having ever worked in communications. An intelligent person - and not necessarily an academic - a lawyer would be capable, for instance - with no personal connections to people high up in the industry is immensely preferable and has much less potential for corruption.
> I don't see any benefit to someone in charge of regulating the communications industry having ever worked in communications.
If you replace "communications" with "construction", you're advocating that the people regulating building codes should have absolutely no prior experience actually building things, and I imagine that is not a stance you would take. Why then is communication so different from construction?
The point of regulatory agencies is to take the aspirational goals of laws passed by the legislature and turn them into concrete, executable frameworks. This means you need people who are far more experienced on how companies are going to react to changes in regulation than the people who write the laws. Without personal experience, people are going to have rely a lot more on the corporate lobbying to make sense of what's going on, and they're going to have less basis to understand intentional misdirection in corporate responses.
I think you are downplaying the complexities of these regulatory jobs if you think they can be adequately done by any intelligent person regardless of their knowledge of the industry. That admittedly may be less important for the FCC compared to other agencies, but would you be comfortable if the head of the FDA was a lawyer rather than a doctor or scientist?
To be totally fair here, I think you'd probably have to establish a base rate of this. I'd bet that virtually all prior FCC commissioners end up with a gig like that, regardless of how they regulated the industry. It should be an easy question to answer though.
I’ve noticed that the Aspen Institute is a sink for these sort of individuals across a number of fields. So far as I can tell, it functions as a sort of a bullpen for talent at the political / economic interface for a number of large corporations. It certainly isn’t mission-driven or benevolent.
Revolving doors lead to corruption. Study after study have shown this. [1] The recent patent examiners study by the national bureau of economics research again confirms this. [2]
There is no basis to advocate status quo by setting up false choices and appeals to expertise in the face of overwhelming evidence.
The impact in the financial industry, telecom, pharma and literally any segment shows incredibly damaging consequences. This is simply too high a cost to pay for some people's feelings of how the world should work versus how it actually does.
Not only that, it's what people entering government plan to do.
I had a conversation with a lead researcher at a pharmaceutical company (also a friend) where she discussed her plans to work at the FDA for a few years and then return to private industry. She was very explicit about her reasoning: companies pay a premium for researchers with FDA experience because such people are more adept at navigating funding and approval processes.
When I asked whether she considered that she would be participating in a corrupting (if not corrupt) process, she simply waved the notion away--this is how it works and what you need to do to advance your career. This person leans very liberal from a social and political perspective.
This is where we're at as a society. The machinery of the administrative state is consuming everything in its path. I'm not anti-government or anti-regulation. But the centralization of power is extremely problematic; not just conceptually, but literally.
Once upon a time the Federal government had an explicit (if informal) policy of placing administrative offices across the country. This was, I believe, largely a matter of sharing the employment opportunities across the states. But it also had the effect of disincentivizing government work for highly ambitious people. (Moving to D.C. is far easier to justify than moving to Oklahoma City.) These administrative offices are increasingly centralized geographically around D.C. This has attracted industry. The phenomenon is one example of many that has promoted corrupting processes such as the revolving door between regulators and industry.
On the bright side, it means there are very concrete countermeasures that we could begin instituting. For example, instate an explicit, formal policy of locating administrative agencies--especially executive offices--far outside the Beltway. Yes, this will be costly in terms of administrative efficiency. But safeguarding democratic institutions is costly; if we're not prepared to pay the price then we deserve what we get.
This guy will just say anything, won’t he? I already knew he wasn’t a constitutional scholar, but this is rich even coming from a shill with as little self respect as Pai.
The broader problem is that California's micromanagement poses a risk to the rest of the country. After all, broadband is an interstate service; Internet traffic doesn't recognize state lines. It follows that only the federal government can set regulatory policy in this area. For if individual states like California regulate the Internet, this will directly impact citizens in other states.
What?! I can’t even begin to express how infuriating this is, the sheer hypocrisy and wanton dishonesty, from someone who is nominally in the position of protecting Americans’ interests. Forget the interstate commerce clause, forget Republican’s supposed respect for state’s rights, forget giving people a necessary service, let’s use a warped interpretation of the law as a hammer to empower crooked bureaucracy.
> The broader problem is that California's micromanagement poses a risk to the rest of the country. After all, broadband is an interstate service; Internet traffic doesn't recognize state lines. It follows that only the federal government can set regulatory policy in this area. For if individual states like California regulate the Internet, this will directly impact citizens in other states.
This line of argument fails the smell test; California (and other states) regulates phone networks, including long distance calling from within its borders, and the FCC doesn't whine about that.
It also fails the smell test because Internet traffic doesn't recognize international lines, yet he's claiming the federal government has regulatory powers over the Internet.
I think the country needs net neutrality. But the specific point he's making here is valid: it'll suck if there are 50 different sets of laws that ISPs have to conform to. From a technical point of view, routers everywhere in the country will have to know to treat traffic going to to California customers differently from Nevada customers.
We could hope to repeat the history of vehicle emissions controls, where CA introduced regulations and auto makers eventually found it cheaper to make one kind of vehicle than two. But the incentives for non-net-neutral policies are so large that if major states have different rules, we'll end up with a huge mess. And regulatory messes tend to favor large incumbents, because they can devote the resources to them. That's why, for example, we have no new banks (which are regulated by states.)
>CA doesn't think twice about making laws that contradict federal laws
It's been my naive observation that state laws are, in some practical context, "allowed" to contradict federal laws, in the sense that perhaps they are simply given some de facto leeway. Am I totally off base? Does this reduce the hypocrisy?
They are only allowed to contradict state laws to the extent that the federal government may decide it's not worth it to try and enforce the rules in the state, especially states like CA where they state that they won't cooperate with enforcement of laws they don't agree with. Even if the state someone lives in has contradictory laws, you still have to follow the federal laws at any job that cares about that. For example, if you live in a state that has legalized recreational or medical marijuana, you still can't use it if you want to work a federal job or anything that requires a security clearance.
Well they thumb their nose at the constitution when it comes to the 2A and they thumb their nose at the federal government itself when it comes to weed for starters.
Some of their policies regarding illegal aliens (though this is more of a city by city thing) are arguably in direct contradiction with federal law.
A lot of the rulings the 9th circuit has come up with over the years look like they came out of left field with regard to the constitution and the precedent being set.
I can dig up specific examples if you want.
I'm not passing a value judgement here, just saying that CA likes to interpret the constitution rather freely, for better or worse.
It's quite interesting how much the Trump administration is copying from the Reagan administration (admittedly, I was not alive during the Regan times so my info is coming from textbooks). The Trump administration is doing is essentially its own form of Trump Reaganomics mixed with his own Starve the beast playbook [1]. Though I feel like this new strategy is more to protect the self interests of the few around President Trump rather than to cut down the big government.
TBH it is hilarious we believe "net neutrality" exists in the first place. Peering agreements between ISP's at IPX's are rarely "fair or neuatral" as different ISP's have different carrying capacity, and will treat traffic from their own networks preferentially for technical reasons.
But since <5k people understand BGP routing configuration we pretend it is neutral.
The term "net neutrality" is so overloaded at this point it's useless. Removing posts, throttling bandwidth, ISP/IPX negotiations, ISP protocol/domain treatment, ISP data collection, are all wildly different concerns that should each have unique names. I associate the term with the ISP protocol/domain treatment concern, as in ISPs should never use Application Layer variables to choose preferred routing, blocking, bandwidth allotment, etc.
It's been my experience that all definitions of net neutrality explicitly allow prioritization for technical reasons (e.g. streaming). Is this fuzzier than I thought?
"technical reasons" should be limited to things like the speed of light, or in this case the necessity to drop packets if the presented load exceeds the output rate of a link for more than the finite buffer can store.
everything else is policy - which means there is a choice. that choice might be heavily driven by economics, or by some kind of business strategy. but its pretty indefensible to say 'the crew in white coats down in the basement told me we just had to do it that way (shrug)'
so in the absence of speed-of-light issues, 'technical reasons' in this case is just a planet-sized loophole.
Of course, but that's me saying that as a shorthand. I'm referring to the actual definitions in practice. I would hope they don't say "for technical reasons" and leave it at that.
So in early August, we adopted a policy that would allow a single entity to do the requisite work on the utility pole—a policy commonly known as “one-touch make-ready.” This policy could substantially lower the cost and shorten the time to deploy broadband on utility poles.
But according to https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2018/08/fcc-gives-google...:
Despite today's vote, the FCC hurt the cause of faster pole attachment when it deregulated the broadband industry last year, according to Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) Legislative Counsel Ernesto Falcon. The FCC's anti-net neutrality vote removed the classification of broadband as a common carrier service—that now-repealed classification "ensure[d] that every broadband provider has the legal right to gain access to many of the poles that run along our roads," the EFF wrote last year.
"I wonder if the anti-net neutrality crowd understands that Title II's regulation of poles and conduit is now limited to telephone/cable TV thanks to [the] Restoring Internet Freedom Order," Falcon tweeted today. "The ISPs that are broadband-only will not get the benefit, thus limiting its positive impact."