Court Upholds Net Neutrality Repeal, With Some Caveats

On a slightly different tack, it is disgraceful that huge areas of the country have virtually no internet access at all, still less "high speed" internet. Wouldn't be prudent (or profitable). Of course that's not government's job. I'm sure the residents of the area transformed by the TVA are completely onboard with this shameful reality.

As the saying goes, elections have consequences. Voters need to pay attention, and candidates need to communicate clear messages as to what the stakes are.

The F.C.C. chairman, Ajit Pai is a complete rightwing idiot. Beyond that what we have to pay for internet service is obscene. I am at the extreme bottom on an income scale and if I want internet service at all in the Eugene Springfield Oregon area Comcast will charge $70.00 a month.

I ran into net neutrality issues in the early 90’s. I was a network engineer and I was working to connect a doctor’s office to a hospital system via a VPN connection. It was very low bandwidth, just green screen and keyboard traffic. We were using a basic cable TV Internet connection, but the VPN would disconnect about every two minutes. It would take 10 of 15 seconds to reconnect. It basically made the set up unusable. Working with the VPN vendor, I spent a couple of days trying to figure out the problem. After the VPN vendor told me it looks like you are getting a disconnect message, and the box on the other end did not send it, I got hold of the cable company and it took me a couple of days to actually talk to a network technician. He told me that the cable company decided that VPNs were creating too much traffic on their network and they had a program running that would actively inject disconnect packets into the data stream and the result was that one end would disconnect. The Dr’s Office was forced to upgrade to a more expensive (double the price) connection with 20 times the needed bandwidth. So, when net neutrality goes away, it basically means that something like Netflix will stop streaming and say “buffering” or the video will pixilate and you will have no good idea why, but your service provider will be glad to make you buy the “streaming” package to get Netflix to work. Oh, but you want Hulu to work too? That will cost extra!

If the American people vote Trump and all the republicans out of office, this ruling can be reversed by a new law.

We need a Democratically elected government to pass laws to enforce net neutrality, not the GOP FCC.

If the internet is not a utility, nothing is a utility.

Everyone is worried about what AT&T and Comcast MIGHT do while Google and Facebook make billions off our personal data and child sexual exploitation.

One other thing that the article missed. The arcane matter of who can attach cables and equipment to poles, how much they pay and under what terms is written into the part of the law called Title II. This is exactly the law that the FCC decided does not apply to ISPs. If ISPs now have neither the rights nor the responsibilities that come with being a Title II telco or a cable company, we are looking at more chaos in an already chaotic realm. The court rightly kicked this back to the FCC and told them to fix it. Now, the FCC can't just say that none of Part II applies to ISPs, except for Section 271. I have no idea how they're going to square that circle.

I took the time to read the opinion. Frankly, I was blind-sided and disappointed. What it says between the lines (2-1) is that two Supreme Court precedents, Chevron and Brand-X, tied their hands. Chevron says that an agency can interpret an ambiguous law any way it wants to, as long is it's "reasonable". By this opinion, the bounds of reason apparently are extremely broad. In this case, the FCC relied on cooked and irrelevant data to justify what it did and summarily dismissed valid criticisms and alternative data. This was "reasonable". Chevron is controversial, particularly among some recently appointed Supreme Court justices, because it is usually used to uphold progressive regulations. Brand-X is a particularly illogical decision from 1992. It says that Internet Service Providers fit into the "Information Services" bucket in the Communications Act, because ISPs used to bundle email, portals, web hosting and such with service. The FCC's excuse was that when consumers use the Internet, there are two bits of data processing, "DNS" and "Caching" that happen without their knowing about it. The tech community almost uniformly agrees that DNS and caching really aren't part of the Internet service, but the FCC ignored them. The court says that the Brand-X precedent makes them allow this bit of sophistry. When the Supreme Court ruled on the census case, I had hoped that it would affect the outcome of this one: an agency has wide latitude but not on a pretext. I was wrong.

I use video very less and somebody else uses it a lot. Why should I pay for another persons habits. Everybody paying the same and these standard tiers have extinguished the chances of 15 dollar phone bills.

Pai and Trump are , not surprisingly, acting in favor of big business and profit, at the expense of consumers. The FCC action will limit consumer choice, and let big ISP's decide what websites people can easily view. That decision is undemocratic and certainly not in the interests of the American people. Trump, Pai, and the GOP represent big business, not the people, that's clear.

I'm tired of being whip-sawed by all this "Net Neutrality On" / "Net Neutrality Off". What's the current status, again? It's good, but it's going to be bad? Or is it already bad? It does seem kind of bad now, I think.

So, even the Obama appointed Judges on the 9th Circuit have become water carriers for Trump and the Republican Party. These Judges have pandered to big business and failed American consumers yet again. Its no big surprise, but it is sad. The US "justice" system is a farce. You get "justice" if you're wealthy or a corporation. For we regular Joe's on the street, justice is just a fairy tale. The roll back of regulation in favor of big business by these skinheads in black robes will continue until individual consumers have no rights at all.

So if there is net neutrality in New York, and you cross into a neighboring state that does not allow net neutrality how in the world will that work? This is crazy and a lazy decision on the part of the FCC. More work to be done on this!

Everything around lawmaking, court ruling and reportage re tech is invariably weak. That’s because tech is secretive and fast moving and the only element in the equation in possession of the almighty “data.” This ruling is a messy answer to a bad policy change.

I agree with the intent behind net neutrality rules, and will take such flawed policy if that's the best we can get, but I would rather see federal, state, and local governments tackle the root of the problem that caused netizens to begin clamoring for net neutrality in the first place, which was the loss of competiton in the "last mile" of wired Internet connectivity. This stems from government being asleep and not insisting that the cabling owned by your local cable franchisee be operated as a "dumb pipe" with requirements to offer wholesale access to competing ISPs. We didn't need to worry about net neutrality back in the day when we still had a thriving industry of independent small and mid size DSL providers who could piggyback on the wires incumbent local exchange carrier.

Can't wait for the new government and the back of Idjit Pie.

The appeals court comes off sounding lazy (like the U.S. Supreme Court in the gerrymandering decision). Who cares how many times it has been litigated? If it’s true, it’s true. P hysically, they’re common carriers.

This article demonstrates poor writing. How about explaining to us these caveats mentioned in the title? The author said the decision gave both sides something to cheer about but only described one side of the outcome. Why does this outcome "ensure the debate will continue"? Readers are left to guess, thanks to vague prose.

Of course, the story doesn't include the court's decision so this comment is a bit of speculation. But if the decision really allows states to enact their own rules on net neutrality, them it really doesn't matter. If only a few states (new York, California, Massachusetts) enact effective net neutrality rules then for all practical purposes the rules will apply to the whole country.

The Internet is global. Doesn't it make more sense to have a national standard?