ISPs to FCC: Don’t Bypass Courts, Classify Broadband as Phone Service
by Capitol ConfidentialIn a strongly-worded 14-page letter to Federal Communications Commission (FCC) chairman Julius Genachowski, the nation’s largest internet service providers Monday cautioned the agency that reclassifying broadband internet services from an “information service” to a “telecommunication service” would have “far-reaching and destructive consequences,” including deterring continued broadband investment and innovation.
The “extremist” move to regulate internet service in a similar manner to telephone service, which some observers called a transparent, albeit indirect ploy to enact net neutrality, “would be untenable as a legal matter, and, at a minimum, would plunge the industry into years of litigation and regulatory chaos,” the letter read.
Signed by Verizon, AT&T, Time Warner, and Qwest, among others, the letter comes amid an important federal appeals court decision in the larger net neutrality debate, in which a ruling against the FCC would likely derail the agency’s quest to institute “open internet” regulations.
Presently, broadband is classified as an information service, which is marginally subject to FCC jurisdiction, though liberal interest groups and national Democrats favor reclassifying ISPs as common carrier services, which would solidify the agency’s regulatory powers over the internet — and ultimately threaten competition among network, service and content providers. Furthermore, according to one tech policy expert, such a reclassification (under Title II) would result in the broadband industry being subjected to the same rules as the monopoly telephone companies of the early 1930’s—a framework that many observers doubt is appropriate for the Internet.
“In short, the Commission should keep this Pandora’s Box of Title II classification nailed shut,” the companies warned in the letter. “[T]he commission cannot seriously think that layering a 75-year-old regulatory structure on modern broadband facilities will not harm current and future levels of broadband investment.”
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360 Comments
Where in the Constitution can the government regulate free speech? Read and learn the First Amendment. If you can't understand the first, you damn well better read the second.
chip…chip…chip
How many chips 'till the Obama statue starts to fall?
Oh gee, another government intrusion into our private lives and choices, only serving to enrich political pals and tighten government control over us on a daily basis, Whod'a thunk? ,,,,,,,,,,Hanzo
If they end up controlling the Internet I guarantee riots in the streets!
do not underestimate the desire of the Current Occupant and his minions to control speech…
There are battles fought on multiple fronts, here. Obama knows the open access and transfer of information is doing in his administration. Whether it's net neutrality, or 'local access', or 'ownership diversity' or any other canard, it's all attempts to censor.
They cannot achieve their subterfuge with the light of day shown upon them constantly. They need c ontrol.
They desire control. They HAVE to have it.
This is only just beginning…
But… but…. the One said he's a big time opponent of anything like Net Neutrality! Surely he wouldn't LIE to us all and will put a stop to this nonsense!
I need to correct what I just wrote in the third paragraph above. The tax was eliminated, after 108 years. I'll let the paragraph stand, to prove the point though. Once government gets a finger in our pocket, they will pick it for 100 years.
http://www.usatoday.com/money/industries/telecom/...
While I admire your spunk and agree with your position; this is not an issue of speech, but of commerce. That is how it will be litigated.
Good to see you back, my friend. The NWO movement marches steadily forward against the ever increasing resistance of American Patriotism. A bulldozer can only push so much dirt before it loses traction against infinite resistance. Sooner or later, they'll run out of gas.
Let's hope it doesn't come to that…but make plans like it's going to.
Get your e-m fixed? ,,,,,,,,,,,,,Hanzo
That's funny! I haven't heard that brought up since my "Intro To TeleCom" class in college. You are 100% correct on the tax. Most people also don't know that they can petition to be exempt from it, either. It could lower your monthly phone bill by a couple bucks a month to do so.
I'm pretty sure you're spot on on that one too. It was in the works when I was still in class. I didn't follow up on it because it sounded at the time to be a sure thing to be rescinded.
Really? They actually teach that stuff in college? They have Intro To Telecom classes? I never knew that.
In any event though, I'm sure you see my point. If one would get the total cost for the Spanish American War, then the dollars collected by that tax, for 108 years, the numbers would be staggeringly disproportionate. It is nothing more than theft of tax money, by the government, from the people.
Never, never, never give in. Never give them an inch. It will take them at least 108 years to make things right, if they ever do……..
Anyone who is a regular on this site with a few minor exceptions that is or becomes aware of onWhen people become aware of the ideologies of Chairman Julius Genachowski
If you haven't been paying attention to the MSM lately, these past few months, (try NEWSBUSTERS)…
That's what they're pushing for already. MSNBC wants race riots, and it's evident by their lying and inciting. It was evident as far back as Hurricane Katrina. THE MSM WANTS IT, OBAMA WANTS IT, and everything either of them say or do, lately seems to be done with that in mind.
"What can we do today to MAKE WAR HAPPEN in America?" seems to be the question both the Obama admin and the MSM are asking themselves each and every morning.
When you realize this, everything else falls into place and begins to make sense.
Yes I did, sir. I am once again prime time live. Now I just have to dig though my saved mail to find your address and I will make first contact. I already dealt with Beth about her site questions……………………….L4S ;o)
They can try to regulate it. They for sure will tax it.
Can someone with more knowledge of networks clue me in:
How is this going to silence conservatives? I honestly never heard a good explanation. Since the biggest obstacle to this Marxist, well, coup, for lack of a better word, has been the existance of the internet, and since the issue seems to be of GREAT interest to conservatives, seemingly with that in mind, I have always just assumed that the Net Neutrality issue was indeed designed to take down this threat, and silence conservatives.
HOW?
Classify broadband as phone service? Thats ridiculous. We could buy our own satellite for the taxes they collect on phone services. Even Vonage, which runs as a Voip service sells it's service for 24.99/mo but the taxes on it raise it to 32 bucks here.
Communism and control moving like a speeding freight train. We need to man the switches and send it over a cliff. Very soooooon.
They teach all kinds of cool stuff in college! You just have to know what cool stuff you want to learn.
You further illustrate to me by your reply that you do, indeed, "get it". That Spanish-American War tax on phone bills is just one fine example of the government's inter-generational theft of private wealth. You get that! I wish everyone did. These bastards hide taxes EVERYWHERE! The Income Tax was supposed to be rescinded after the war was paid for, but no politician in his right mind was going to cut off a revenue flow that gigantic. They MUST put something in the water…I can't believe Americans were ever stupid enough to buy into any of these "tricks".
Redistribution of wealth…
Typical… statists want to make every ISP as crappy as Comcast. We're all going to end up paying more for less… unless this flexing by the FCC & Team Hussein stops.
It's bad enough that these statists think corporations just magically produce wealth, from nothing, for them to tax…. they never take into account overhead and investment toward innovation when crippling business and industry by their meddling, thieving, fascist ways.
I run a small ISP in a rural area, and truly, reclassiflying ISP's as 'telelcommunications" would put me out of business. The rules are so complex, the investment so huge, and the mandates, regulations, and stifling of innovation such that I'd be gone, as would pretty much every ISP except the telephone company, cable company, and maybe a few competitive local exchange carriers. There would be a few who are large enough, meaning they have scores of or hundreds of employees, who can afford this kind of regulatory straitjacket, but I can't. My customers would become unserved and remain that way for years, because the telco and cableco will never invest in serving small groups of people many miles apart. I do it via fixed wireless, and it's a small two man business. This is a HUGE threat to the health of one of the few bright spots in our economy. JUST SAY NO!
If "the one" gets this crap through we'll find ourselves looking towards Russia as a "beacon of liberty" in five years…
While I don't monitor MSLSD very closely but based on what little I've seen, I have to agree with you about them wanting violence.
I remember how the LSM beat that dead horse….showing Rodney L. King over and over, night after night. And how, when the time came for the jury to render a verdict, everyone was prepared for the L.A. Riots that they (MSM) created and fueled.
LSM is eagerly looking for the next 'spark'.
Pretty soon these leftists will want to regulate the decibel of my farts.
Today's "Pravda" already contains far, far more truth than most of our MSM.
It's a Russian newspaper that used to be well-known for propaganda-for-the-State.
Our press is way better than Pravda ever was at it.
Not only that, our MSM is more devoted to it, since they do it not at gunpoint, but out of their own (useful idiot) free will.
Oh, we're going to see what the USSR was like, it seems.
I would like to take this opportunity to reclassify the current gov't as communist and the administration as a bunch of lying weasels. But that weasel remark is kind of unfair. To weasels.
They are way too loud. You will be required to wear a muffler.
Hope&Change = Fascism
But hey, good side!
Free houses for Liberals!
And all the stuff that's in 'em!
Hollywood is already fantasizing with its latest "you might have to kill your neighbor" movie.
Preppin' their peeps.
your right
Don't know who told you that, they lied, this is a very high priority of Comrade Obama's agenda…
Too true! Reclassifying ISP's as 'telecommunications' is an attempt to (temporarily) brush aside their plans for not-neutrality as they shift focus and set their sights on taxes and nefarious regulatory fees. Yes, small business will be crushed but the bigs know that their losses will be greater than the benefit of less competition, in this case.
And isn't that really what this all about?
Geez you run a 6ghz link from your headend?
That doesn't really help.
Okay, how does "redistribution of wealth" affect the availability of truth on the internet?
Someone use logic with me. Reason. Please.
No offense, wldbil. I understand that redistribution of wealth is a goal and that they want to tax the air I breathe, but how does Net Neutrality shut down the great truth-spigot that is the internet? Or control it. Someone give me a scenario, where, say, GatewayPundit would be restricted in posting something about, say "Fistgate VII" and Kevin Jennings. Or, where me, a commenter, would be restricted in my debating a progressive in a forum such as this.
I honestly don't see how it will affect either, and it seems that it will, judging by how fearful people seem of it. This is more than just fear of another tax being manifested when you read comments under these types of stories. This is a deeper fear, a fear of being silenced. I want to know why. And trust me, I do understand that this Admin has a GREAT NEED to silence us, since we are all that stands in the way of complete and utter national brainwashing, it seems.
A Marxist is a Marxist.
Unless we find a way to stop this we are on a greased train to………
No freedom at all.
What happens when you redistribute the wealth?
First nothing works very well for anyone…..then…the right people, corps, 'obtain through bribery', preferences…hope that helps you.
Put that chisel away randy, I got a big chain and a pick-em-up truck. We can Saddam 'ol Hussein…
He shore did! Thanks L4S!
I used to work in the telecom business and was the person in charge of paying the "telecommunications" taxes to the federal government. The forms we were provided from the FCC showed our company's percent of all the nations telecom taxable revenues. Using some simple math, we determined that the amount raised by the FCC for the government was in the Billions of dollars each year. We did a little checking and found out this goes into the general fund for the Feds. There is this tax on land lines and cell phones, but not so much on internet service. As land lines go away or are converted to Voice Over IP (data phone lines) the tax revenue is shrinking rapidly. The fed needs more revenue, so they are targeting data lines. They have raised the taxes to over 10% on phone lines to try to make up the difference. This will not due, especially when spending in DC has become a full-contact death cage match.
C4
Yes and NO! Power and Taxes. They need the power first then they can Tax!
Enter cap and trade CO2 and Methane!
Exit perhaps?
Only stage left! Like Snagglepuss!
God bless the interstate commerce act (sarcasm). Up until now the internet has, for the most part, been totally self regulated. Groups like the ISOC made sure there standards in place for people to follow. They didn't follow them under thread of legal action. They followed them because they just knew if they didn't, this thing we call the internet would never work. People really don't understand just what happens when they type in a URL in their web browser. The fact DNS works how it does is a spectacular feat. We're talking thousands of servers that all get updated usually within 2 hours when any information related to a domain name gets changed. Just think about it, you type in an address and within seconds your signal can bounce across the country. I changed my business and it took me 4 months to get it all straightened out and state/federal agencies. They really could totally screw the internet up if they are not careful here.
One thing I would be in favor of, end the semi-monopoly providers like Comcast and Time Warner have when they agree not to compete in the same areas. Make them all compete in the same markets and you'll really see innovation.
Virtual riots
“In short, the Commission should keep this Pandora’s Box of Title II classification nailed shut,” the companies warned in the letter. “[T]he commission cannot seriously think that layering a 75-year-old regulatory structure on modern broadband facilities will not harm current and future levels of broadband investment.”
As the old saying goes, follow the money. In this case, the reason for the interest in this by the government, is that they are following the money. They smell money, they smell tax revenue. They will do anything within their power to make a grab for it, one way or the other.
When it comes to telecommunications, most people do not know, that for a standard hardline phone, there is a tax still in effect today, that was enacted to pay for the Spanish American War. Imagine that! The tax was never eliminated. Most folks don't even know there was a Spanish American War, and the few that do, do not know when it was………..
Telcos were still charging extra for Touch Tone service well into the nineties.
The question is, which will be chipped away first: the Obama statue or the Constitution.
Far more than it ought to… every time a chunk falls out the MSM scramble in to spackle the damage over.
Violence and conflict do wonders for the old ratings. Stirring up factionalism in this country is how the media sell advertising space.
At this point, they're all praying the next civil war starts during sweeps week.
I remember an episode of Mystery Science Theater 3000 where they were watching a short about (essentially) the Bell Labs exhibit at the '62 World's Fair in Seattle… there was a demonstration of touch-tone dialing (still in the works at this point) and someone made a snarky comment about how thirty years later there would STILL be a surcharge on it.
Here it is: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-61157462...
Which is EXACTLY why the Verizons/AT&Ts/Comcast-type ISPs want to charge different rates for different traffic and why the tech communities fought back with a request for congress to pass a law to stop the kind of nonsense the FCC was headed toward at the request of the large Telco/Cableco ISPs.
The enactment of net neutrality is an attempt to force the Telco/Cablecos to treat internet broadband in the same way they do telephone service – no restrictions/filtering on content / no preferential treatments / no differential pricing due to which web sites or protocols go over the wires.
Technically, this move by the FCC prevents the ISPs from censoring internet access to their customers and would act to force customers to even run network servers and small network in their own homes if they wish to pay for their bandwidth. It's a good technical alternative to what the ISPs were wanting to do to their contractual customers and the expectation is that market forces would prevent the ISPs from allowing the prices to get out of hand.
Note that it's illegal for the Telcos to *NOT* provide service to remote locations that are within their coverage area just because it's more expensive to install/maintain lines to a relatively handful of customers and they make less profit. The same benefit should apply to internet service. If internet service is treated like telco service, then all internet access becomes uniform until the limits of the telco network are reached and then all customers have an equal impact of any limits imposed by the telco equipment.
Overall – that's a much better outcome than the telcos deciding to *NOT* provide support to remote locations at all or leaving some customers with 9600-baud dial-up while others have gigabit fiber-optic-ethernet service based solely on where that person chooses to live.
It's also better than telcos throttling ftp and voice-over-IP traffic (such as vonage and skype) to dial-up-speeds while allowing http traffic (very latency tolerant) to run at megabit speeds. Note that Verizon throttling Vonage and skype is also anti-competitive and potential monopoly abuse based on Verizon's monopoly on the physical wires.
Heavens to Murgatroyd!
In my state I pay a minimum of $14.50 in taxes per month just to have a landline. My cell phone tax is $7.00 per line.. I got rid of the landline. State and local 911 fees are starting to get outrageous.
You're quite welcome. Here's wishing you a happy voyage home!
This seems like the best response to what it's really about! If Power and taxes mean total control by NowDaddySam!
The only only chisel I see is one to put BIGDADDYOBAMA'S figure ALL ALONE on Mount Rushmore!
BIGDADDYOBAMA will be shooting us down in the street for less than Internet control, betcha!
Hey, this is a "Mao" prototype, so just MURDER THEM!
Somebody please help me understand where Comcast got it's power from? Are they Obama's eye-in-our-homes program?
We'll know in November this year! But I'm scared!
i really think there should be more ppl writing in a similar style you do ^^
Shows their stupidity….in most revolutions, one of the first things to be overtaken is the media, so the word can be gotten out.
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