🌎 Discussion: Online Piracy, AI, Net Neutrality, Killswitch, and Other Internet Issues II

[MessiahDecoy123]

Very corrupt. The head lobbyist for the telecom companies was in charge of the FCC in 2002 when they declared Internet providers are only "information providers" and not "common carriers" like utility companies.

Figures.

Yeah we're screwed.

 

[Thundercrack85]

If SOPA can be defeated, this can be defeated.

It's all about communication.

 

[MessiahDecoy123]

If SOPA can be defeated, this can be defeated.

It's all about communication.

What defeated SOPA was websites like wikipedia and google blacking out.

Millions of people realized what was going on and flooded congress with phone calls.

The congressmen who proposed SOPA withdrew it very quickly.

But it looks like the big internet players are going to sit this one out.

 

[enterthemadness]

What defeated SOPA was websites like wikipedia and google blacking out.

Millions of people realized what was going on and flooded congress with phone calls.

The congressmen who proposed SOPA withdrew it very quickly.

But it looks like the big internet players are going to sit this one out.

Well, I've done a bit of reading and a poster here posted a link in another thread, but the FCC still has power. So, technically, they could limit the ISP's from going crazy with power.

 

[JMan2003]

Here's some online petitions you can sign to help protect Net Neutrality If still possible aside from the FCC's official website:

https://petitions.whitehouse.gov/pe...y-internet-providers-common-carriers/5CWS1M4P

http://act.freepress.net/sign/internet_FCC_court_decision2/

http://www.savetheinternet.com/sti-home

http://www.fcc.gov/

http://www.avaaz.org/en/internet_apocalypse_loc/?bbUepcb&v=34949

 

[enterthemadness]

Looks like they were lying about not slowing down Netflix.


http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencet...s-claim-service-unusable-sites-work-fine.html


Verizon and Comcast slowing down Netflix streaming speed.

And sadly....even though I think Time Warner sucks...with them slowing down Netflix,...


http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/...rner_n_4778175.html?ncid=edlinkusaolp00000009

Comcast buying out Time Warner.

But then again...

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs...tflix-speeds-are-down-but-dont-blame-verizon/

The analyst, Doug Anmuth, told Re/code Tuesday that Netflix CEO Reed Hastings is confident that Internet providers won't dare to provoke the wrath of users by slowing down access to films and TV shows. More importantly, Re/code reports, Netflix itself hasn't observed anything to suggest that Verizon is throttling bandwidth.

 

[enterthemadness]

****....


http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/...deal_n_4843277.html?ncid=edlinkusaolp00000009


Comcast and Netflix agree to huge deal


Boom, we are all screwed.

This agreement means that Netflix will deliver its movies and TV programs to Comcast's broadband network as opposed through third party providers, giving viewers faster streaming speeds for watching movies and TV programs.

The deal could also mean that other broadband providers like Verizon and AT&T will have to strike a similar arrangements, known in the industry as interconnect agreements.

 

[JMan2003]

SOPA is back so feel free to sign the official White House Petition If you want:

https://petitions.whitehouse.gov/petition/stop-sopa-2014/q0Vkk0Zr

Better to sign the petition than do nothing at this point even though Net Neutrality is still dead. As for those company buy outs you just mentioned, yeah it was pretty much inevitable.

 

[wiegeabo]

Well, the FCC's latest proposed rule to replace the struck down net neutrality regulations are anything but neutral or consumer friendly.

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/...-for-good-fcc-may-endorse-pay-for-play-deals/


Basically, the ISP's wouldn't be able to block content providers like Netflix. But they could require Netflix to pay to ensure subscribers get high quality. Of course, if the ISP says blocky stuttering images is good quality, then the content provider and subscriber are screwed.

Essentially this is something like paying the Post Office to have a package delivered. Then the Post Office charges the receiver for the package to "complete delivery". Just so they can get paid twice.


It's so funny how Comcast says they need to charge companies like Netflix because their infrastructure can't handle the load. But their own streaming services aren't effected at all. And the day after Netflix paid the extortion fees, suddenly the network was handling the load, with no extra infrastructure being built...

Also funny how the FCC chairman proposing these rules used to be a lobbyist for the cable and wireless industries...

 

[JMan2003]

So right now there's an online petition going on at Whitehouse.gov to help protect net neutrality (or whatever is left of it) and much like with Congress's rush to pass a new SOPA (Stop Online Piracy Act) bill into law instead of doing their job such as increasing the Minimum Wage, passing Immigration Reform, or Gun Control laws it's time for us to step up to the plate once again and ensure that the Internet remains free and open the way it was originally intended. So far as I'm typing this there's only 39,769 signatures on the petition and we need 60,231 more to reach the goal of 100,000 by May 24th, 2014 which is the deadline. Here's the link to the petition:

https://petitions.whitehouse.gov/pe...ct-freedom-information-united-states/9sxxdBgy

Spread the word on this petition through YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, etc. just make sure this gets out to the public.

 

[DJ_KiDDvIcIOUs]

I've been posting in my Biz/Tech thread on all the little BS deals these companies are making to set precedent to screw us in the future and apparently have the Government's ok with it. All these little steppingstones lead us to where we eventually stand

 

[Anubis]

I'll sign it as long as I can keep getting my free porn.

 

[wiegeabo]

FCC approves plan to allow for paid priority on Internet


This does not mean the change has been made official and implemented. It now starts a four month comments period where the FCC hears what the public thinks.

So now's the time to start bombing them on social media, emailing and writing them directly, and putting pressure on the Congress critters.

 

[DJ_KiDDvIcIOUs]

How to Yell at the FCC About How Much You Hate Its Net Neutrality Rules

In spectacularly bureaucratic fashion, the FCC just voted to start the formal consideration of its horrible net neutrality rules. That means the floor is now open for public comment, and the future of the internet is at stake. In fact, it's up to you. "But how do I comment?" you ask, "How do I politely but firmly express my rage as a member of the public?" Let us show you the way.

Step one: Visit FCC.gov/comments and find the proceeding with the title "Protecting and Promoting the Open Internet." It should be the one on top and should also have over 20,000 filings in the last 30 days.

Step Two: Click the proceeding number "14-28." You can also try to click this direct link, though it might not work every time. This will take you to the FCC's Electronic Comment Filing System. It looks a little janky, but hey, the government built it.

Step Three: Fill out the form. Write about your feelings. Express your concerns. Air your grievances. Provide your real name and address. Hope for the best.

Step Four: Click "Continue" and make sure you like what you wrote. If you don't you can modify your comment. If you do, click "Confirm."

We asked the FCC what actually happens to these comments, after you send them off into cyberspace. This is their response in full:

To be clear: the NPRM approved by the FCC today has tentative conclusions on which we're seeking comment, and many broad questions that we are seeking comment on. Once the comment period closes, we review the comments and apply them and the law to our proposals / questions, to come up with final rules. The Chairman has a goal for voting on final rules by the end of the year. Right now, it's just proposals.
The comment period is until September 10, but you might as well get started now while the news is fresh. And do let us know how it goes!

I already filed mine please file yours as well to try and prevent this travesty on a neutral net. Pass the info along to your friends and family!

 

[wiegeabo]

Filed my complaint.

Actually typed more than I expected as I laid out the argument

 

[DJ_KiDDvIcIOUs]

Don't forget to pass it along to as many people as you think will actually fill it out, the more the better!

 

[DJ_KiDDvIcIOUs]

How to Fight the Battle for Net Neutrality

It's game time, people. After months—some might say years—of contentious deliberation, the FCC is moving forward with a set of open internet rules that basically destroys net neutrality as we know it. But it doesn't have to be this way.

The real deliberation begins now. While folks on both sides of the debate have speculated about the specifics of the FCC's plan to regulate the internet once and for all, the actual rules are now out and open for public comment until September 10. This actually presents a complicated proposition to internet-loving Americans. On the one hand, we could sit back and let the big telecom lobbyists work their magic. They have a friend in FCC chairman Tom Wheeler, who used to be big telecom lobbyist. On the other hand, you could fight back.

If you care about your internet, pick the other hand. The implications of these FCC rules will reverberate not only throughout the United States but all over the world. Specific issues like the treatment of paid prioritization, which is just a fancy term for internet fast lanes, stand to affect your life online and send shock waves through the economy. Remember how upset everybody got over SOPA? This is more important than SOPA. We should all be angry, and we should all be acting.

We already told you how to yell at the FCC about how much you hate its new net neutrality rules. Here are a few more ways you can fight for freedom right now. And do stay tuned as new efforts to save the free and open web pop up, because they will.

Get Involved

The battle has to start in the armory. In other words, you should spend some time getting to know the awesome folks who've been fighting for the internet for years, because they have all the right weapons for this battle. To name a few: the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), Free Press, MoveOn.org, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), Common Cause, and Fight for the Future. Each organization has its own initiatives, but you can start by reading their blogs, signing up for their email lists, and sending them a note. They'd love to hear from you. They'd especially love it if you got involved.

Give Money

Internet activists have to eat, too. They also have to pay for lawyers and researchers and servers and ads. Free Press has been fighting to preserve net neutrality harder than anyone, and they're currently raising money for an ambitious campaign aptly named, Save the Internet. Though they managed to hit their fundraising goal ahead of the May 15 FCC meeting, Free Press has vowed not to give up until they win. Help them out.

Send a Letter

A lot of people are wondering if the FCC will even read the tens, if not hundreds of thousands of comments the public is submitting through its janky web form. While you should still submit a comment of your own, you might consider taking it a stage further and writing letters to Wheeler and the individual commissioners. You can find all of their contact information here.

Call Your Congressman

This is where things get really fun. When you step back and think about it, it's actually absurd that a bunch of unelected officials are deciding something so important as the future of the internet. Long story short, this is possible because Section 706 of the Telecommunications Act of 1996 invites the FCC to do so. However, Congress can change all that with a little ol' bill—and many think they should. Either way, it's your job as a citizen to get your elected representative involved in this debate, since it affects every single one of their constituents. Here's how to call your congressman or senator as well as a handy form to send them all a prewritten letter. And while you're at it, you might as well give Tom Wheeler a ring, too.

While making a donation or writing a letter seem simplistic, the little things add up. And if you want to do something big like launch a website or stage a rally, you should! Inevitably, if enough Americans stand up and scream, we can strike down the FCC's awful rules for net neutrality. We did it a couple of years ago when we killed SOPA. We can do it again.

If you care about this, and you should since you're using it as you read this, than click on any of the blue links above to help fight these bogus rules and regulations they are trying to cram down our throats!

 

[DJ_KiDDvIcIOUs]

The FCC Thinks We're All Idiots

Just a few days ago, the FCC voted in favor of a pretty uniformly terrible proposal to allow internet fast lanes. And throughout the 99-page proposition, FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler makes one thing painfully apparent: The FCC thinks we're all a bunch of goddamn idiots.

Not only do they think we won't read...

Wheeler insists that the proposal itself is just a platform for "asking important and specific questions, and opening the discussion to all Americans." It's not. Instead, the fact sheet almost entirely consists of tentative conclusions. In other words these are the rules the FCC wants to adopt. That much is plain right in the text. As Derek Turner, Research Director for the Free Press, explained in an email to us:

This is, after all, a "Notice of Proposed Rulemaking," not a "Notice of Inquiry." It's a set of proposed rules with questions about those proposed rules—not a set of questions about an issue.
Sure, the proposal may ask if so-called fast lanes should be banned outright, but Wheeler is already well aware of the answer: Unless ISPs start being classified as common carriers (i.e. services that are legally required to cater to all), the FCC doesn't have the legal authority to do so even if they wanted to. It's like asking if we should have world peace; the answer's obvious, and there's absolutely nothing he can do about it.

What's more, this is technically the second time the FCC's asked these questions to no real end. At least this time, though, they're following up with their very own, preemptive hell no. From paragraph 97 of the proposal:

We tentatively conclude that our proposed no-blocking rule would allow broadband providers sufficient flexibility to negotiate terms of service individually with edge providers, consistent with the court's view that we must permit providers to "adapt . . . to individualized circumstances without having to hold themselves out to serve all comers indiscriminately on the same or standardized terms."
In other words, even with a supposed "no-blocking rule," the FCC has to let each ISP treat each party as it sees fit—in good faith, of course—because the FCC can't prevent it unless they treat broadband providers as common carriers. This will almost certainly lead to the practice of effectively shoving out anyone who can't pay up. Or what rational people might call "blocking."

It's a pretty little way of saying the opposite of what you mean.

...they think we can't read...

The one thing the FCC references time and again as a means of preventing a slow lane is the ever-mysterious "minimum level of service standard." There are several problems with this logic, which become evident once you start making sense of the FCC's ridiculous language.

First, requiring ISPs to provide any sort of minimum standard is seen by the courts as just as restrictive as the obligations a common carrier is bound to—a big no-no. But that's a moot point in light of problem number two: the FCC has absolutely no idea what a minimum standard would even begin to look like.

Not that the FCC would ever actually admit that. Instead, Wheeler pulls some of the most obscenely convoluted linguistic acrobatics that you will ever have the displeasure of reading. From paragraph 102 of the proposal:

One way to define a minimum level of access is as a requirement that broadband providers apply no less than a "best effort" standard to deliver traffic to end users. For any particular type of Internet traffic, best-effort delivery would represent the "typical" level of service for that type of traffic—in effect, routing traffic according to the "traditional" architecture of the Internet. Broadband providers would be free to negotiate "better than typical" delivery with edge providers, and would be prohibited (subject to reasonable network management) from delivering "worse than typical" service in the form of degradation or outright blocking.
That sure is a lot of words. But what do they actually mean?

The FCC is basically saying that, while it'll make sure that ISPs do their best to give everyone a fair shot, ISPs will still be able to choose to give some edge providers (i.e. YouTube, Amazon, Imgur, and pretty much every website and app ever) a shot that's still the best—just, you know, better. It's a prospect that not only flies in the face of a free internet, but also logic. You can't improve your "best efforts" for some without necessarily creating "worst efforts" for others.

It's basically an (admittedly convoluted) dictionary definition of everything that net neutrality isn't. As Turner told us:

Best-efforts routing means first-in/first-out routing. If there is no congestion, there is no meaning to priority. But in order to create priority, by definition, the ISP's networks have to be constantly congested—or artificially made to seem that way by slowing down all non-prioritized traffic.
Imagine that you're standing in line for a ride at an amusement park. You spent all your money on a ticket, and you've been waiting in line for your favorite ride for hours, all the while watching as people who were able to shell out for a fast pass zip along ahead of you. No one slowed you down. No one literally put you in a slow lane. Yet there you are, and all the weasel-words in the world won't make it OK.

...so they lied.

We've looked at the proposal. We've cleaved through the ********. And it all seems to boil down to one big, egregiously glossed over problem: reclassification. Without reclassifying broadband providers as common carriers, the FCC can fill all the fact sheets with all the words they want—they still won't be able to regulate a single thing.

But to hear Tom Wheeler tell it in the days and months leading up to the proposal's release, considering reclassification—not even reclassification itself, just considering it—was all but a guarantee. In a blog post several weeks before the proposal's release, Wheeler wrote:

Using every power also includes using [reclassification] if necessary. If we get to a situation where arrival of the "next Google" or the "next Amazon" is being delayed or deterred, we will act as necessary using the full panoply of our authority. Just because I believe strongly that following the court's roadmap will enable us to have rules protecting an Open Internet more quickly, does not mean I will hesitate to use [reclassification] if warranted.
Ignoring the (glaring) oversight that identifying the "next Google" in its preliminary stages is nearly if not literally impossible—and the further problem that without a free internet, there's nothing to see—Wheeler makes a strong case for being open to the idea of reclassification—the one thing that could actually ensure net neutrality's protection.

And if you just glanced at the beginning of the proposal, it would seem that Wheeler's kept that effective promise! He asks all the right questions—it's just too bad they're totally insincere. In paragraph 118, the proposal concludes:

In selecting a legal standard, the Commission not only wishes to avoid subjecting broadband networks to common carriage per se, it also wishes to choose a legal standard whose valid adoption renders unnecessary the adjudication of any question other than whether the adopted legal standard has been violated
Going against everything Wheeler both said and implied beforehand, the proposal clearly states that the FCC will actively try to do everything but classify broadband providers as common carriers. But despite what Wheeler and co. might think, we're not a bunch of bumbling idiots. We can read, and we are fully aware when we're being lied to. Not only is this proposal insulting, it's downright dangerous.

Because when the FCC says its doing everything it can to avoid reclassification, it means it's doing everything it can to avoid net neutrality. And unless we do something to stop it, the internet as we know it is as good as gone.

Again in the post above there are links provided so you can do whatever you feel necessary to prevent this atrocity

 

[wiegeabo]

 

[DJ_KiDDvIcIOUs]

​New Bill Threatens to Stop FCC Treating Broadband as a Utility

A new bill proposed by Republican Bob Latta could stop the Federal Communications Commission from reclassifying broadband as a common-carrier utility.

Despite the FCC's call for comment on whether to reclassify broadband as a utility or allow providers to engage in pay-for-play traffic management, the conversation could be rendered pointless if the mew legislation, proposed late Wednesday, passes. In a statement about his proposed bill Bob Latta, an Ohio Republican, explained:

"At a time when the Internet economy is thriving and driving robust productivity and economic growth, it is reckless to suggest, let alone adopt, policies that threaten its success. Reclassification would heap 80 years of regulatory baggage on broadband providers, restricting their flexibility to innovate and placing them at the mercy of a government agency.

"In light of the FCC initiating yet another attempt to regulate the Internet, upending long-standing precedent and imposing monopoly-era telephone rules and obligations on the 21st Century broadband marketplace, Congress must take action to put an end to this misguided regulatory proposal."
While Latta's proposal might find favour in the Republican-controlled House of Representatives—it has, after all, opposed FCC net neutrality initiatives in the past—it will, with any luck, meet with disapproval in the Democrat-controlled Senate. Hopefully the bill will struggle to pass muster with other rule makers generally, allowing the FCC to treat broadband as a common-carrier utility in the future.

http://www.pcworld.com/article/2303...-from-reclassifying-broadband-as-utility.html

I smell corporate lobbyist

 

[wiegeabo]

Nice how he blatantly ignores the fact the the Internet did its growing under Net Neutrality.

 

[MessiahDecoy123]

It must be opposite day where giving big companies fast lanes increases competition and growth.

 

[MessiahDecoy123]

A strong and very funny argument for net neutrality by John Oliver. (It's usually on HBO but it has been censored)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fpbOEoRrHyU

 

[DJ_KiDDvIcIOUs]

Saw that last night, he does great things on that show. Nice to have that kind of pallet cleanser after GoT

 

[Destructus86]

Looks like they were lying about not slowing down Netflix.


http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencet...s-claim-service-unusable-sites-work-fine.html


Verizon and Comcast slowing down Netflix streaming speed.

And sadly....even though I think Time Warner sucks...with them slowing down Netflix,...


http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/...rner_n_4778175.html?ncid=edlinkusaolp00000009

Comcast buying out Time Warner.

But then again...

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs...tflix-speeds-are-down-but-dont-blame-verizon/

yeah, i've noticed Netflix takes a lot longer to jump to HD now. Starts off grainy even though i'm paying for faster internet now. Only in the evenings though. It's seriously pissing me off.