Can the FCC be influenced by donations from private interests? Is there any sway congress can impose upon the FCC?
this post was submitted on 28 Sep 2023
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This really isn't the right question. The better question is why Congress hasn't codified net neutrality into law, which is what the FCC has been asking for at least a decade if not longer.
In some ways, it's better that the FCC can do this without Congress. But it leaves it open to the next republican president to just do away with it.
Given some states barring porn, it actually be interesting to see if other states like California start codifying NN into law, forcing companies to adopt a patchwork of laws. Typically the loss of money motivates them to lobby Congress to do the right thing.
Wonderful input, thank you. As far as I'm aware, because we haven't had NN, the downside we've seen is ISPs counting data usage for streaming, e.g., Netflix toward a user's monthly data usage, whereas they wouldn't count data usage count if the user was streaming from the ISP's own streaming service.
This leads me to believe Netflix, Disney, and the swath of companies who provide streaming services, but not their own ISP, may be, indeed, a proponent of NN.
I can see how, with the combination of ISPs losing money due to implementing that patchwork of "Internet laws", and other non-ISP-providing streaming service companies losing money to a lack of NN, we may see NN codified into law. But, to get there, things have to get worse first, no?
the swath of companies who provide streaming services, but not their own ISP
TBH, this seems to point towards the need for a model of connectivity provider that's more in line with that of a utility than that of a vertically-integrated bandwidth+content-sales conglomerate.
We don't need connectivity to come bundled with content; that just creates motive and opportunity for shitty ISPs to do anti-competitive bullshit like throttling competitors' content.
Plus, the cost of delivering bandwidth has plummeted by more than 80% in just the last 15 years- there's no reason for it to keep costing slightly more over time to have internet service, except that the people delivering it have a stock price to pump.
If we want net neutrality, we should separate ISPs from content providers in the same way we separated retail banking from investment banking
Fwiw, there was NN but it was during Obama. Trump, and his appointed Ajit Pai rolled it back.
Under Obama, data caps was not directly a NN thing. It was more that ISPs couldn't favor one traffic over another. So where this got played out was if you had T-Mobile, they couldn't do a Netflix deal where their traffic wasn't counted but your traffic to Hulu was.
To be clear, I'm not in favor of data caps but want to make sure what NN is and what it isn't.
My personal fear is that it may be too late. With the consolidation of the market since Trump, we don't have a ton of options. I'd really like to see FCC take on monopolies like Amazon and Google but probably not enough time between now and the election to make a difference.