These causes came on to be heard on the petitions for review of an order of the Federal Communications Commission and were argued by counsel. On consideration thereof, it is ORDERED and ADJUDGED that the petitions for review are denied, in accordance with the opinion of the court filed herein this date.
Two versions of a ban on rate regulation for broadband service are moving through the U.S. congress, but there’s more to it than preventing the Federal Communications Commission from overseeing monthly subscription prices.
House resolution 2666 was passed by the house of representatives and is now awaiting action by the U.S. senate. As currently written, it says the FCC “may not regulate the rates charged for broadband Internet access service”. That simple and very broad statement covers more than just monthly fees.… More
Perhaps as soon as tomorrow, a federal appeals court in Washington will decide whether or not the Federal Communications Commission 1. has the legal authority to impose common carrier rules on broadband service and 2. whether it followed all the necessary procedures when it did so.
The Federal Communication Commission released its new transparency requirements for big Internet service providers – small ISPs are exempt for now, and maybe forever. The rules spell out how ISPs must disclose performance metrics, including “expected and actual download and upload speeds, latency, and packet loss”, and make that information available via the web.
It might surprise you to learn that the rules aren’t actually new, although the FCC’s decision to reclassify broadband as a common carrier service last year made some changes to the requirements.… More
By definition, competition requires market information. Internet service providers, like pretty much any business, have a natural tendency to want to reduce competition. So they make it very difficult to do comparison shopping. Try going to Comcast’s or AT&T’s website and get a fast and straight answer to a simple question: what’s the monthly price for a service package? It takes tenacity to get it, if it can be had at all. It’s one more way to protect a monopoly business from the perils of competition.… More
Mid-sized Internet service providers as well as small ones would be exempt from Federal Communications Commission rules that require, among other things, full disclosure of monthly price, fees, data caps and other such terms of service, under a bill approved unanimously (411 to zip) by the U.S. house of representatives. HR 4596 says that transparency rules adopted last year by the FCC, as part of its decision to regulate broadband as a common carrier service, “shall not apply to any small business”, which is defined as “any provider of broadband Internet access service that has not more than 250,000 subscribers”.… More
The European Union will implement network neutrality rules that are significantly friendlier to telecoms companies than the ones adopted earlier this year in the U.S. The European parliament rejected amendments –proposed by pretty much the same high tech companies that successfully pushed for the more stringent U.S. rules – that would have closed gaping loopholes.
Part of the problem with the rules in their current form, argued Joe McNamee at the European Digital Rights campaign group, is that they are ambiguous.
Small and medium sized Internet service providers are getting a year’s reprieve from the Federal Communications Commission. They won’t have to file reports detailing the prices, fees and data caps that apply to the services they offer to public, nor will they have to provide performance data, such as packet loss or peak usage time throughput, or information about network management policies and practices. At least not for the next year.
The requirements – transparency rule, as it’s called – were included in the FCC’s original decision back in February to impose common carrier regulations, up to a point, on broadband service.… More
Network neutrality rules, adopted by the Federal Communications Commission earlier this year, were examined yesterday by a federal appeals court in Washington, D.C. Both sides – the FCC and its allies that favor tighter regulation of Internet service providers, and telecommunications companies of all technological flavors that do not – came out of the session with upbeat assessments of whether the three-judge panel would buy their arguments.
According to an article in Ars Technica, the judges seemed amenable to the idea that the FCC can subject residential broadband to common carrier rules but more skeptical about whether those same rules may be applied to mobile services or interconnection agreements between companies…
“The argument started off in a way that we took to be quite hopeful,” according to attorney Kevin Russell, who is representing consumer advocacy groups and other interveners who support the FCC’s rules…
Appeals Court Judge David Tatel “ask[ed] the challengers whether the Supreme Court hadn’t already decided most of the case in a prior decision called Brand X, which he suggested was best read to say that the commission gets broad authority to decide how best to classify these kinds of services,” Russell said…
Potential problem areas for net neutrality proponents include the FCC’s assertion of authority over interconnection disputes, the application of net neutrality rules to mobile networks, and questions about whether the FCC provided the public enough notice before enacting its rules.
