Obama says FCC should reclassify internet as a utility

Posted on November 12, 2014 by RonMamita — 2 Comments

Recall that the U.S. high speed internet is NOT top rate, listen to professor Susan Crawford’s dismal assessment of the U.S. physical infrastructure in the video above.
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President Obama has come out in support of reclassifying internet service as a utility, a move that would allow the Federal Communications Commission to enforce more robust regulations and protect net neutrality. “To put these protections in place, I’m asking the FCC to reclassifying internet service under Title II of a law known as the Telecommunications Act,” Obama says in a statement this morning. “In plain English, I’m asking [the FCC] to recognize that for most Americans, the internet has become an essential part of everyday communication and everyday life.”

Obama Wants to Now Fully Regulate the Internet as a Public Utility

Obama is now using his EXECUTIVE POWERS to seize control of the internet. This is not a democratic action voted on by the people or even their pretend representatives. No bill was drafted and introduced in the House or Senate. This is Obama using dictatorial powers that are undemocratic by their nature. This is simply a presidential decree and the majority of people are too socialist to even understand what is taking place here. They just believe whatever government does is for our good.

There have been no gatekeepers deciding which sites you get to access. There are no toll roads on the information superhighway. This set of principles, the idea of net neutrality, has unleashed the power of the Internet and given innovators the chance to thrive. Communism collapsed BECAUSE of central planning. Abandoning these principles would threaten to end the Internet as we know it.

2 comments on “Obama says FCC should reclassify internet as a utility”

RonMamita says:

November 12, 2014 at 1:27 pm

Why Internet connections are fastest in South Korea?

http://www.cnn.com/2010/TECH/03/31/broadband.south.korea/

South Korea has more [competition in broadband] than the United States,” Faris said. “In fact, most countries have more than the United States.”

Some academics, including Yochai Benkler, co-director of the Berkman Center, have criticized the U.S. government’s broadband plan as not doing enough to create the kind of competition that is present in other countries.

In a New York Times editorial, Benkler says competition will reduce costs for broadband consumers.
“Without a major policy shift to increase competition, broadband service in the United States will continue to lag far behind the rest of the developed world,” he writes.
[…]
There are stark cultural differences between hyper-connected Korea, where more than 94 percent of people have high-speed connections, according to the OECD, and the United States, where only about 65 percent of people are plugged into broadband, according to an FCC survey.

The South Korean government has encouraged its citizens to get computers and to hook up to high-speed Internet connections by subsidizing the price of connections for low-income and traditionally unconnected people.

[See a more recent report: http://thehill.com/policy/technology/222339-report-us-internet-speeds-and-prices-lag-behind-others
Americans pay far more and get far less when it comes to the Internet than many other people around the world.
U.S. policy is beholden to mega corps, Wall Street, and military industry, with reductions in commitments to small biz, competition, anti-monopolistic policies, and caring for the poverty sector. Those are my observations ~Ron]
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NCTA Stunned By White House Title II Response

Says Title II Would Have ‘Tectonic’ and ‘Devastating’ Results
(Updated) 11/10/2014
National Cable & Telecommunications Association president Michael Powell, who as FCC chairman was no fan of efforts to classify the Internet under Title II, joined other stakeholders in opposing the President Obama’s announced effort to get the FCC to take that route to new Internet regs.

“We are stunned the President would abandon the longstanding, bipartisan policy of lightly regulating the Internet and calling for extreme Title II regulation,” Powell said in a statement. “The cable industry strongly supports an open Internet, is building an open internet, and strongly believes that over-regulating the fastest growing technology in our history will not advance the cause of Internet freedom. There is no dispute about the propriety of transparency rules and bans on discrimination and blocking. But this tectonic shift in national policy, should it be adopted, would create devastating results. Heavily regulating the Internet will lead to slower Internet growth, higher prices for consumers, and the threat of excessive intervention by the government in the working of the Internet.”

He also warned of the signal it would send to classify the Internet under common carriage rules.

“This will also have severe and profound implications internationally, as the United States loses the high ground in arguing against greater control of the Internet by foreign governments. There is no substantive justification for this overreach, and no acknowledgment that it is unlawful to prohibit paid prioritization under Title II. We will fight vigorously against efforts to impose this backwards policy. “The FCC is an independent agency and it should exercise independent judgment in crafting new rules. This is truly a matter that belongs in Congress and only Congress should make a policy change of this magnitude. Congress can easily unravel the legal and jurisdictional knot that has tied up the FCC in crafting sustainable open Internet rules, without resorting to rules of the rotary-dial phone era. We urge Congress to swiftly exercise leadership of this important issue.”

FCC chairman Tom Wheeler Monday said he would take the President’s input into account, but pointed out, as Obama conceded, that the FCC is an independent agency that will make its own call. Republican leaders in the House FCC oversight committees plan to begin work next session on overhauling telecom regs.

Update: David Cohen EVP of Comcast (NCTA’s largest member), agreed with Powell about the inadvisability of the President’s move, and seconded the call for Congress to weigh in.

“Comcast and cable companies (along with the telcos) have led the broadband revolution, being the first to roll out America’s fastest broadband speeds across the country,” he said. “As the White House itself acknowledged in its broadband report in 2013, this only happened because we were not subject to the intrusive regulatory regime designed for a different era.

“To attempt to impose a full-blown Title II regime now, when the classification of cable broadband has always been as an information service, would reverse nearly a decade of precedent, including findings by the Supreme Court that this classification was proper. This would be a radical reversal that would harm investment and innovation, as today’s immediate stock market reaction demonstrates. And such a radical reversal of consistent contrary precedent should be taken up by the Congress.

– See more at: http://www.multichannel.com/news/technology/ncta-stunned-white-house-title-ii-response/385425
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ASK THIS

March 14, 2006

By Bruce Kushnick http://www.niemanwatchdog.org/index.cfm?fuseaction=ask_this.view&askthisid=186
bruce@newnetworks.com

Q: Why is the United States 16th in broadband Internet technology and falling? DSL lines and cable modems, when compared to alternatives such as fiber-optic lines, are inferior products. How, then, did they become the standard in America?

Q: Why have U.S. customers paid an estimated $200 billion in higher services rates and tax breaks for fiber-optic networks they never received? How has this affected American industry and technology, given the economic benefits of better connectivity?

Q: How did the mergers in the past decade of SBC (now called “AT&T”) with PacBell, SNET, and Ameritech, or Verizon with GTE, NYNEX and Bell Atlantic, harm the future of fiber-optic lines? What happened to the competition these companies promised?

Q: Is the recent announcement of AT&T to purchase BellSouth, one of the two remaining original Bell companies in the Public Interest?

Q: Each state had a separate contract with a different phone company that was supposed to provide fiber-optic based broadband. What is the history of fiber optic deployment in your state? How much money was collected in your state for fiber-optic and other technologies that were never brought to market?

Q: Did local phone companies use money slated to improve broadband connections in homes to enter the long-distance telephone market? Why do phone companies charge a “hidden broadband tax” on phone bills?

Through most of the 1990s, the United States led the world in high-speed connectivity. Yet according to the International Telecommunications Union (ITU), the United States, despite having the most broadband connections, has stumbled to 16th in broadband technology and continues to fall.

This situation has directly harmed this country’s technology edge, and makes the U.S. a backwater compared to South Korea, Japan and even Slovenia.

By 2006, according to telecommunication companies’ own documents, 86 million customers in the United States should have received 45 Mbps service. In fact, South Korea and Japan do even better: they routinely offer 100 Mbps connections in both directions, uploading and downloading, for around $40 per month. But in the United States, the best connections top out at 1/3 this speed and cost 400% more—and very few places even have access to the new fiber-optic services being offered. The United States once led the world in Web technology. What happened?

The answer is, the merger of the phone companies that control the phone networks decreased competition. Instead of deploying the high-speed fiber-optic lines they promised, they were content to collect profits, tinker with existing copper connections instead of rewiring, and roll out inferior DSL services. The FCC defines anything above 200 Kbps as broadband (1000 Kbps = 1 Mbps), allowing them to claim that Americans have broadband access. However, this definition is a politically-driven embarrassment for technologists, the equivalent of two tin-cans with string.

Yet—and here is the most troubling part—the phone companies got paid anyway. Through tax breaks and increased service fees, Verizon and the old Bells reaped an estimated $200 billion since the early 1990s to improve subscriber lines in the United States. And what have American consumers received? The most common DSL Service over the old copper networks tops out at 768 Kbps in most areas—a hundred times slower than routine connections in other countries. (There are faster, more expensive versions of DSL, but most have a top speed of 1-3 mbps in one direction, and it varies based on how far a person lives from a network hub.)
– See more at: http://www.niemanwatchdog.org/index.cfm?fuseaction=ask_this.view&askthisid=186#sthash.XKcDamRw.dpuf

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Spartan of Truth says:

November 12, 2014 at 4:37 pm

Reblogged this on Spartan of Truth and commented:
They won’t stop until we are all in pods with data up-links connected to the backs of our heads! It’s their nature…

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