Net Neutrality Rejected by the House

[Manyak]

Aww hell naw.

The U.S. House of Representatives definitively rejected the concept of Net neutrality on Thursday, dealing a bitter blow to Internet companies like Amazon.com, eBay and Google that had engaged in a last-minute lobbying campaign to support it.

By a 269-152 vote that fell largely along party lines, the House Republican leadership mustered enough votes to reject a Democrat-backed amendment that would have enshrined stiff Net neutrality regulations into federal law and prevented broadband providers from treating some Internet sites differently from others.

Of the 421 House members who participated in the vote that took place around 6:30 p.m. PT, the vast majority of Net neutrality supporters were Democrats. Republicans represented most of the opposition.

[AbstractOrigin]

Re: Net Neutrality Rejected by the House

Bastards!

[Goufunaki]

Re: Net Neutrality Rejected by the House

i'm not very bright when it comes to politics, what's all this mean?

[Kefka Jr.]

Re: Net Neutrality Rejected by the House

Yeah, is my blog gonna get shut down now or what?

[Manyak]

Re: Net Neutrality Rejected by the House

Network neutrality is the notion that networks should not distort application traffic by delaying, dropping, or modifying packets. As a regulatory principle, is also defined as the notion that all Internet traffic should have the same priority regardless of its application requirements. Alternative options allow ISPs to offer a different quality of service to application streams depending on contractual agreements. Technical limitations, such as different levels of Internet access bandwidth, physical locations of users and servers, and varying abilities of systems to present packets to the network, and laws of physics, prevent the implementation of network neutrality in a strict sense. Therefore, the goals of a neutral network policy are either to meet specific application needs as nearly as possible while providing equal service to applications with similar needs, or to require uniform behavior on the part of network applications.

Needless to say, this is cause for concern.

[Goufunaki]

Re: Net Neutrality Rejected by the House

Awesome!

Now in english?

[AbstractOrigin]

Re: Net Neutrality Rejected by the House

Companies can charge us little fees for using their services.

That's what I got from it.

[Valkysas]

Re: Net Neutrality Rejected by the House

site owners will also be able to pay off providers to make their site run faster than their competitors and such.

[Starba]

Re: Net Neutrality Rejected by the House

Can't providers also effectively block sites they don't want you to go to? I.e. Yahoo! pays off the people who give you your internet, and in turn the internet provider blocks, say, Google. Bad news man.

[Patryn]

Re: Net Neutrality Rejected by the House

Can't providers also effectively block sites they don't want you to go to? I.e. Yahoo! pays off the people who give you your internet, and in turn the internet provider blocks, say, Google. Bad news man.

That's exactly the problem. If Yahoo! does pay off your ISP, if you typed in Google it could possibly send you to Yahoo! instead. It also means that if an ISP doesn't want to make a site available, they could block it and make it impossible for their customers to go there.

Basically net neutrality would force ISPs to treat all websites the same. Now, they can act like bouncers and accept and reject sites that they do and don't like (and those that are willing to grease the bouncer).

[ChaosKnightXD]

Re: Net Neutrality Rejected by the House

*stabs U.S House of Representatives* fools.

[John Mora]

Re: Net Neutrality Rejected by the House

I'm guessing the ol' freedom of speech argument wasn't good enough. Wasn't good enough for AMERICAN REPRESENTATIVES OF THE PEOPLE.

[thetruecoolness]

Re: Net Neutrality Rejected by the House

Welcome to the United Corporations of America. Now all the ISPs can be like China (blocking what they feel like because it doesn't portray them, or their investors, in a positive ligth), and no one can say anything about it because you don't need to have the internet, and you don't need to have access to all sites. Plus you signed a contract which forgoes all your rights, and any responsibility on the part of the company for anything.

Yeah that is a bit reactionary, but probably not too far from the actual truth of what could happen if this trend in lack of responsibility for companies continues. Now I'm not for big government but for enforcing some sort of fairness in the market I believe that at times it is neccessary for a third party to step in (preferably neutral, though the government isn't always as neutral as you would like it to be). So it will be like Internet Explorer taking you to their search site when a site doesn't exist instead of a 404 page, or nothing, except this time the page does exist.

Of course the internet is an interesting beast, as with TV and radio money was always the limiting factor in what get's put on, since it costs a whole lot of money to just make something in those mediums and get it broadcast (so there the radio and tv companies can choose what gets put on), whereas now with the internet anyone can put things up for free or at least a much smaller fee than with other medium. But since the internet is owned by private corporations, there is not a whole lot the government can do without the consent of the people. So while this might feel bad, it is technically par for the course as the government usually doesn't interfere with private affairs. They can't really do anything until this can be proven to lead to monopolistic, or anti-freedom os speech practices. Of course freedom of speech on the net is definitly not fully protected as there are still a lot of things you can't say on the net, especially when it comes to defaming other people. And if you notice on cable a lot of times some channels don't come in as clear as others, now that might be justified in terms of the signal strength, but whos to say it's not something like this going on. They also get to choose what channels are on your lineup, though high demand for a channel will usually get it added there is no guarantee. Same with services like XM and such, so really having a neutrality like this would set a new precedent in entertainment delivery. So until the net becomes a government regulated medium, there is not real hope for neutrality. Welcome to the dark side of capitalism.

Also after reading this, notice the concept of Net Neutrality was struck down, meaning the opposite had been in place since it started, so any company could already be doing this. So really this can't have worse application now than it did before, as there were no checks against it and still aren't. And if we ever get a Democratic congress, and President then neutrality would likely pass, so really nothing has changed. Remember that companies have been able to do this as long as it's stated in the contract, or really ever if it's not stated in the contract they will be neutral. So this hasn't given ISPs any more power than they already have, it just would have taken some away if it passed. So while it will be worse to not have net neutrality for the consumer, it's still the same now.

[Red Dragon]

Re: Net Neutrality Rejected by the House

Didn't the senete say yes to NN though? So I guess it is going BACK to them now.

[Fayorei]

Re: Net Neutrality Rejected by the House

God freaking... DANGIT.

Government represented by the people? Hell nah.

Well, most people I talked to about it either didn't take me seriously("People can't control the internet with money!") or simply didn't know about it until it was too late.

You'd think this would count as extortion and may possibly lead to a monopoly. Wouldn't they have to solve that, then?