us government: what could possibly happen when we remove net neutrality? yall worry too much.
verizon rubbing their greedy hands together: no one will be able to contest our actions
verizon:
Idijit Pie should be tried for treason for forcing this repeal the American people didn’t want while clearly doing it for his old company.
I just want to stress for people: Their bandwidth was throttled to 200-600 kbps. For simplicity’s sake we’ll average it to 400.
400 kbps is roughly 50 times slower than the US national average, and about 100-200 times slower than what the “unlimited” plan the fire department bought promised them.
That isn’t “Kind of inconvenient” throttling, it’s “borderline unusable for modern purposes” throttling, especially in a situation like this where quick, up-to-date responses are essential.
To be fair to Verizon, they have admitted they did wrong, and that they should have waived the cap and not throttled the data. The problem is that their mistake, in a situation like this, can get people killed. An apology and admission of wrongdoing don’t bring people back to life, and the fact a mistake like this can be made raises serious concerns about the competency of these newly-deregulated companies, concerns that would’ve be completely moot prior to the repeal.
This wasn’t a fucking mistake. They specifically claimed that if they were allowed to control what speeds different people got at different times, they would use that to divert more bandwidth toward emergency responders and crisis areas, and then they deliberately did the exact opposite of that because they knew they could get away with it and it would save them a couple bucks at the expense of human lives.
This is not an ‘oh whoops we got caught throttling a video streaming service that we compete with sorry we won’t do it again no really’ apology. This is ‘we cut off the communications of a group of people literally fighting for their lives in a blazing hellscape because lol what are you going to do about it we own your government’.
This is fucked but has nothing to do with the Trump admin doing away with Net Neutrality. The kind of throttling that Santa Clara experienced was not the kind of throttling that became legal after the FCC gutted Net Neutrality rules (which is throttling to favor certain Internet traffic). What happened here is what happens to every American with an unlimited data plan. The more data you use the more your download speeds are slowed down.
Bringing back Net Neutrality wouldn’t not have solved this, I repeat this would have happened with or without Net Neutrality. Verizon supposedly has a policy to not throttle emergency services, which didn’t happen. This is fucked but you have to advocate for regulations that will actually solve this problem.
“Verizon, to its point, was throttling “unlimited”
customers in less extreme circumstances who hit certain data thresholds
well before last year’s net neutrality repeal. The legal brief also says
the filers are not arguing that the throttling would necessarily have
been a violation of the previous net neutrality rules, which were passed
in 2015. Still, the filers of the brief do argue that the problem is
about net neutrality in a different sense.
The throttling may not have been a violation of the
previous rules, but the brief, also filed by attorneys general in 22
states, argues that the FCC failed to take public safety into account
when it passed its repeal. “That was part of the FCC’s original mandate:
it needs to be thinking about public safety in its rulemaking,” says
Santa Clara County counsel James Williams. As the FCC is required to
consider the interests of public safety, the FCC’s repeal is therefore
“arbitrary and capricious,” the brief argues.
The throttling, the filers say, also showed how service
providers will be willing to act in ways that benefit themselves
financially in the absence of regulations. “We should expect nothing
less than an ISP to act in its economic interest — that’s its job,”
Williams says. (Verizon said in its statement that its practice is to
not enforce slowdowns during emergencies and that it has removed similar
restrictions in other emergency situations.)
Others have pointed out that, under the previous rules,
customers had a path to complain to the FCC when they believed
throttling was unfair. In this case, that route was largely re-directed
to the FTC, a structure that’s been criticized as insufficient.
Gigi Sohn, who worked on the net neutrality rules under
the previous FCC chairman, argues that there is some question about
whether Verizon’s actions would have violated the 2015 rules. But,
regardless, she believes the repeal eliminated a route that would have
given them recourse to make an expedited case in front of the agency,
which could have resolved the dispute more quickly. Instead, Verizon and
the fire officials had a frantic, lengthy back-and-forth over email, an
exchange that appeared in the brief.
“If the net neutrality rules were still in place,” Sohn
says, “[t]rust me, I don’t think there would’ve been a monthlong
conversation about this.”
Cheloneuniverse 