This is being seriously mismanaged, and that may actually cause long term harm to the chances of saving (or restoring) net neutrality.
The big mistake being made is not explaining where the Congressional Review Act (CRA) approach fits into the bigger picture. There are several places along the timeline of net neutrality repeal where it in theory could be saved. The Congressional Review Act (CRA) approach is just one of them.
The CRA approach has almost no chance of actually passing both houses (it has a pretty good chance in the Senate, but because of the way the House is structured it would take a miracle there).
When you consider it in the context of the bigger picture, that's not a problem. Its role in the overall effort is to get members of Congress on the record, which might be useful later in campaigns for office. The public is broadly in favor of net neutrality and this support is very high even among Republicans.
That's probably not enough to get Republican voters to vote Democrat, because it is not high on the list of important issues for them, but it could be enough to get them to vote for more moderate Republicans in the Republican primaries or caucuses.
In sports terms, this is not a play to score a goal. It is an attempt to get better position to set up a later scoring play. But the people running these campaigns treat everything like it is a scoring attempt...and then when it doesn't score the people who participated feel like they failed.
That can discourage them, making them less likely to respond to later calls to action. Then they might not be there when it is time to actually go for a goal (e.g., get out and vote).
Except maybe for a PR tidal wave so huge that anyone who opposes net neutrality is driven out of business, I don't see how you convince companies to go against their own interests.
That is to say, what you're saying is true, but typically (as long as the net is in sight) the best way to set yourself up to score a goal later is to try to score a goal now.
The approach is prone to local maxima, but I'm not convinced there can be another approach here. If you're not trying to win it all, then you're setting yourself up to lose.
They can't even score a goal now. The purpose of this within the US legal system is a pure intermediate play. And the when net neutrality doesn't get overturned as a result of this instance people will feel demoralized and hopeless.
"We don’t know how this is going to end...."
They know very well how it will end. This is an effort to get ammo for the primaries.
I get the feeling that these sites are just 'preaching to the choir' (i.e. their customers already support these things, and most likely have let their 'representative' know).
Is anyone doing anything to give the 50 senators who are against this a taste of what is to come? I recall cloudflare or someome along those lines threatenning to throttle traffic from government IPs, or maybe that just happened in my dream..
It's not about changing minds. It's a call to action - they're specifically trying to get their users to contact their representatives.
Then again I find it troubling how easy politicians are getting bought these days while in essence it's not that hard to govern with all the people in mind instead of them self. But I may be very naive in this regards.
No, because I am fine with the way things are, ie unregulated.
Not only is it unlikely to pass both chambers and be signed by the president, passing the bill doesn't change the broader status of net neutrality. Currently, the legality of the FCC enforcing net neutrality is unclear, with the matter destined to be decided in the courts either way.
A law explicitly giving the FCC control has been necessary for over a decade, but both parties have refused to pass one or even consider passing a future one.
Unfortunately, that's not a winning argument from a rhetorical perspective. Almost every single person in both the House and the Senate, of both parties, voted for FOSTA/SESTA.
FOSTA and SESTA are truly abominable bills. They're arguably the most anti-gay bills passed at the federal level since DOMA in 1996. But telling people "net neutrality isn't about controlling the Internet, because it's not as bad as these other bills that received near-unanimous, bipartisan support" isn't going to win over any allies who weren't already in your camp on both issues in the first place.
And I think it could convert those in the anti camp. Some are against Net Neutrality because they see it as government control of the internet (it is not). They need to recognize that FOSTA is directly what they perceive Net Neutrality to be (at least in terms of results).
Edit: Actually, we'd have even more freedom with an Internet version of the FERC rule for open access to electrical transmission lines.[0]
> The legal and policy cornerstone of these rules is to remedy undue discrimination in access to the monopoly owned transmission wires that control whether and to whom electricity can be transported in interstate commerce.
0) https://www.ferc.gov/legal/maj-ord-reg/land-docs/rm95-8-00w....
We may actually have the opposite problem; Trump may not veto anything that comes across his desk.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Screenshot-2017-10-28_MEO...
If you believe some other law already prohibits this, please tell me.
Still not great though, since it just increases the moat for existing companies. Also companies in the states have tried exactly the same thing before with their video streaming service not counting towards you data cap.
The competition in the U.S. isn’t as great as it can be in here in the U.K. where many will only have a single choice for their ISP (or have restricted cell/sat isp or have a service that we wouldn’t even consider as broadband as it’s speed is so low).
It’s strange how people from different parts from the world may require different rules that govern them.
So? Most of that is empty space nobody is trying to serve. The key metric is population density, which is comparable between urban areas in Europe and the US. The size of the US has nothing to do with lack of ISP choice, as evidenced by the fact that the same problem doesn't occur in countries with lower population densities than the US (33.8 people per km²) such as Sweden (21.5), Finland (16.2), Norway (13.4) or Australia (3.1).
All I see about NN is a lot of manipulation from both sides. And what's especially frustrating is that some people insist that NN is anti-customer. No thanks, I'll keep my zero-rating.
What people are worried about is when the ISP's get to play kingmaker about which services will get deals and which will not. The cable TV providers are among the most hated companies in the US for a reason, and those are the only broadband ISP's available to most Americans.
Zero-rating as we fear it is just another way to let them impose arbitrary and capricious costs on their customers.
