FTC sides against Net Neutrality
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Let God sort 'em out The Federal Trade Commission has cautioned against regulations that would ensure telecom providers treat all internet traffic the same way.â¦
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Hundreds of groups and individual Internet users sounded off to the U.S. Federal Communications Commission on net neutrality in comments filed Monday, the deadline for responding to the agency&#39;s inquiry into the proposed regulation.
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Two privacy groups are stepping up the pressure on the U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC), saying the agency has an obligation to consider privacy concerns as it prepares to rule on the antitrust implications of&#160;Google&#39;s proposed acquisition of DoubleClick.The executive directors of&#160;the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) and the Center for Digital Democracy (CDD) repeated their call for the FTC to impose privacy conditions if it approves the merger. It appears that an FTC decision on the $3.1 billion acquisition is &quot;imminent,&quot; said Jeffrey Chester, CDD&#39;s executive director.FTC Commissioner Jon Leibowitz in October suggested the FTC&#39;s review of the deal had to be about competition questions, not privacy, but Chester disagreed during a press conference on Tuesday. One of the FTC&#39;s main duties is to protect consumer privacy, and the merger of the number one search provider with the number one ad server raises serious privacy questions, he said.Google&#39;s contention that there are no major privacy concerns is &quot;absurd on the face of it,&quot; Chester said. DoubleClick says it serves 8 billion online ads and processes 964GB of Web server log files each day, he said.&quot;It would be a violation of trust, in effect abuse of their own role, in not addressing an issue of such concern as the data-collection apparatus within the ever-growing behemoth,&quot; Chester said. &quot;If they&#39;re really the agency to protect consumer privacy, they will act to protect privacy. If they fail to act to protect privacy, they have basically put up a flag to American consumers saying, &#39;We surrender your data.&#39;&quot;Google spokesman Adam Kovacevich repeated Google&#39;s position that the merger would have positive effects.&quot;This acquisition is good for consumers, advertisers and Web site publishers, and we continue to be confident that it will be approved,&quot; he said. &quot;I would also point out what the FTC itself has said about privacy not playing a role in its review of the deal.&quot;Last week, the two groups&#160;asked FTC Chairman Deborah Platt Majoras to recuse herself from the decision on the merger, saying her husband works for a law firm that is advising DoubleClick on the deal in the U.S.&#160;Majoras declined Monday to recuse herself, saying that her husband isn&#39;t directly involved in the DoubleClick deal and that the Jones Day law firm is advising the company only before European regulators.An FTC spokesman wasn&#39;t immediately available for comment.Chester and EPIC executive director Marc Rotenberg repeated their calls for Majoras to recuse herself. Jones Day&#39;s Web site, until recently, said it was advising DoubleClick on the deal in the U.S. as well as Europe, they said.But the most important step the FTC can take is to impose privacy conditions on the merger, Rotenberg said. The case for a privacy review &quot;is very clear,&quot; he said.Chester agreed. &quot;Are they concerned about Americans&#39; privacy, or are they going to give Google a pass?&quot; he said.
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Timothy Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web, advocated that the U.S. Congress protect net neutrality and questioned the value of DRM (digital rights management) Thursday.
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Citizens have until Friday to sway government regulators on net neutrality, the principle that ISPs should treat all packets of internet data equally.
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Justice Department tells FCC that internet service providers should be allowed to charge a fee for priority Web traffic. DOJ says it's opposed to "Net neutrality," the principle that all Internet sites should be equally accessible to any Web user.
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'Power to the people. And us.' Just after Comcast copped to throttling P2P traffic, a new net neutrality bill appeared on Capitol Hill.â¦
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The U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC)&#160;has settled a complaint with a Web-based company it accused of selling people&#39;s telephone records without permission, the agency said Monday.
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Proponents of Net neutrality laws call for a hearing on the issue, arguing reports of peer-to-peer traffic interference support need for rules banning that practice.
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The U.S. Federal Trade Commission has settled a complaint against a company that owns patents to a widely used Ethernet standard, saying the patent owner was attempting to collect huge license fees despite a prior commitment to the contrary.
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The trade commission hears what's right and wrong with file sharing, but there's no guarantee it will institute regulations. Michael Grebb reports from Washington.
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The chairwoman of the Federal Trade Commission recommended against additional regulation of high-speed Internet traffic.
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The FTC's peer-to-peer workshop brings opposing sides together, and they agree something should be done, but it's that uncertain something that is causing trouble. Michael Grebb reports from Washington.
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The company tells the FCC that blocking some file sharing prevents subscribers from hogging the bandwidth and keeps net traffic moving.
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(InfoWorld) - The U.S. Federal Communications Commission (FCC)Â should resist calls to impose net neutrality regulations on broadband providers because such rules could hurt the Internet, the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ)Â said Thursday. The DOJ, in a brief filed with the FCC, said net neutrality rules could "inefficiently skew investment, delay innovation, and diminish consumer welfare." Rules that would prohibit broadband providers from giving priority to their own Internet traffic and prohibit them from blocking or slowing competitors' traffic could also prevent providers from charging fees for priority service, the DOJ said. This could, in turn, cause fees to increase to all broadband users, the DOJ said. "Free market competition, unfettered by unnecessary governmental regulatory restraints, is the best way to foster innovation and development of the Internet," the DOJ said. Net neutrality rules could also discourage broadband providers from investing in new, high-speed services and keep providers from managing their networks efficiently, the DOJ said. The DOJ's comments were in response toÂ an FCC inquiry, launched in March, about whether there's a need for net neutrality regulations. Individuals and organizations have filed more than 27,800 comments in the net-neutrality inquiry, many of them from people who want the FCC to impose net-neutrality rules. Some Internet-based companies and consumer groups have argued that net-neutrality rules are needed after the FCC and U.S. Supreme Court in 2005 did away with regulations that required incumbent broadband providers to share their networks with competing providers. Several telecom executives have complained that Internet companies are not adequately paying network owners for using their pipes. Public Knowledge, a consumer-rights group and net-neutrality advocate, said the DOJ doesn't seem to recognize that most U.S. consumers have few choices for broadband providers. "It is at odds with reality for a Justice Department that approved the largest telecommunications merger in history with a mere press release to now claim that market forces and antitrust enforcement will be able to protect the free and open Internet," Gigi Sohn, Public Knowledge's president, said. "A more vigorous antitrust analysis would have recognized there is a market failure and would have resulted in conditions on the AT&T takeover of BellSouth that would have benefited consumers and Internet companies." The DOJ has failed to recognize that net neutrality would protect consumers and Internet companies from discrimination, she added. "Perhaps the DOJ does not recall that there is very little in the way of market forces to protect consumers," Sohn said. The DOJ, however, said there's little evidence of the need for net-neutrality rules, with only a "few isolated examples" of broadband providers blocking Web content from competitors. "Proponents of 'net neutrality' regulation have failed to show that a sufficient case exists for imposing the sorts of broad marketplace restrictions that have been proposed," the DOJ filing said. In recent years, the DOJ has proposed its own regulations for the Internet. In mid-2006, the DOJ floated a proposal that would require ISPs to retain the Web histories of their users for two years as a way to aid law enforcement investigations. That proposal met resistance from ISPs.
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Another of the Net's founding wizards weighed in on the Net neutrality debate this week, as Tim Berners-Lee advocated that Congress protect Net neutrality and questioned the value of digital rights management tech.
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FCC clears the way for more companies to offer the alternative form of Net access. The US Federal Communications Commission this week cleared the way for power companies to roll out broadband over power line