NET NEUTRALITY UPHELD BY FEDERAL COURTS AGAINST CABLE COMPANIES

NET NEUTRALITY UPHELD BY FEDERAL COURTS AGAINST CABLE COMPANIES (GOOGLE FIBER):

Sources: Politico, Youtube

It's Official!

Thanks to a Federal Appeal judge's decision, Pres Obama and some members of Congress, all human beings who reside on American soil will enjoy access to a Free and Open Internet highway.

The Cable company barons have vowed to continue fighting for their legal right to restrict access.

Hello Google FIBER!

***** Court upholds Obama-backed net neutrality rules

A federal appeals court Tuesday upheld a White House-supported effort to make internet service providers treat all web traffic equally, delivering a major defeat to cable and telephone companies.

The D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals, in a 2-1 vote, affirmed the FCC's latest net neutrality rules, which consumer groups and President Barack Obama have backed as essential to prevent broadband providers from blocking or degrading internet traffic. 

The telecom industry and Republicans have heavily criticized the rules as burdensome and unnecessary regulation, with Texas Sen. Ted Cruzonce labeling it “Obamacare for the Internet.”

AT&T immediately announced it would appeal the ruling, saying it's always expected the issue to be decided by the Supreme Court. 

Several industry trade groups are expected to join the effort.

The court decision marks a victory for FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler, who led the agency’s Democratic majority in approving the rules in February 2015 over the objections of the agency's two GOP commissioners. 

The rules apply utility-style regulation originally written for telephone companies to both land-based and wireless Internet services.

Wheeler on Tuesday celebrated the ruling, calling it a “victory for consumers and innovators who deserve unfettered access to the entire web.”

“It ensures the internet remains a platform for unparalleled innovation, free expression and economic growth,” the FCC chairman said in a statement. “After a decade of debate and legal battles, today’s ruling affirms the Commission’s ability to enforce the strongest possible internet protections — both on fixed and mobile networks — that will ensure the internet remains open, now and in the future.”

Big internet service providers, such as Verizon and Comcast, argued the rules will chill investment in network infrastructure. AT&T and CenturyLink, along with cable, wireless and telecom trade groups, filed the lawsuit to overturn the order.

During oral arguments in December, appeals court judges David Tatel, Sri Srinivasan and Stephen Williams had seemed receptive to the FCC’s decision to ground its net neutrality rules in telephone-style regulation. 

In the majority opinion, written by Tatel and Srinivasan, the judges said the FCC's approach was bolstered by how people view the internet today. 

"These conclusions about consumer perception find extensive support in the record and together justify the Commission’s decision," they wrote.

The majority also let stand the FCC's decision to apply net neutrality rules to the wireless internet, citing the "rapidly growing and virtually universal use of mobile broadband service.” 

That's a critical feature of the rules, since many people today access the web through smartphones.

Williams, the lone dissenter, said he agreed the FCC has the authority to change how it regulates broadband providers, but said the agency didn’t provide enough reasons doing so.

Congressional Democrats cheered the court decision as a win for consumers and free speech, with Bernie Sanders tweeting that it "will help ensure we don't turn over our democracy to the highest bidder." 

Republicans criticized the opinion, and some GOP lawmakers reiterated calls for legislation to undo the FCC's order and create rules that are less burdensome to industry.

"This is why we need to rewrite the Communications Act," Rep. John Shimkus (R-Ill.) said. "There's a better way to protect consumers from blocking and throttling without stifling innovation or delaying build-out. That way requires action by Congress."

But public interest groups involved in the net neutrality battle urged industry and Republicans to give up the fight.

"The people have spoken, the courts have spoken and this should be the last word on net neutrality," Free Press President and CEO Craig Aaron said in a statement.

Republican FCC Commissioner Ajit Pai — who voted against the net neutrality order — said big cable and telecom firms should keep pursuing the case in court.

"I continue to believe that these regulations are unlawful, and I hope that the parties challenging them will continue the legal fight,” Pai said.

The telecom sector has a successful track record in thwarting the FCC’s net neutrality efforts. 

A lawsuit by Verizon scuttled the agency’s previous 2010 Open Internet order.

The Internet Crashed! Its Doomsday! How Will You Survive??

Pres. Obama on Cyber Security. Obama stages fight in Cyber War. NBC's Tracie Potts reports.

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

What if the Internet breaks?


The 40-year-old system might be vulnerable to technical collapse and cyberattack, which could cause widespread chaos in fields from banking to health care to government.

When your Internet service goes down, it's at best an inconvenience. If you rely on it for business, it can quickly cost you money.

So imagine: What happens if the Internet breaks?

Picture people wandering the streets lost without GPS or maps on their iPhones, unable to pay for food or other goods with a simple swipe of a card.

Companies would have to resort to faxes and phone calls instead of e-mail; they'd quickly reach capacity and be unable to function. Credit cards wouldn't work; stores and hospitals would run short of supplies. Even electrical power to our homes could be disrupted.

"It would be a mess," said Dave Marcus, the director of security research for McAfee (MFE, news, msgs). "You would be taking businesses that were designed to do all their point-of-sale and financial transactions through the Internet and going back to pen and paper and taking checks in a car to the bank. People would lose their minds."

On the 40th anniversary of the first transmission over the earliest version of the Internet, it's more than an idle question to examine the network's fragility. It's been more than 20 years since the last systemwide overhaul, and Internet infrastructure is still based on 1970s ideas about computer networks.

Headline-making outages of popular Web sites such as YouTube and Twitter merely hint at the damage a full-blown failure could wreak. The Internet protocols that allow computers to communicate in networks have infiltrated every sector of our economy.

"The Internet has moved from being a toy or ornament to something that's central to our economy," said James Lewis, a senior fellow at CSIS, a nonprofit think tank in Washington, D.C. "We've automated all these processes, which makes our economy much more efficient, which means cheap. But it also means we're now dependent."

How could the Internet break?

The obvious question is, could it happen? In fact, parts of the Internet go down quite frequently.

The outages that make headlines usually involve a large segment going down, either cutting service to a geographical area or taking down a given Web site. For instance, Michael Jackson's death sent people flooding to sites such as Google News and Twitter, rendering each temporarily inaccessible. A few years ago, Pakistan's attempt to block access to YouTube in that country resulted in a two-hour outage of YouTube across the world. And early this year, hackers kicked the entire nation of Kyrgyzstan off the Internet.

Those examples highlight the two main risks: an attack or a technical collapse.

A systemwide outage is hard to envision, though. The Internet is a decentralized system of routers and networks owned by a variety of governmental and private organizations. That makes it resilient: If one section breaks, the network calculates a route around the disruption.

The Internet opened for business in 1969, when a government project connected scientists, researchers and military officials by networking giant mainframes. In the early 1990s, the government opened the Internet to commercial development. In 1994, Netscape launched its browser, the first of an ever-increasing cascade of user-friendly software and applications for public consumption.

To bring down the entire Internet, something or someone would probably have to disrupt the core Internet protocols -- the rules that computers follow when trying to communicate with other computers. That would not only break the World Wide Web but also private IP networks that companies maintain for greater security.

One possible avenue would be to attack the domain name system, or DNS, that identifies the address of each computer or device attached to an IP network. Currently, just more than a dozen computers scattered around the world contain the DNS addressing information for the entire Internet, Lewis said.

If someone were able to erase or scramble that information, your computer wouldn't know where to find the information on a given Web page or where to deliver an e-mail. But all that information is duplicated on each of the central servers.

That redundancy is probably the Internet's best defense. The Internet was designed on the premise that computers are smart but the network is fallible, even when the computer operators attached to it were all highly educated academics. These days, of course, those 30,000 experts have been succeeded by 1.5 billion untrained people connecting computers, iPods, BlackBerrys, televisions and other devices.

Simply staying ahead of the demand for DNS addresses and server capacity is a challenge. VeriSign receives 50 billion queries each day from computers looking for DNS data and expects that to rise to 4 trillion by 2020, according to Ken Silva, the company's chief technology officer.

Part of the debate in Washington over so-called net neutrality involves who would pay for billions in upgrades to enable the Internet to handle the demand of uses such as high-definition video. Experts at AT&T and elsewhere have suggested the Net could run out of capacity next year. The point is hotly debated, and it's not clear what would happen if it did.

The Doomsday scenario:

If the Internet did break, the impact would ripple through to:

* Communications. You wouldn't be able to get information from e-mail or the Web. Phone and television services that rely on IP networking would go dark. News organizations would be unable to communicate internally or to use the Web to gather and disseminate news. Governments would have trouble communicating internally and broadcasting emergency information.

* Financial transactions. Banks process payments electronically over IP networks, whether by the swipe of a credit card or the check you send from your bank's Web site. They do have backup systems, relying on physical checks and phone networks, but those require human staffing and would struggle to keep up with demand.

* Transportation. Airplanes, trains and even some roads rely on IP networks to ensure smooth transportation. Much travel would grind to a near standstill, disrupting the movement of people and goods around the country.

* Retail supply chain. Even those trucks and shipping avenues that work would be taken back to the dark ages, since retail stores wouldn't be able to use automated inventory systems. At Wal-Mart, for instance, when an item is swiped for sale, the cashier's machine sends a signal to a central computer database that a new product is needed in that location. A Wal-Mart Stores (WMT, news, msgs) spokeswoman declined to comment.

* Health care. Many of our medical records are stored on computer databases. With networks down, a health care provider would have to be standing in front of the relevant computer in order to access a record. Pharmacies, hospitals and clinics would have trouble accessing records and keeping supplies in stock.

* Electricity grid. You wouldn't lose power automatically if the Internet broke, but energy companies would be unable to send control signals around the grid. "That network becomes a potential point of failure," VeriSign's Silva said.

"If the Internet stopped working, every major corporation and government agency would not be able to function," said Tom Kellermann, a vice president at Core Security Technologies.

Efforts to protect the Internet

Don't run off to stock the fallout shelter, though. Many measures are in place to prevent a catastrophic failure.

"There are so many redundancies built into the Internet protocol and the architecture," McAfee's Marcus said. "The actual root servers of the DNS are not approachable by most computers."

At VeriSign, which oversees Web sites ending in ".com," 75 duplicate servers contain the same answers for computers that query the database for DNS data. VeriSign uses multiple operating systems, computers from different manufacturers and redundant routers to ensure that a bad chip or operating system vulnerability doesn't become a single point of failure. The master database also checks data before sending it out on the network to make sure any corruption isn't propagated.

"We attempt to make sure we are over-provisioned enough to not only deal with the demand in load but the demand in threats," Silva said. "If companies don't invest in infrastructure, they will pay a price for it eventually."

The government requires financial companies to maintain backup systems to ensure the smooth functioning of the system, said Scott Talbott, a senior vice president at The Financial Services Roundtable, which represents banks, insurance companies, mutual funds and securities firms.

"Financial institutions, like all major users of the Net, maintain and test contingency plans for a wide range of scenarios, including Net capacity issues, outages, routing complications and browser problems," Talbott said. "These plans are designed to keep all critical functions up and running, and to keep service levels as high as possible.

"If computer systems shut down, banks would have backup systems, and those legacy systems would cut in. Depending on the length of delay, there may be an inconvenience to the customer and a slowing of the transactions."

But while the lack of a central Internet authority deprives bad actors of a single target to bring down the Net, it also means there's no single organization that can order new security or protocols.

"The people who are managing the system work really hard to keep it stable. Our problem is that these Internet protocols are from the '70s," said Lewis, of the CSIS think tank. "You can polish it and keep it tuned up, but it's still a 1970s car. We know there are people in the world who are trying to figure out, 'How can I bring this thing down?'"

Even criminals need the Net

Perhaps the most reassuring argument against the threat of attack is that even the people who have the skill and motivation to carry one out -- rogue governments, terrorists or criminals -- are dependent on it.

"The bad guys really have no interest," said Marcus Sachs, the director of the SANS Internet Storm Center, an all-volunteer Internet early-warning organization. "It's not to their benefit to monkey around with the wires and the switches because they too are reliant on the Internet for communication and to steal things. It's kind of like a bank robber who would blow up the bridge next to the bank."

The major crime syndicates of the world derive 60% of their revenue from cybercrime, and each has a business unit solely devoted to hacking. "They don't want to burn down the castle; they want to take it over. They want to pillage it slowly," Core Security Technologies' Kellermann said. "It's not about breaking the Internet; it's about controlling the Internet. It's about maintaining a consistent, clandestine presence."

Likewise, terrorists use the Internet to recruit new members, disseminate propaganda, move money and communicate. Moreover, McAfee's Marcus noted: "How can you see the terror you're supposed to be inspiring in others if you can't access the Internet?"




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Sources: MSNBC, Money Central, Google Maps

FCC Chief To Propose More Bandwidth, Net Neutrality For Consumers...Thank You

U.S. as Traffic Cop in Web Fight


The U.S. government plans to propose broad new rules Monday that would force Internet providers to treat all Web traffic equally, seeking to give consumers greater freedom to use their computers or cellphones to enjoy videos, music and other legal services that hog bandwidth.

The move would make good on a campaign promise to Silicon Valley supporters like Google Inc. from President Barack Obama, but will trigger a battle with phone and cable companies like AT&T Inc. and Comcast Corp., which don't want the government telling them how to run their networks.

The proposed rules could change how operators manage their networks and profit from them, and the everyday online experience of individual users. Treating Web traffic equally means carriers couldn't block or slow access to legal services or sites that are a drain on their networks or offered by rivals.

The rules will escalate a fight over how much control the government should have over Internet commerce. The Obama administration is taking the side of Google, Amazon.com Inc. and an array of smaller businesses that want to profit from offering consumers streaming video, graphics-rich games, movie and music downloads and other services.

Julius Genachowski, head of the Federal Communications Commission, is also expected to propose in a speech Monday, for the first time, that rules against blocking or slowing Web traffic would apply to wireless-phone companies, according to people familiar with the plan.

Wireless carriers, which have been among the fiercest opponents of such regulation, continue to restrict what kind of data travels over the airwaves they control. For example, earlier this year, AT&T restricted an Internet-phone service from Skype so iPhone users couldn't place calls on AT&T's cellular network. At the time, AT&T cited network congestion concerns.

"We believe that this kind of regulation is unnecessary in the competitive wireless space as it would prevent carriers from managing their networks -- such as curtailing viruses and other harmful content -- to the benefit of their consumers," said Chris Guttman-McCabe, vice president of regulatory affairs for CTIA, the wireless industry's trade group.

If the FCC does force U.S. wireless carriers to open their networks to data-heavy applications like streaming video, it could push them beyond the limited capacity they have. Already, in areas like New York and San Francisco, a high concentration of iPhones has caused many AT&T customers to complain about degrading service.

In such a scenario, wireless carriers may have to rethink how much they charge for data plans or even cap how much bandwidth individuals get, said Julie Ask, a wireless analyst at Jupiter Research.

The FCC's proposal will take into account the bandwidth limitations faced by wireless carriers, according to people familiar with the plan, and would ask how such rules should apply to current networks.

The rules could encourage big Internet companies to launch new data-intensive services by establishing that their traffic can't be slowed or blocked. In the business market, companies that make Internet-phone services or video-conferencing software may invest more heavily in those services, some analysts say.

The rules are likely to be a big boon to smaller tech companies, like Silicon Valley start-ups and small makers of mobile software for Apple Inc.'s iPhone and other devices, that wouldn't be able to afford paying Internet providers for special access.

"Any company or piece of software that becomes popular, generating a lot of traffic, would tend to benefit," said Jonathan Zittrain, the co-founder of the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University.

The FCC has four "net neutrality" principles, which call on Internet providers to avoid restricting or delaying access to legal Internet sites and services. Carriers are permitted to block access to illegal services and sites.

Mr. Genachowski is expected to propose the agency clarify its current principles and turn them into formal rules. He will also tack on a new one, which would require carriers practice "reasonable" network management. The agency will ask for guidance on how to define "reasonable."

Most Internet providers have resisted "net neutrality" rules in the past, saying they have a right to control traffic on networks they own and it's not a good idea for the government to micro-manage Internet traffic.

Phone companies including AT&T have argued that they can live with the FCC's existing principles, but they've argued there's no reason to put more formal rules put into place.

Representatives from AT&T, Verizon Wireless, Comcast and Sprint Nextel Corp. declined to comment ahead of the FCC's anticipated announcement.

The proposals come as the FCC faces a federal appeals court case over its authority to regulate Web traffic. Comcast is fighting an FCC decision last year to ding it for violating the agency's "net neutrality" principles when it slowed traffic for some subscribers who were downloading big files. Comcast said it didn't violate any rules because the FCC had never formally adopted any, but it did change how it manages its network.

Republicans are likely to oppose the FCC's new proposal -- both at the FCC and in Congress -- arguing that the FCC is trying to fix problems that don't exist and that the agency should take a more hands-off approach to the fast-changing industry.

"With only a few isolated instances of complaints alleging net neutrality-like abuses ever having been filed, it is a mistake," said Randolph May, president of Free State Foundation, a free-market oriented think tank.

The concept of network neutrality originated with the nation's longtime telephone monopoly. AT&T and its successors were prohibited from giving any phone call preference in how quickly it was connected. Since the Internet was born on phone wires, the concept survived into the Internet age largely by default.

That notion was challenged toward the end of the 1990s, as cable companies began offering Internet service. Cable companies argued since they were content companies not phone companies, the principle of network neutrality didn't apply to them.

Phone companies responded by getting into the content business as well, with television service. As a result, both the cable companies and phone companies had incentives to create conditions on the Internet -- either through pricing or slowing or speeding up certain sites -- to favor their own content.

In 2005, the FCC deregulated the Internet business, by ruling that Internet providers were communications companies and not phone companies and, importantly, were therefore no longer subject to the old phone rules such as network neutrality.

The FCC instead created its four "guiding principles" for protecting network neutrality. They were vague enough to embolden those looking for ways around it. Major phone companies like AT&T subsequently said they were considering creating "fast lanes" on the Internet, available at a higher price -- plans they put on hold amid an outcry.

Now, by codifying the principle, the FCC is seeking to limit erosion of network neutrality.

Mr. Genachowski is expected to set plans to open a formal rule-making process on the issue at the FCC's October meeting. The rules would have to be approved by a majority of the FCC's five-person board; whose three Democrats support net neutrality.



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Sources: Wall Street Journal, FCC, Google Maps