The reasoning you're using here doesn't make much sense, to me, in light of the statute. The Telecommunications Act of 1996 had as its primary purpose the deregulation of the RBOCs and the provision of local (last-mile) POTS service. To the Telecommunications Act, the Internet is firmly something you would build on top of a telecommunications service; the entire Internet is an information service. That doesn't make any sense to you today because you're ~30 years removed from the time of Prodigy, CompuServe, and AOL, but that's the context of the statute.
The statute, I'll remind you, doesn't exist to establish whether ISPs can prefer one streamer over another. "Streamers" are a concept that wasn't legible to the authors of the Telecommunications Act.
The reason this definition matters is that it's the hinge point on which the FCC claimed authority to regulate --- to make up its own laws, based on the opinions of its own executive appointees, with no Congressional consensus behind it --- ISPs. In the era of Chevron Deference, court precedent was that in the face of ambiguity, the courts were to trust the unelected administrative agencies in their interpretation of statutes. That was struck down, so courts now actually get to look at the context of the Telecommunications Act and see: no, this was not an act that had "net neutrality" in mind.
> That doesn't make any sense to you today because you're ~30 years removed from the time of Prodigy, CompuServe, and AOL, but that's the context of the statute.
I'm not 30 years removed from it. I grew up in it. We picked Prodigy at the time on our Tandy 1000 because of the services Prodigy directly offered to their subscribers. We liked their message boards. They had a Sesame Street area in their application that would refresh every few days with new content.
This is entirely unlike the service I get with my ISP today. I chose them because they're the only ones with fiber lines to my house. Sure sounds like back in the day when SBC was the only line to my house now doesn't it? Funny too because the box that fiber line runs to has a RBOC label on it and the manholes for the larger service conduits have their old RBOC name still. One might think they're just the RBOC doing the same RBOC things they used to do.
Huh, I wonder which kind of service this ISP of today should be regulated as. Like the old SBC or Prodigy?
> the Internet is firmly something you would build on top of a telecommunications service; the entire Internet is an information service.
I think the key assumption you're making here is that anything layered on top of a telecommunications service must be an information service, so if "telecommunications service" can be defined narrowly enough, then maybe the entire Internet (endpoints and transit) can be construed as "information service".
But that's not how the two legal definitions are related. Information services must have an underlying telecommunications service, but I don't see where the law prohibits a telecommunications service from being layered atop another telecommunications service (which POTS as an amalgamation of numerous providers seems to be, especially in the case of MVNOs, or undersea cable operators selling a slice of their bandwidth to phone companies).
I also don't see where the definitions require that the line between telecommunications services and information services must be drawn at a low enough layer that IP transit exists solely above the line. And certainly a company who operates the lowest physical layer must be operating at least partially on the "telecommunications" side of the line.
I think you have reached a level of abstraction where the courts, post-Chevron, were not going to take the FCC's word for it. I also think, putting my brain back into 1996-Thomas mode (still eating frozen pizzas, still enjoying the music of Front Line Assembly) that fetching a web page is, by the logic of the Act, fundamentally the same thing as making a request of Prodigy or AOL. And I'm telling you this as someone (again) who ran an ISP in 1996.
I can't say enough how much the Telecommunications Act was not about this issue. This does not feel like a sufficiently load-bearing piece of legislative intent to hang such an intrusive regulatory framework on! Based solely on this definition, in a statute that pretty clearly saw the Internet as a use case for telecommunications, the FCC gets to regulate all Internet providers? What did you think was going to happen?
> that fetching a web page is, by the logic of the Act, fundamentally the same thing as making a request of Prodigy or AOL.
That's not actually in dispute. I fully agree with you on this point.
You're just being silly by pretending that the fact that AOL was called an ISP back then means that everything called an ISP now must be regulated the same way, when "ISP" isn't even the legally-relevant terminology.
> in a statute that pretty clearly saw the Internet as a use case for telecommunications
To the extent that "the Internet" can be seen as a "use case" in itself and not just an enabler of other use cases, it must be considered to be the packet network plus services atop it like email, WWW, etc.
I'm not saying AOL was considered an ISP back in 1996; I don't really think it was. I'm saying the Internet as a concept was not considered a raw telecommunications service. The Internet was something the Act wanted to force telecommunications providers to allow; its concern was much more that MCI and AT&T might try to suppress the Internet in favor of some MCI- or AT&T-specific information services.
For as much tsuris as this issue has caused on this thread, I don't think there's much dispute about this, legally; the issue made it all the way to the Supreme Court, which ruled on it; only a particularly reach-y application of Chevron made the interpretation you want viable. Chevron is dead now, and so, too, mechanically, is administratively-enforced "net neutrality".
> Internet as a concept was not considered a raw telecommunications service
You're making a common parlance argument against statutory interpretation. Go with what the law actually says an information service is versus a telecommunications service.
> its concern was much more that MCI and AT&T might try to suppress the Internet in favor of some MCI- or AT&T-specific information services.
This is exactly the concern that NN proponents have today. It's the same RBOCs of yore wearing a mask and arguing they're something they aren't. And That by controlling the pipes (many of which have no viable or slim competition) the ISPs can (and have tried) to push certain information services they own and operate or have financial deals with over others with unequal billing and network management policies.
What you're making is an argument that Congress should pass a law regulating the ISPs as if they were RBOCs†. The Telecommunications Act of 1996 refers specifically to the "Bell Operating Companies", and does so because of the antitrust-enforced divestment of those very specific companies from AT&T. They're not an abstract concept in the law, and the FCC can't just say "it would make sense if the law was extended to ISPs too". That's Congress's job.
† or something; the 1996 Act actually de-regulates the RBOCs.
> What you're making is an argument that Congress should pass a law regulating the ISPs as if they were RBOCs
No. Your current bags of cash ISP position makes you incapable of reading the law and see there are no "ISPs" or "RBOCs" in the Communications Act of '96. For all the times you've harked on me about "CoMmOnPaRlaNCe", you've completely failed to actually read the law and read the court opinions and apply an ounce of clear, open, honest understanding to them.
> In short, an “information service” manipulates data, while a “telecommunications service” does not.
The court here gave us a very obvious test, one you constantly ignore here. Tell me how my ISP is manipulating my information outside of being a common carrier for our conversation here. You cant! You fucking can't! I've given you many chances, and you've failed every time!
I guess you didn't understand it, let me repeat it:
> In short, an “information service” manipulates data, while a “telecommunications service” does not.
This is the court's opinion.
Don't apply your own common parlance understanding of what an ISP is. Don't apply some twisted prezel-brained logic of what "provides access to". Tell me how my ISP lives up to the standard this court just gave us for what an information service is.
But you won't, you'll just ignore this and continue to count those dollars the ISPs are giving you and wonder where this corruption I talk about is.
I don't know what my "bags of cash" position is (I haven't worked for an ISP in over 25 years) but no, there obviously are RBOCs in the Act; you're looking for the search term "Bell Operating Company". Sorry to disappoint you on this.
That's a funny way of saying "sorry, I looked at the statute, and you're right, it repeatedly discusses the Bell Operating Companies", but: apology accepted.
> In short, an “information service” manipulates data, while a “telecommunications service” does not.
I will forever respond to your comments with this quote until you really answer how an ISP substantively manipulated my POST request to Hacker News. This is the standard the court gave us. Tell me how my ISP is an information service here.
The statute, I'll remind you, doesn't exist to establish whether ISPs can prefer one streamer over another. "Streamers" are a concept that wasn't legible to the authors of the Telecommunications Act.
The reason this definition matters is that it's the hinge point on which the FCC claimed authority to regulate --- to make up its own laws, based on the opinions of its own executive appointees, with no Congressional consensus behind it --- ISPs. In the era of Chevron Deference, court precedent was that in the face of ambiguity, the courts were to trust the unelected administrative agencies in their interpretation of statutes. That was struck down, so courts now actually get to look at the context of the Telecommunications Act and see: no, this was not an act that had "net neutrality" in mind.