2021 Yingyi Text4 Intensive Reading and Grammar Analysis
This article is selected from the Los Angeles Times article Is net neutrality alive or dead? It's hard to tell on October 2, 2019. The author pointed out that net neutrality can ensure broadband Carriers do not treat competing network companies differently. However, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC)'s current policy and the latest appeals court decision are contrary to this goal; in view of this, Congress should step in to ensure that the FCC implements net neutrality. The first paragraph of the article introduces the need for net neutrality, the second and third paragraphs point out that net neutrality cannot be implemented and focuses on the FCC's unreasonable policies, the fourth and fifth paragraphs analyze the shortcomings of the latest appeals court ruling on net neutrality, and the last paragraph proposes recommendations to Congress.
2021 National Unified Postgraduate Entrance Examination English (I) Test Question Text 4 Original Text
[1] From the early days of broadband, advocates for consumers and web-based companies worried that the cable and phone companies selling broadband connections had the power and incentive to favor their own or their partners’ websites and services over those of their rivals. That’s why there has been such a strong demand for rules that would prevent broadband providers from picking winners and losers online, preserving the freedom and innovation that have been the lifeblood of the internet.
[2] Yet that demand has been almost impossible to fill — in part because of pushback from broadband providers, anti-regulatory conservatives and the courts. A federal appeals court weighed in again Tuesday, but instead of providing a badly needed resolution, it only prolonged the fight. At issue before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit was the latest take of the Federal Communications Commission on net neutrality, adopted on a party-line vote in 2017. The Republican-penned order not only eliminated the strict net neutrality rules the FCC had adopted when it had a Democratic majority in 2015, but rejected the commission’s authority to require broadband providers to do much of anything. The order also declared that state and local governments couldn’t regulate broadband providers either.
[3] The commission argued that other agencies would protect against anti-competitive behavior, such as a broadband-providing conglomerate like AT&T favoring its own video-streaming service at the expense of Netflix and Apple TV. Yet the FCC also ended the investigations of broadband providers that imposed data caps on their rivals’ streaming services but not their own.
[4] On Tuesday, the appeals court unanimously upheld the 2017 order deregulating broadband providers, citing a Supreme Court ruling from 2005 that upheld a similarly deregulatory move. But Judge Patricia Millett rightly argued in a concurring opinion that “the result is unhinged from the realities of modern broadband service,” and said Congress or the Supreme Court could intervene to “avoid trapping Internet regulation in technological anachronism.”
[5] In the meantime, the court threw out the FCC’s attempt to block all state rules on net neutrality, while preserving the commission’s power to pre-empt individual state laws that undermine its order. That means more battles like the one now going on between the Justice Department and California, which enacted a tough net neutrality law in the wake of the FCC’s abdication.
[6] The endless legal battles and back-and-forth at the FCC cry out for Congress to act. It needs to give the commission explicit authority once and for all to bar broadband providers from meddling in the traffic on their network and to create clear rules protecting openness and innovation online.
Intensive reading, background and grammatical analysis
Original article, please indicate the source for reprinting: ©️ Sylvan Ding
references
- Lai's Classic English Grammar
- Analysis and review ideas of past postgraduate entrance examination English test questions (Zhang Jian Yellow Book 2021)
- The American Court System (Zhihu)
- How to deal with conflicts between U.S. federal law and state law? - Wang Zhi's answer - Zhihu
- What is Madrid v. Madison all about? - TheOddestOne's answer - Zhihu