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FCC Votes Yet Another Study of Net Neutrality
yuna49 writes to let us know that the US Federal Communications Commission last week announced a Notice of Inquiry (PDF) into: "...the behavior of broadband market participants, including: (1) How broadband providers are managing Internet traffic on their networks today; (2) Whether providers charge different prices for different speeds or capacities of service; (3) Whether our policies should distinguish between content providers that charge end users for access to content and those that do not; (4) How consumers are affected by these practices." eWeek reports that the study is targeted at whether broadband providers are treating some content providers more favorably than others. Distinctly absent is any discussion about port filtering or other restrictions on Internet usage. The two Democrats on the Commission pressed for a broader "Notice of Rulemaking" to move more quickly towards a policy of non-discrimination. The Republican majority ignored these arguments and voted for an Inquiry, to which the Democrats acceded.
The FCC isn't Congress, it's part of the Executive branch.
Slashdot - where whining about luck is the new way to make the world you want.
However at least some of the carriers have begun doing two things: a) arguing that Net Neutrality is illogical and inappropriate and that they need to implement biases, and b) implementing biases. Most noteably many users of Vonage and Comcast have seen their service degrade drastically in recent months just after Comcast released its own competing service.
So just to follow up. It is not a solution in search of a problem it is a problem that is growing and being grown by many well-funded actors who no longer want net neutrality (but still want common carrier restrictions). The goal now is to put in place a hard Net Neutrality mandate (i.e. one not based on the vote of four or five appointed persons) before Net Neutrality is no longer the status quo.
At this point at least some of the carriers have begun to (apparently) break the rules as they see fit all the while arguing that the rules must be changed in their favor. This is about preventing them from getting their way.
However, you notice that there is no mention made of *where* your traffic goes. The fact that you pay one flat rate to access Google, Slashdot, Youtube, and what have you is due to the FCC's Net Neutrality regulation. Without this regulation, your cable or telephone company would be within its rights to charge you different rates for different web sites. In essence, the Internet would become like cable TV, with websites being broken into various tiers, and you having to pay extra to access other tiers.
Example: if Comcast struck a deal with Yahoo, Yahoo would become the default search engine, and Google would be moved into a "premium" tier, meaning that I'd have to pay extra in order to access Google. I don't have to do this today because of Net Neutrality.
We all know what to do, but we don't know how to get re-elected once we have done it
Yet. There have been noises lately from corporations who wish to cash in on mergers which have created large blocks of internet subscribers. Noteably the CEO of SBC has been making serious threats to change the way the internet works by charging content providers to have access to SBC customers.
And make no mistake about it, SBC's intention is to charge every content and service provider a toll to have access to customers on SBC's broadband connections.
The reasoning is that telecoms like SBC are becoming broadband ISPs and ISPs have managed to stay clear of the common carrier status. THIS is what SBC and others want is to drop the common carrier status so the FCC can no longer regulate them and they can begin to cash in on the monopolies they are building by extorting Google and others for the profits SBC's CEO covets.