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Court Upholds Internet Deregulation
Internet Voting writes "Big telecom companies seem to have won big with the 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruling upholding FCC's ruling deregulating the Internet. Opponents argued that telecoms could now deny third parties access to their telecommunications lines and eliminating competition. From the story: "In its September 2005 ruling, the FCC relieved telephone companies of decades-old regulations that required them to grant competing Internet service providers 'nondiscriminatory' access to their wirelines in order to reach consumers.""
This deregulation is a consumer's worst nightmare. We already have very limited competition in broadband service, and this promises to kill off what little there is.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
"From your Comcast address? No, that won't do. My hardware is not Comcast-enabled."
Even without that, things are going that direction. I tried to send a note to a friend's hotmail address the other day. Since I use flat text formatting, it kept on getting rejected by a spam filter and I had to switch to html format to get it to go (needed MORE junk characters, amazingly enough). Gee, I'd bet those eMails would have gone through had I been using hotmail. Denying mail from other providers because it's suspected of being "spam" is really just one step away from only allowing hotmail users to talk to other hotmail users. Thanks, MSFT, for taking a perfectly portable, open, transport mechanism like SMTP and making it incompatible.
It hit me then that the openness of the internet is under attack from many different vectors, not just on the net neutrality front.
blah blah blah
I will give you a very good reason why. The Internet is mankind's single greatest invention.
Not antibiotics. Not the motor vehicle. The Internet. Why?
Information has been given the ability to travel the entire globe in less than the time required for you to read this post. Think about that. A coup could happen in an African country, and literally the entire planet could know about it within five minutes. A discovery for an infectious disease could be made at some remote lab in Antarctica...five minutes later, the whole world would know.
Information between teachers, doctors, scientists, philosophers, religious figures....the collective knowledge of our entire species is just a point and click away.
That's why.
Living With a Nerd
It amazes me how the press gets sucked into the lingo. This is not at all a ruling in favor of deregulation. To the contrary, it is a ruling authorizing private regulation of the Internet. Moreover, private regulation in this space is much more dangerous than government regulation because it works. The government can't do much at all to regulate the Internet, thanks in large measure to the First Amendment and thanks in no small measure to the fact that the government does not have any physical control over the transport layer. But the major ISPs do have such control, and are not bound by the First Amendment. In short, this ruling says, in plain English, "Whereas the government may not and cannot regulate communications over the Internet that are protected from suppression by the First Amendment, we hereby free those of you who have the power to suppress freedom of speech to go ahead and do so."
Aire Libre
Of course the big telcos don't want to roll out snazzy new broadband lines if they have to bear the cost of R&D and deployment, and then immediately allow competitors to use their brand new high-speed lines at the price the government insists on. I mean, their competitors can just lay new fiber optic lines themselves, right?
Oh, wait...the government created the whole mess in the first place with geographical monopolies on the right to run telephone lines, muddied the waters even more by declaring that cable companies are "information services" and thus don't have to share *their* lines, and now want to wash their hands of it and stand back and watch Joe Consumer take it up the ass.
On a *completely* unrelated note, I suggest that any group of politicians hereafter be called a clusterfuck. (e.g., A herd of cattle, a gaggle of geese, a murder of crows, a clusterfuck of politicians).
Insisting on "correct" English is like saying that there is only one, definitive recipe for chili.
He isn't talking about tax breaks; he is talking about direct infrastructure investment made on behalf of the people of the United States that is now being used for profit by private companies. That, by itself, is not problematic, so long as the the companies have equal access to the infrastructure and the profit making remains entirely competitive.
Where I live, Verizon doesn't offer me DSL. But Cavalier Telephone offers me DSL, over Verizon's lines. (My neighborhood is fairly poor, so Verizon probably thinks we aren't worth it). So does that mean that I won't be able to get DSL then? If that's the case, my only option is Comcast, who doesn't allow me to use Bittorrent. So now I will have only one choice for broadband internet. And it's a company that doesn't believe in neutrality.
Yay for deregulation!
The problem isn't censorship, it's competition. Right now, if the copper running to your house is owned by Company A, and Company A offers Internet Service, and Company B wants to provide you with Internet Services, Company A is required to share the copper they laid with Company B. What this ruling does is allow Company A to tell Company B to take a hike. The consumer (you) now has no choice for internet service because the company that owns the copper determines what options you have.
So, if Company A were to drop prices significantly, and crush all local competitors, thus ensuring that they have a strangle hold on the local area's ISP offerings, they can then jack prices up as high as they want and the consumers will have no other options for providers.
I would guess this could also have some higher stream issues if some major back bone provider decided that it didn't want to allow data from some other provider at that level. That might be route able to still get through, but if they blocked it all the way to the last mile, you'd never get that data.
-Rick
"Most people in the U.S. wouldn't know they live in a tyrannical state if it walked up and grabbed their junk." - MyFirs
At some point, though, a product becomes so ubiquitous that it is no longer just a common good and has become a staple. At that point, living without it really does have social repercussions and, in the case of the Internet, we are rapidly reaching that point. How many paper resumes do you think get submitted in industrialized nations these days? If the choice was limited to getting raped by my telco and/or not having a job, that's not much of a choice is it?
I'll tolerate anything
The problem is that they're been able to reach monopoly status during a period of regulation which limited their ability to abuse this status. Competition is supposed to be the force which ensures people will not be taken advantage of, and that they will see the fruits of productivity gains. However, removing the restraints on their powers does not instantly create competition, and the fact that the companies still have de facto monopoly status, tons of resources and no regulation virtually ensures that the customer's going to get fucked.