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.""

Comments

Re:If you dont like it...

[Pojut]

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.

Re:Wait

[RingDev]

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