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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.""
"Hey, did you see that video on YouTube today?"
"No, I can't. My ISP doesn't support that part of the internet."
"Oh... that sucks... well, I can email you the video."
"From your Comcast address? No, that won't do. My hardware is not Comcast-enabled."
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.
You want to deny everybody else access to the wires you laid on public easements, using grants, subsidies, and tax breaks given to you by the government? Fine. Pay all of the back leasing costs and taxes that were handed to you so you could establish your geo-monopolies everywhere. Sounds fair to me.
Radio Shack will finally have an incentive to start a Universal Adapter ISP that'll bridge the various parts of the internet, which all use slightly-different-sized plugs to transmit data.
After RTFA, I think some may be a little confused as to what this means from just the summary. Some seem to be interpreting this as a blow to net neutrality. As I understand it, that is not the case. What this means is that the owners of the physical lines (AT&T, Verizon, etc.) now can make independent deals with ISPs that don't own the lines (Earthlink, Speakeasy, etc.) instead of having to let them all have access.
Where this is bad, as I see it, is that now AT&T can basically tell Earthlink that if they want to use their precious copper to bring the Intertubes to peoples homes, it will cost them eleventy billion dollars. So basically, it means AT&T gets to set the price for DSL to whatever they want, and no one else can really compete on price because AT&T can make the cost of use to the third party provider so high that they cannot compete on price. Anyone feel free to correct me if I am misinterpreting something.
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
In the end, the free market will win and the internet will stop being free. It's to be expected given that the same thing has already happened in meat space.
The only thing left to do is to buy stock in the telcos. That way, you can preserve your dignity by claiming that whereas everyone else is merely raped by the telcos, you are actually raping yourself.
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.
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!
Its easy to get up in arms about this decision, and start poo-pooing how its going to lead to less competition. But here's the reality of the matter.
In 2008 there will be an election in the US for President. A good chunk of Congress will also be up for grabs. And unless something really radical happens between now and then, in all likelihood the next President is going to be a Democrat, and the Democrats will hold a majority in both houses of Congress. This is what happens when a Republican President falls to a 24 percent approval rating in the polls (and Congress is doing only slightly better).
Democrats are generally pro-consumer and love regulating things (Republicans, on the other hand, are generally pro-business, and like to deregulate). The first time one of the big telecoms tries to openly block competition, the Dems will be on it like hair on a gorilla. And even the telecoms are smart enough to know that.
I want a new quote. One that won't spill. One that don't cost too much. Or come in a pill.
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.