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

I can't wait!

[InvisblePinkUnicorn]

"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."

Re:I can't wait!

[bmwm3nut]

It hit me then that the openness of the internet is under attack from many different vectors, not just on the net neutrality front.

Yes, you're right, however, I don't fear the loss off "free" communication like the internet currently provides. If we do get to a stage where only Hotmail users can talk to other Hotmail users, or only Comcast customers can see Comcastnet, or whatever, it will be just like the bad old days of AOL, Prodigy, CompuServe, even local BBSes. While the "internet" or whatever we call the "internet" today may turn into a walled garden, I'm sure there will be something out there (yet to be invented) that will allow us unfettered access. As first it will be only nerd friendly (like the early days of the internet), but it will catch on. Even look at how much "freedom" the Chinese have with the internet and that's with the totalitarian government doing it's best to curtail it. For example, look at where we are with wireless mesh networking. If something happened that made the internet not free, you can bet there will be even more research into mesh networking and then you don't even have to worry about the telecom layer, you (the user) control it all.

Appeal it again.

[dgatwood]

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.

Re:Appeal it again.

[KiltedKnight]

I'm sure the Verizon execs are jumping for joy over this.

You're quite correct. Verizon screwed us as best as they could within the law (FITL), and now they're going to be able to just get their customers with all the sandpaper they can possibly use... and we're not going to have much of a choice.

This is just further proof of why the entity that maintains the physical lines should not be allowed to also be service providers.

Fine... pay the government back, then.

[glindsey]

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.

Re:Fine... pay the government back, then.

[krunk7]

Look, it's simple: either you believe in the free market, in which case deregulation is a good thing as it will open up the market that regulation is currently closing off, or you believe in fascism. It's that simple.

Yeah! that's telling them! Your either Good or Evil, Capitalist of Communist, good with God or a baby eater!

Don't be a dunce. There's no such thing as complete deregulation except in anarchy. In any system of government, local, federal, you name it any system of government there is regulation. And there is enforcement of regulations. That's what government is. For example, "You may not use monopoly status to leverage competition in other markets." This is a regulation that maintains free and equal competition, the very core of Adam Smith's capitalism.

I love how many self proclaimed capitalists and free market advocates fail to understand their founders work.
Here's some quote's from Smith that clearly outline his feelings on keeping big business in check:

• Our merchants and master-manufacturers complain much of the bad effects of high wages in raising the price, and thereby lessening the sale of their goods both at home and abroad. They say nothing concerning the bad effects of high profits. They are silent with regard to the pernicious effects of their own gains. They complain only of those of other people.
• People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices.
• As soon as the land of any country has all become private property, the landlords, like all other men, love to reap where they never sowed, and demand a rent even for its natural produce.
• The rate of profit... is naturally low in rich and high in poor countries, and it is always highest in the countries which are going fastest to ruin.
• The subjects of every state ought to contribute toward the support of the government, as nearly as possible, in proportion to their respective abilities; that is, in proportion to the revenue which they respectively enjoy under the protection of the state ....[As Henry Home (Lord Kames) has written, a goal of taxation should be to] 'remedy inequality of riches as much as possible, by relieving the poor and burdening the rich.
• Whenever the legislature attempts to regulate differences between masters and their workmen, its counsellors are always the masters. When the regulation, therefore, is in favor of the workmen, it is always just and equitable; but it is sometimes otherwise when in favor of the masters.
• We rarely hear, it has been said, of the combinations [that is, unions or colluding organizations] of masters, though frequently of those of workmen. But whoever imagines, upon this account, that masters rarely combine, is as ignorant of the world as of the subject. Masters are always and everywhere in a sort of tacit, but constant and uniform combination, not to raise the wages of labor above their actual price.

And my personal favorite:

"Whenever the legislature attempts to regulate differences between masters and their workmen, its counsellors are always the masters. When the regulation, therefore, is in favor of the workmen, it is always just and equitable; but it is sometimes otherwise when in favor of the masters."

So yeah, buddy, I'm a Capitalist with a capital C. I advocate free and fair markets. And I, like the father of capitalist theory and the invisible hand, am not so dense as to think that deregulation, for the simple fact of being deregulation, is a good thing.

But you keep drinking that cool aid.

Clarification

[prestonmichaelh]

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.

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.

Headline Doublespeak - deregualtion is regulation

[Aire Libre]

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."

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

Re:Fine with it...

[Gaki]

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?