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."

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.

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