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FCC Commissioner Urges, Don't Regulate the Internet

Posted by kdawson on from the horse-halfway-out-of-the-barn dept.

Brett Glass writes "In an op-ed in today's Washington Post, FCC Commissioner Robert McDowell makes a case against government regulation of the Internet, opining that 'engineers, not politicians or bureaucrats, should solve engineering problems.' With state governments pressuring ISPs to pull the plug on Usenet, and a proposal now in play for a censored public Internet, McDowell may have a very good point." McDowell is one of the two FCC commissioners who did not vote with the majority to punish Comcast for their BitTorrent throttling.

5 of 343 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Hmmm by tux0r · · Score: 3, Funny

    "Complimentary"?

    Other Human Interaction: Hi there Internet...
    Internet: Wow, you're certainly looking great today, Other Human Interaction!

    --
    ( Redundancy is ) ^ n
  2. Re:Hmmm by noidentity · · Score: 5, Funny

    Is posting on Slashdot a right? If so, how many chara

  3. Re:Hmmm by deathguppie · · Score: 3, Funny

    Is food a right? If so, how much food? What kind of food? Think about it...

    depends.. personally I think those frozen party pizza'a are a'right.. but then someone else might think some other king of food is a'right.. so I would have to say at least on my behalf most food is a'right.. but not all..

    --
    once more into the breach
  4. Re:It's government or corporate, choose your devil by epee1221 · · Score: 2, Funny

    Think long and hard whether these are the folks you want governing the Internet.

    After that, think long and hard about the alternative.

    --
    "The use-mention distinction" is not "enforced here."
  5. Re:Hmmm by Brett+Glass · · Score: 2, Funny

    Comcast was throttling based on behavior, not content. (And it was doing something very reasonable. BitTorrent is a bad actor; its purpose is to hog bandwidth.) It's the FCC, on the other hand, that has proposed blocking content. (See the link about sanitized public Internet above.)

    By this I do not mean that corporations should always be trusted, but in this case Comcast appears to be far more trustworthy than government.