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FCC Vote Marks Effort To Take Greater Control of the Web
GovTechGuy writes "The FCC voted today to open an inquiry into how the broadband industry is regulated, the first step in a controversial attempt to assert greater regulatory control over Internet service providers. In a 3-2 vote the Democratic members of the Commission voted to move forward with the FCC's proposal to reclassify broadband as a telecom service, increasing the regulation it is subject to. The move also has large implications for net neutrality, which FCC Commissioner Julius Genachowski has made a focus under his watch."
Don't be silly, of course it does. And so do prohibitions on human slavery. The Free Market just isn't nearly so great as people make it out to be.
Try not to take me more seriously than I take myself.
I don't know about five, but how about the CIA
The Internet is one of the last few bastions of freedom left in the world...
...and since you only have one or maybe 2 ISPs to choose from, the Evil Corporations can steal that freedom pretty much however they want. Unless the FCC tells them not to, which is what this is.
In general media it's forgivable, but can't we make an effort at technical accuracy on Slashdot? I didn't see anything in the summary or in the article itself about "the Web".
This headline and summary blow and are almost exactly contrary to the facts. The FCC's position, as outlined here is that the FCC is identifying *only* the transmission component of broadband as a telecom service. In practical terms, this means precisely that they will *not* pursue net neutrality-based oversight at this time, and will ignore content-related matters in favor of simple access and transmission oversight.
In other words, the "web" itself is exactly the thing they are not trying to take greater control of.
But Comcast (or Cox or Cablevision or.....) isn't a free market. It's government-created monopoly and therefore the government needs to regulate the monopoly to ensure it doesn't abuse its power. Just the same way electric monopolies or natural gas monopolies are regulated.
I'm a right winger and I support Net Neutrality as necessary.
And yes I approve this message.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
If Government's success rate is around 90%, with 1 in 10 failing, I have way more faith in my Government than any corporation or business.
Non impediti ratione cogitationus.
Because letting corporations run completely amok has never caused grave economic consequences.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Social Security's biggest problem is that it's money constantly gets raided.
It's like a corporate retirement plan that gets abused by the CEO and underfunded.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
OK, so the right-wingers on slashdot may consider me a left-wing radical pinko socialist commie bastard... but even I can name five.
But that's incidental to the real problem... for this industry, are we better off with government regulation, or with service providers self-regulating through market forces? I think you'd have to be heavy on the Austrian side to think that market forces can properly regulate an industry that is dominated by local monopolies.
IMO, even IF the 'teh gubbermint' can't do anything right, it's still a better bet than having people whose interests are directly opposed to ours in charge of regulating themselves via market forces in an uncompetitive market.
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
Reading the article, I see that Verizon is against this, so I'm probably for it.
I especially grimaced when I read this part:
That's more transparent than usual, isn't it? In case it's not, I'll translate: "How are we supposed to have free reign to let America's infrastructure steadily decay, if regulation comes from someone other than the politicians we bought?"
The Internet is full. Go away.
Clearly your knee jerk idiot that doesn't actually study what he spouts off about, but sometime I indulge fools. Here you go:
- US Post Office (nearly bankrupt)
This has in no way made things worse. It's the best postal system in the world.
- The Sedition Act (jailed reporters/protesters for simply saying "We shouldn't be involved in the Great War.")
It was repealed on December 13, 1920.[ SO while it was a dick move, that very same government removed it.
- Social Security (upside down - more checks sent out than cash coming in)
Laughable. Social security is fine, stop buying into to the republican crap. read the papers written by the people that actually study it for a living. Yes, it occasionally needs modification, no it's not going to 'bankrupt' us. and it has in no way made anything worse.
- Medicare (ditto)
(ditto)
- Amtrak (nearly bankrupt)
How did the government intervention make this worse? The were going bankrupt well before the government intervened.
- Pelosicare (the CBO just announced it will add $110 billion to the debt, every year; not deficit neutral as advertised)
Did you read the report? or did you jsut drink Glen Becks tears? twit.
A quick sum up:
A) The Current health policy(prior Health care reform) will costs the federal government a fucking lot.
B) Health care reform wont reduce it to zero. but it will reduce it.
a quote:
"CBO also estimated that the legislation will reduce budget deficits by about $140 billion during the 2010-2019 period and by an amount in a broad range around one-half percent of gross domestic product (GDP) during the following decade"
If you didn't read the report, do you even read the CBO directors blog? No? YOU yes YOU are a fucking nitwit. Educate yourself and stop listening to liars, or get the fuck out.
People like you who keep themselves INTENTIONALLY ignorant, and still spout of opinions as if they have and real weight are the only people I would not defend with my life to say what you want. That junk in the alley way down town? I'd defend him. YOU are a fucking plague on society and can rot.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Seriously, regulating telecoms does not equal controlling the web.
The reason we want net neutrality is so that network carriers do not control the web, just offer their service without unreasonably interfering in the way a customer uses the network. Reasonable limits could be throttling heavy users WHEN there is high demand in order to more reasonably share network traffic, or when a user is using the network in a criminal way.
For example, without neutral networks, we could have a far-fetched hypothetical situation where an ISP limits the availability or performance of services from competitors, and gives preferential treatment to their own services.
I know that the web becoming more of a high-bandwidth place tossing around videos is pretty far-fetched. I know that it would be pretty crazy for ISP's to start competing with video on demand and telephone providers. I know that it would be ludicrous to expect some cable monopoly, such as Comcast, to manage to come along and snatch up some media outlet, say NBC, around the same time that they push for bandwidth caps and tiered pricing. Certainly they would never do something like make those limits apply to other media outlets, but not apply those limits to their own content.
Furthermore, nobody could imagine that they could manage to produce astroturf movements to gain sympathy from the average Joe so that not only can they get away with it, people will be begging the big bad government to stop interfering with their plans.
It would never even get this far, so we don't even have to worry about the unthinkable future possibilities, such as ISPs giving network priority and affect the actual network performance of their own content, compared to their competitors. We won't have to worry about ISPs extorting money from websites in order to give them enhanced performance (at the expense of the non-paying sites). We don't have to worry about them rerouting traffic, or trying to limit criticism by controlling the web.
Really, they couldn't even get halfway there without a lot of protest, right?
It's not like they were allowed to become a monopoly through the help of our government anyway.
If the government had just stayed the hell out, we wouldn't be having this discussion today as the Internet would likely already be far more built-out and with way more players in the market, each of them significantly smaller than the giant megacorps we have involved right now.
Uhh, history teaches us the opposite... not with earlier internets of course, but with roads, plumbing and all kinds of infrastructure that suffers if forced to pay off quickly. The situation is greatly improved if there is an organisation willing to invest huge sums _for the good of the people_ without monetary return in prospect. This has always been a government in the past.
Building for profit from ground up doesn't get equal access to everyone, but equal and neutral access is something our society, you and me _extremely_ profit from in hindsight.
With an internet built on private money only, we'd have a fragmented mess of incompatibility.
For a somewhat related example, just look at the OS platform market today. The OS is just infrastructure, the applications are what matters.
Now we might not see the long term benefit of everyone having the "same" OS to run the applications form. But if this happened "magically"*** today, people in twenty years would say how silly we were back then not to realise this obvious improvement.
Has happened with currency (you know, when each city had it's own coinage), rail track standardisation, trading tolls, etc.
*** I don't care which OS, just that it enables everyone to run all applications. Obviously this is not realistic anyway because of very practical reasons, i.e. multibillion dollar companies having some objections there.
Once the broadband net is no longer neutral, the case to argue about keeping it neutral is already over. Right now the broadband net is theoretically neutral, so it makes sense to treat it like other neutral networks (e.g. telephone).
Once broadband is not carrying mostly neutral traffic, but paid-partner traffic the argument that is should be treated like a neutral network becomes much harder to argue. That is why the FCC wants to make this move now.
What would be best would be local municipally owned wires leased to ISPs, perhaps multiple ISPs.
It's good enough that companies will sue to stop it, like TDS did.