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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.
With the FCC being smacked down with regards to "lol you can't regulate us" the first step has been done to regulate the industry, not because of some wild-eyed's bureaucrat's fantasy, but because it needs to be done.
The days of the mom-and-pop ISP are over and done with. The lack of regulation let these thrive, but the large telecoms and cable companies have gobbled up every single one of these since the dot-bomb. They are gone, never to be seen again.
Now everyone is left with either a local monopoly or at best a duopoly of broadband providers, who are increasingly out to screw the customer, like Comcast has been shown to do. Comcast wanted to play hardball. Well, here it is, guys, the big-time. Don't say we didn't warn you.
--
BMO
and I'm not even American (as you can no doubt tell from my spelling).
You are correct. The fact that you spelled all those words properly instantly gave you away as someone who didn't go through the American public school system ;)
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
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
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.
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.
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.