FCC Commissioner Blasts Verizon On Net Neutrality

destinyland writes "FCC chairman Julius Genachowski says that net neutrality rules 'will happen,' promising the FCC 'will make sure that we get the rules right... to make sure that what we do maximizes innovation and investment across the ecosystem.' But the same week, FCC Commissioner Michael Copps announced that the public should not stand for deals 'that exchange Internet freedom for bloated profits,' mocking the tiered-data plans of the 'Verizon-Google gaggle' and accusing them of wanting 'gated communities for the affluent.' Speaking at a New Mexico hearing, the commissioner warned the audience against proposals that would 'vastly diminish' the Internet's importance, blasting 'special interests and gatekeepers and toll-booth collectors who will short-circuit what this great new technology can do for our country.' (The text of his speech is available as a PDF file at FCC.gov.) He concludes by acknowledging that 'you can't blame companies for seeking to protect their own interests. But you can blame policy-makers if we let them get away with it!'"

Comments

Caching vs. throttling

[antifoidulus]

Partially lost in this whole debate is the fact that there are really 2 ways of giving preferential treatment to traffic, "caching" and "throttling". Throttling is bad, but since it's really cheap to implement the execs like it. Caching on the other hand is much harder and more expensive to implement, but it ultimately ends up being a service instead of a burden to the customer. If Google wants to pay Verizon to cache the most popular 100,000 youtube videos than they should be allowed to. The people that watch said videos get better download times and google saves on bandwidth.

I would hope that such "positive" preferential treatment wouldn't be banned along with throttling, but I can certainly see an upshot, namely enforcement. How is your average customer supposed to know whether or not you are throttling or merely just caching competing content?