President Obama Backs Regulation of Broadband As a Utility

vivIsel writes In a move that is sure to generate controversy, the President has announced his support for regulation of broadband connections, including cellular broadband, under Title 2 of the Telecommunications Act. Reclassification of broadband in this way would treat it as a utility, like landline telephones, subject providers to new regulations governing access, and would allow the FCC to easily impose net neutrality requirements.

Comments

Ted Cruz is Already Attacking Net Neutrality

[l0ungeb0y]

Seems Ted Cruz is not wasting any time in opposing Obama on Net Neutrality by calling it "ObamaCare for the Internet", a laughably stupid hyperbolic statement only a complete moron would make -- unfortunately, he's got a support base of tens of millions even bigger morons who will think this idiotic statement is actually accurate.

Re:Obama

[Anonymous Coward]

That is false. NetFlix has offered many times to provide fee CDN service to the ISP. While that may alleviate the internal traffic issue for customers, it doesn't solve the extra $$$ the ISP's want so they don't take it.

Re:ISPs don't want to take Cogent's money

[ldconfig]

Comcast admitted to congress (The House hearings about the Comcast Time Warner Merger) that what they pay for data has gone down over 99% in the last 10 years.

Re:Obama

[schnell]

You mean, after AT&T was regulated by being broken up and by being forced to allow third-party devices (e.g. modems), major innovation was able to start.

Umm, no. On a couple counts:

• Divestiture didn't have anything to do with attaching 3rd party devices to the phone network; you're thinking of the Carterfone decision from 1968, which was a full 16 years before AT&T was split up.
• AT&T was actually more heavily regulated before its divestiture, as a nationwide telecommunications monopoly. It was prevented from getting into whole lines of business (hence why it gave away UNIX because it couldn't sell it). The divestiture was pursued specifically to strip away the heavily regulated parts (the local telcos) from the largely unregulated parts (long distance, cable, etc.) See this book for more details. Under that regulation, think about the degree of innovation you got out of the Baby Bells... who were still pushing ISDN as "broadband" in the late '90s.
• The one piece of regulation that did actually manage to spur consumer-friendly innovation in telecom in recent memory was the 1996 Telecom Act, which actually reduced regulation in many areas (the "carrot" for telcos) while simultaneously increasing competition in others (the "stick"), such as forcing the Baby Bells to allow competitive access to their DSLAMs to provide DSL service, etc.

Regulation is very important in many industries, including telecommunications. But it is almost never synonymous with innovation.