Reason: How To Break the Internet (in a Bad Way)

Widespread public sentiment favors the FCC's move to impose rules intended to establish "net neutrality"; an anonymous reader writes with a skeptical viewpoint: "No decent person," write Geoffrey Manne and Ben Sperry in a special issue of Reason, "should be *for* net neutrality." Across the board, the authors write, letting the FCC dictate ISP business practices will result in everything they say they're trying to avoid. For instance, one of the best ways to route around a big firm's brand recognition is to buy special treatment in the form of promotions, product placement and the like (payola, after all, is how rock and roll circumvented major label contempt for the genre). That will almost certainly be forbidden under the FCC's version of neutrality.

Comments

One highly-publicized case is all it took

[PseudoCoder]

It seems everyone pointed at the Comcast/Netflix deal as the lynchpin of why FCC's "net neutrality" needed to be passed. What were the actual results of that debacle? A private company paid a bunch of money to another private company and users got better video streaming performance.

And by the way, it's highly skewed, back-room-negotiated regulations (like the ones used to pass NN) that keep smaller players from being able to compete against Comcast-type goliaths in local markets.

Congratulations on handing the well-meaning folks at the Federal government control of the internet, which was doing just fine. Now here's your prize:

http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-broadband-fees-20150409-story.html#page=1