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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.
This.
As long as the isps to my home are monopolies I don't want them engaging in "value added" services.
Take a look at Comcast and cable TV.
They have 100%+ markup on the service.
Then they charge the channels to be on the lineup, which you cant avoid.
Then they pop their commercials into the programming, usually poorly.
These people have already demonstrated they are unfit to be trusted with a monopoly. Absolutely no reason to let them monopolize.
A private company paid a bunch of money to another private company and users got the same video streaming performance they used to have before private company B starting throttling private company A's ability to deliver content that was already paid for by the users to both companies involved.
FTFY
You mean like Verizon extorting money from Netflix, you mean that EXAMPLE.
No where does it cite any prior problem that it could have prevented, only hypothetical scenarios that could happen sometime in the future.
Comcast throttling of Netflix traffic until extortion money was paid actually happened. You don't need to imagine hypothetical future scenarios to see the issues this legislation addresses.
Do you not remember the Great Depression and everything that lead up to it? The lack of regulation lead to huge boom and bust cycles that destroyed the economy of this country. It was only after passing a great deal of regulation that the economy recovered and we saw the greatest run of prosperity in the history of this country. But then the regulation started to be torn down in the 70's, with bits and pieces being torn down by both parties here and there since then and guess what. The boom and bust cycles are increasing in amplitude just like they were before and this country is worse off now that it was 30-40 years ago.
Sure, we don't need oppressive regulation that serves no real purpose. But an economy that has little to no regulation provides little economic freedom to most people and so it cannot really be called a "free" economy. There needs to be just enough regulation to make sure that everyone has free access to the economy in order to really see what a truly "free" economy can accomplish.
Right -- the problem here is we have private companies that have a mandate for Universal Coverage, and receive tax-money to provide that Coverage, but then fail to live up to the mandate and instead cherry-pick easy spots to provide coverage while making record profits by pocketing the difference. Further, when they are called on this, they resist any attempt to rescind that monopoly and recover that tax money to put it towards actually filling in those gaps (i.e. a public utility) and providing the agreed upon coverage, and the state (likely in collusion with said companies) refuses to actually prosecute them for contract violations (so the existing legal remedies are not, in fact, working at all).
For example: New Jersey and NJ Bell (now NJ Verizon) - commitment to 100% broadband coverage (which specifically defines broadband as 45Mbps) by 2010, took the money, failed to even come close to compliance, posted hefty profit (so obviously not putting that money into infrastructure improvements to fulfill said contract), and a few years after the contract end-date got the goal post moved to allow 4G coverage and significantly slower capacity lines to count instead of being required to either pay back the monies taken or to fulfill the original deal.
~Anguirel (lit. Living Star-Iron)
QA: The art of telling someone that their baby is ugly without getting punched.