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

Re:Reason: for corporations, by corporations

[oh_my_080980980]

You mean like Verizon extorting money from Netflix, you mean that EXAMPLE.

Re:Reason: for corporations, by corporations

[Anguirel]

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.