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

[diamondmagic]

Did you read the FCC rationale for Title II Internet? No where does it cite any prior problem that it could have prevented, only hypothetical scenarios that could happen sometime in the future. THAT sounds like FUD to me.

All in the name of expanding FCC power, mind you.

Re:The internet has just become Ma Bell

[Rockoon]

I agree that the FCC's rules aren't going to stop all abuses. They are a good start...

This right here is the problem with progressive world views.

When a progressive gets what they want its still only "a good start" and "not enough" .... NEVER has a progressive said "We are done!" or asked "Maybe we went too far?"

Even when completely ignorant of the specific issues of a specific "problem", this leads to one wondering how much of their "justification" is just self-serving "spin."

In the case of "Net Neutrality" the justification was 100% spin. The Netflix excuse is rife with hypocrisy, as when Netflix was using Cogent it was Level 3 that Netflix claimed was evil, but now that Netflix uses Level 3 its someone else thats evil. The fact is that Netflix goes with the cheapest ISP they can but that decision has consequences.

Netflix saves a ton of money with their ISP choice and you Net Neutrality goons have been tricked into pushng the consequences of that savings directly onto your own ISP, which means directly onto you. Thats great for Netflix customers... socializing Netflixs costs onto their neighbors that arent Netflix customers...