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Obama Is Threatening To Veto the GOP's Latest Assault On Net Neutrality (vice.com)
An anonymous reader cites a Motherboard article: President Obama has long been a vocal supporter of net neutrality. In a "
Statement of Administration Policy" (PDF) released Tuesday, Obama signaled that he intends to veto Republican-backed legislation that open internet advocates say could eviscerate federal net neutrality protections. Earlier this year, a GOP-controlled House subcommittee approved the "No Rate Regulation of Broadband Internet Access Act," (H.R. 2666) which net neutrality supporters say could severely undercut the Federal Communications Commission's ability to police the nation's largest cable and phone companies. The House bill would "undermine key provisions in the Federal Communications Commission's open internet order and harm the commission's ability to protect consumers while facilitating innovation and economic growth," said the Obama administration's statement. "If the President were presented with H.R. 2666, his senior advisors would recommend that he veto the bill."Please do, Obama.
Wrong. Net neutrality ensures competition by equal availability. The packets from netflix are not more important than those from youtube or hulu, and net neutrality is about preventing paid performance advantage over common carrier networks aimed at capturing market share from competitors.
"No Rate Regulation of Broadband Internet Access Act" is a purposefully misleading name. I like John Oliver's suggestion of "Cable Company Fuckery" Act. What the GOP claim is that the FCC will regulate pricing by imposing net neutrality. In a way, they are correct, the FCC will regulate pricing by ensuring that the cable companies don't use their pseudo-monopolies to gouge customers for internet access. In most markets, consumers have at best two choices so they have to pay whatever the cable company will charge for crappy service. I see it in places like Topeka and Austin where Google is coming in with fiber. Suddenly the cable companies lower their prices AND start to offer higher speeds. Suddenly they start to put in fiber where they promised they would for a decade.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
Unfortunately, the concept of Net Neutrality ruins such innovative business models.
Unfortunately, your puppydog and unicorn concept of the benevolent provider allowing for humanity to reach never before achieved levels of awesomness.
All it sounds like is an overall adoption of the phone carrier's unlimited data packages concept for everyone. So at home, we'll be throttled after a few Gb's, and if we want the "real unlimited" package, we can pay 2X the amount, and get 3 Gb before they throttle us.
Which in today's internet, the ads should take care of the unthrottled data after 3 or 4 page views.
In the end? If I want to keep the service I have now, it will only cost 4 times as much.
4. Profit!
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
There are multiple ways of looking at this. For me, I think hard-wired networks should be so robust that no set of user demand could ever saturate the possible bandwidth. That means massive upgrades should take place everywhere and ISPs would be competing solely on bandwidth. And, that also means taxpayer dollars spent on network upgrades should be spent on network upgrades. ISP's, however, (and specifically Verizon) have spent these taxpayer dollars largely on shareholder dividends without upgrading their infrastructure. They are working hard to protect their limited-bandwidth infrastructure from market influences that demand upgrades. Economically, it makes sense for Verizon to spend little on infrastructure upgrades if they can get rid of net neutrality because it means they can completely cripple competing services citing 'bandwidth limitations' while making sure their antiquated services (like cable TV) work better than the competition. As for wireless, net neutrality is somewhat tougher to support unless existing total bandwidth was always divided equally against existing customer bandwidth demands. The whole thing comes down to who controls what and who makes money. If we don't support the FCC on this one, we are essentially handing complete control of the Internet over to companies like Verizon. I would prefer we did the opposite and gave control of the Internet to individuals as much as possible.
--- We need more Ron Paul!
Worse than that. The ISP says that the packets from the ISP's video streaming service should be given priority over the packets from Netflix video streaming service unless Netflix wants to pay the ISP for better delivery, in case, "something might happen" to their packets during delivery.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.