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Silicon Valley Kicks Off Fight On Net Neutrality (cnn.com)
Web companies met with FCC Ajit Pai on Tuesday and urged him not to gut the net neutrality rules that protect their traffic, a week after he met with broadband providers that have tried to kill the Obama-era regulations. From a report: The Internet Association, a trade group representing companies like Facebook, Google, and Amazon, stressed the importance of defending current net neutrality rules in a meeting with Federal Communications Commission chairman Ajit Pai on Tuesday. "The internet industry is uniform in its belief that net neutrality preserves the consumer experience, competition and innovation online," the group said in the meeting, according to a filing with the FCC. "Existing net neutrality rules should be enforced and kept in tact." The net neutrality rules, approved by the FCC in 2015, are intended to keep the internet open and fair. The rules prevent internet providers from playing favorites by deliberately speeding up or slowing down traffic from specific websites and apps. This is the first face-to-face encounter between the tech association and the new FCC head. It comes on the heels of reports Pai met with the telecom industry to discuss changing how the rules are enforced, potentially weakening them.
Do you use facebook? It would sure be a shame if suddenly you had to pay a $10/month premium to access it.
Want to watch Netflix without waiting 60 minutes for the show to buffer? That'll be another $20/month please.
Want to use Google? That's an extra 50 cents per search, paid to your ISP.
If you are unable to see how incredibly anti-consumer this move is, and how badly it will directly hurt *everyone* except ISP shareholders, then you are not qualified to have an opinion. If you really think that this is nothing more than some political game of playing favorites, then you are an idiot. Now go sit down and let the adults talk.
Yet. Exactly. And that powerful position is exactly why things like Net Neutrality are necessary. It's not a matter of "if" they abuse their position, but "when". You know they will fuck over literally every single person they possibly can. It's just a matter of time, and how quickly they build up their hubris.
Early mobile phone providers are a great example. They literally nickle and dimed you for every conceivable thing. For every service you wanted to access. Now, they still try to, but it just doesn't seem as bad because almost everything people use is over the internet that the provider is unable to control. Removing Net Neutrality will return you to exactly the state we were in before.
You want to use twitter? Sure, just go through our portal that conveniently charges you 5 cents per post written or read. It *will* happen, because it's been done before, and the ISPs will have no incentive to *not* do that. (Oh? You want to change ISPs? Too bad! We sued all the other players in your area to the point where we are the only option!)
The service Netflix (for one example) has a price - and that price is independent of the costs Netflix incurs in providing that service.
The ONLY thing "net neutrality" does is say Netflix gets all that, and the providers that have to build infrastructure to supply the bytes from Netflix to its consumers can't charge Netflix to do so.
WHY IS THIS A FEDERAL GOVERNMENT ISSUE?!?!?!
You wonder why the feds pull off crap like "warrantless wiretaps" and "persistent surveillance"? You don't like that?
THEN STOP SAYING THE GOVERNMENT NEEDS THE POWER TO SOLVE FIGHTS OVER WHO GETS WHAT PIECE OF A MARKET.
Because our government IS GOING TO USE THAT POWER AGAINST US.
Or maybe you LIKE the fact that the NSA listens to your phone calls.