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The Republican Push To Repeal Net Neutrality Will Get Underway This Week (washingtonpost.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Washington Post: Federal regulators will move to roll back one of the Obama administration's signature Internet policies this week, launching a process to repeal the government's net neutrality rules that currently regulate how Internet providers may treat websites and their own customers. The vote on Thursday, led by Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai, will kick off consideration of a proposal to relax regulations on companies such as Comcast and AT&T. If approved by the 2-1 Republican-majority commission, it will be a significant step for the broadband industry as it seeks more leeway under government rules to develop new business models. For consumer advocates and tech companies, it will be a setback; those groups argue that looser regulations won't prevent those business models from harming Internet users and website owners. The current rules force Internet providers to behave much like their cousins in the legacy telephone business. Under the FCC's net neutrality policy, providers cannot block or slow down consumers' Internet traffic, or charge websites a fee in order to be displayed on consumers' screens. The net neutrality rules also empower the FCC to investigate ISP practices that risk harming competition. Internet providers have chafed at the stricter rules governing phone service, which they say were written for a bygone era. Pai's effort to roll back the rules has led to a highly politicized debate. Underlying it is a complex policy decision with major implications for the future of the Web.
The FCC (who created the phone company monstrosities) took over and neutrality regulations were released in 2015. They have never been enforced yet. So those decades of innovation building the world wide web - that was all without net neutrality micromanaging networks, with just FTC regulations.
Why do you call this a Republican plan? Trump is not paying one iota of attention to what is going on in the FCC. I doubt if he can even name the FCC commissioners. Pai took over automatically when the White House switched parties, Trump did not put him there. Also, when you poll voters on this 70% of people are for Net Neutrality and 30% don't know what it is. Republicans and Democrats poll almost identically on this. This is not a party line issue.
Pai is a member of party Verizon with constituents Comcast, Charter, AT&T, etc. Pai is not representing any block of voters.
What we should be hoping for is that he attracts the attention of Trump by throttling his Twitter, and then I'm sure Pai will get a "You're Fired!". And, by the way, he was appointed by Obama and approved by a Democratically controlled Senate.
Well... not to belabor definitions here, but you explained this yourself in your title. Republicans are not progressives, they are not after progress. They are conservatives, in opposition to progress. Or, to put a more positive spin on that, they're about careful, cautious, advancement and the way we've been doing things until now has worked just fine thank-you-very-much.
Those are the old definitions of progressive and conservative. The modern American definitions are just: conservatives believe whatever the Republican Party platform is at the moment, and the same for progressives and Democrats.
Your example also happened at a time when the internet relied entirely on sitting on top of a wire infrastructure that already existed and was maintained by companies not involved in the supply of internet services. Those ISPs were sitting on the phone lines - and changing ISPs was as easy as terminating your account and getting another one. It was fairly easy to switch ISPs and fairly cheap and easy to establish one - because the infrastructure costs were limited to a few routers and servers.
That era doesn't exist anymore - broadband technology came with the downside of requiring expensive new infrastructure and the ISPs converged into being the same companies that build the infrastructure.
The old ISP competitive market was lost in the process.
Your prediction then that the same would happen is not supported by the evidence you're providing since the two situations are markedly different. It's a basic principle of the scientific method that if you change the parameters of the experiment you cannot assume the results will not also change.
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *