Slashdot Mirror
AT&T Seeks Supreme Court Review On Net Neutrality Rule (bloomberg.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: AT&T and other broadband providers asked the U.S. Supreme Court to overturn the Obama-era "net neutrality" rule barring internet service providers from slowing or blocking rivals' content. The appeals, filed Thursday, will put new pressure on a rule enacted in 2015 when the Federal Communications Commission was under Democratic control. Filing a separate appeal from AT&T were the United States Telecom Association, a trade group, and broadband service provider CenturyLink. The embattled net neutrality rules bar internet service providers such as AT&T, Verizon and Comcast from blocking or slowing some web traffic in favor of other content -- their own or a paying customer's. "The practical stakes are immense," AT&T said in its appeal of a ruling that backed the FCC. The company pointed to a dissenting opinion that said the regulation "fundamentally transforms the internet" and will have a "staggering" impact on infrastructure investment.
Omg stfu dude. Government regulation is what keeps corporations from doing all sorts of evil shit. The internet is now too important to not have protections for consumers.
Unfortunately no, net neutrality is not achieved by making sure competition exists. Violating net neutrality is a competitive advantage, one which works in favor of consolidation. Not only does competition not bring net neutrality, lack of enforced net neutrality reduces competition where it once might have existed. The way ISPs intend to profit from abolishing net neutrality rules is through double dipping: They want to get paid by the content hosting side as well as the content consuming side, data sources and sinks, even if they're not directly connected to the data sources.
Violating net neutrality is their instrument of torture to get the hosters to pay up. An ISP that doesn't do that has to derive all income from the consumers, so their break-even rates will be higher compared to ISPs that also get paid by the hosters. In the extreme the anti net neutrality ISPs will use "zero rating", exempting some data from data volume caps. Once all neutral ISPs have been driven out of the market (reducing competition), the double dipping will start in earnest.
Net neutrality is a necessity for an open, fair and competitive market. It's not just a band-aid for a failing market.
The free market argument works if there's competition. If the customers want net neutrality, they will ditch ISPs which accept payments for fast lanes, and switch to ISPs which honor net neutrality. If customers want services who pay for fast lanes, they will ditch neutral ISPs for ISPs which charge for fast lanes. This is pretty much how Internet service works in most of the world. If your ISP's policies piss you off, you cancel and get Internet using a different ISP.
This exposes the seed of destruction that Capitalism contains. A free market requires competition, low barriers to entry and informed consumers, among a few other things. But market participants are incentivized to eliminate competition, raise barriers to entry and keep consumers as ignorant as possible. So the free market's participants have a short-term interest in destroying the freedom of the market! It's one of Capitalism's inherent flaws that I have always found interesting, and why government regulation is required to maintain Capitalism.
"What the American public doesn't know is what makes them the American public." -Ray Zalinsky (Tommy Boy)