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Steve Wozniak: Net Neutrality Rollback 'Will End the Internet As We Know It' (siliconbeat.com)
An anonymous reader quotes Silicon Beat:
Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak penned an op-ed on Friday with a former Federal Communications Commission chairman, urging the current FCC to stop its proposed rollback of Obama-era net neutrality regulations. In the op-ed published by USA Today, Wozniak and Michael Copps, who led the FCC from 2001 to 2011, argued the rollback will threaten freedom for internet users and may corrode democracy... "Sometimes there's a nugget of truth to the adage that Washington policymakers are disconnected from the people they purport to represent," they wrote. "It is a stirring example of democracy in action. With the Internet's future as a platform for innovation and democratic discourse on the line, a coalition of grassroots and diverse groups joined with technology firms to insist that the FCC maintain its 2015 open internet (or 'net neutrality') rules."
In the joint letter, Wozniak and Copps write that "We come from different walks of life, but each of us recognizes that the FCC is considering action that could end the internet as we know it -- a dynamic platform for entrepreneurship, jobs, education, and free expression."
"Will consumers and citizens control their online experiences, or will a few gigantic gatekeepers take this dynamic technology down the road of centralized control, toll booths and constantly rising prices for consumers? At stake is the nature of the internet and its capacity to transform our lives even more than it already has."
In the joint letter, Wozniak and Copps write that "We come from different walks of life, but each of us recognizes that the FCC is considering action that could end the internet as we know it -- a dynamic platform for entrepreneurship, jobs, education, and free expression."
"Will consumers and citizens control their online experiences, or will a few gigantic gatekeepers take this dynamic technology down the road of centralized control, toll booths and constantly rising prices for consumers? At stake is the nature of the internet and its capacity to transform our lives even more than it already has."
"30+ years without "net neutrality" regulations, 2 years with" - bzzzzzzt. Wrong.
For the 1990's to mid 2000's ISPs and telecoms were typically separate entities. Telecom access was dialup or DSL - both regulated by Title II. Since the ISPs weren't in the telecom business they didn't require regulation - they had no reason to block/throttle based on service/source/destination/whatever.
From then until 2014 various FCC rules and regulations (including the "Open Internet Order") governed ISPs. In 2014 Verizon "ruined it for everyone" by challenging the OIO and taking the FCC to court. They won, but the judge suggested that if the FCC was going to police ISPs it would have to classify them as common carriers. So the FCC did.
Similar rules have always been in place, it's just that the rules have only applied to the telecom provider. ISPs today are both the telecom company, the internet provider, and in many cases also a content source. Prior to about 2005 your ISP was just the internet provider - other companies did the telecommunications and still others provided content. The telecom companies have always been regulated by Title II, this regulation is "new" for the vertically integrated ISPs...who are undoubtedly providing a telecommunications service in addition to being an internet provider.
Uhh...we actually did have net neutrality for most of the time that we had the Internet. Remember: the Internet operated over telephone lines for most of its existence, and those lines were regulated under the same Title II classification that Obama’s FCC simply extended to cable ISPs. It’s a matter of bringing Internet-over-cable in line with the regulations that have existed for Internet-over-anything-else for the duration of the Internet’s history.
Universal health care is about being decent human beings. Most first-world countries have it.
You guys have insane costs caused by letting corporations run your health care system so that needs to be fixed, but even lower costs could not be afforded by everyone. Your taxes are also wasted on the military, so fix that too and you'll have universal health care, universal income, ten times the budget for NASA, etc.
#DeleteFacebook
The net neutrality rules didn't ban QoS or put the definition of it into the hands of the government. They did require that companies show technical, rather than financial, justifications for managing traffic.
People arguing that rules should be repealed based on hearsay without taking the time to find out what the rules actually say? What could go wrong?