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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."
It's only in the last few years that companies have created totally vertical integration with content creation to delivery. That is a major difference, in my mind; hence the need for laws.
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Part of the problem is that while yes, there are many users of the Internet who want it to stay open and free, there is a segment of the Consumer population that wants it to be Cable TV, and Perhaps Gaming Distribution 2.0
The idea behind DRM, and video rental systems over the internet is just asinine. But you have to look at where a particular segment of the Computer using public is going: Android Tablets, which is Linux turned against iteslf, and iPads. What do both of these things look like? Portable Televisions. They don't have keyboards, they don't have mice. They are tools of Content consumption.
Steve Jobs, Woz's partner, was a huge part of this. Openness on the Apple Platforms ended with the Apple II GS series, and the Macs were all largely closed to the outside world until the advent of OSX. Many Pre-OSX Macs, had proprietary EVERYTHING, and even the speaker Jack was proprietary. OSX opened the Mac world up some by giving us a MacOS running on BSD.
This allowed Mac to Survive and gve us the Trusted Computing Nightmare that was iOS. All the sudden you have what the DRM Corps want: A Computing platform where everything is a Rental transaction, and consumers money can be funneled from their wallets constantly. Thats what is happening now with iDevice owners.
Apple should have died off back in the 90s. They should have gone out of business completely. Consumers should have resisted the introduction of DRM into computers and rejected networks like NetFlix.
"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.
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.