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NYTimes Editorial Board: The FCC Wants To Let Telecoms Cash In on the Internet (nytimes.com)
The New York Times' Editorial Board writes: The chairman of the Federal Communications Commission wants to let Comcast, Verizon and other broadband companies turn the internet into a latter-day version of cable TV, in which they decide what customers can watch and how much they pay for that content. That's essentially what would happen under the proposal by the chairman, Ajit Pai, to abandon the commission's network neutrality rules, which prevent telecom companies from interfering with how their customers use the internet. Net neutrality prevents those companies from having companies like Amazon pay a fee to get their content delivered more quickly than their rivals', and from having the firms throttle other services and websites, even blocking customer access to, say, Netflix or an online newspaper. Under Mr. Pai's proposal, telecom companies would effectively be allowed to sell you a basic internet plan that might include only limited access to Google and email. For Facebook and Twitter you might need a slightly more expensive deluxe plan. The premium plan might include access to Netflix and Amazon. Oh, and by the way, media businesses eager to gain more users could pay broadband companies to be included in their enhanced basic or deluxe plans. Further reading: Associated Press fact check: Net-neutrality claims leave out key context; The death of the Internet.
This model smacks of 1990's style thinking.
Do they think Amazon and Google won't start building out their own 'internets'? Do they think that this type of fragmentation and duplication of efforts would be anything but harmful for consumers?
This isn't free market capitalism. This is crony capitalism.
You're confusing toll roads with member-only access to a building.
If NYTimes requires people to pay to view their articles, it's their business.
But without net neutrality, it would give that power to the ISPs and completely fragment and destroy American's internet access.
#DeleteFacebook
We need strong, caring, logical people to join the U.S. government. One way to help that happen is to take the money out of being elected. Could there be free TV channels for those who qualify and are trying to make themselves known before an election?
Another way is to pass a law that says anyone who tries to influence legislation must make all documents public, and must have no personal involvement with lawmakers or their staff.
Personally if I was them, I would not want this. They'll lose their carrier status and will be responsible for the content viewed
"Only one thing, is impossible for god: to find any sense in any copyright law on the planet." Mark Twain
Internet Access: 40.00/Mo @ 500Gb
Modem Rental: $10.00/Mo - Mandatory Use of Modem
Modem Insurance Fee: $1.00/Mo
Extra Computer Fee: $10.00/Mo/PC -Must use our router
NetFlix Fee: $10.00/Mo/client
Social Network Package Fee: $4.00/Mo
Email Fee: $2.00/Mo
VPN Fee:$50.00/Mo
VoIP Fee: $50.00/Mo
Skype Fee: $5.00/Mo
Non-Approved Browser Fee: $5.00/Mo
Non-Approved Application Fee: $4.00/Mo/application
Non-Approved OS Fee: $10.00/Mo
Mandatory AntiVirus Fee: $4.00/Mo
Blocked: Bittorrent, SSH, Non-Approved VPN, Non-Approved OS, Non-Approved Routers, Non-Approved Sites
Early Payment Fee: $1.00
Late Payment Fee: $10.00
Early Termination Fee: $100
Fee Payment Fee: $1.00
Fee Payment Fee Recovery Fee: $1.00
Fee Payment Fee Recovery Fee Surcharge: $1.00
Fee Payment Fee Recovery Fee Surcharge Levy: $1.00
Fee Payment Fee Recovery Fee Surcharge Levy Premium: $1.00
Excess Data Fee: $20.00/Gb
Unused Data Fee: $0.10/Gb
Paper Bill Fee: $1.00/pg
If you want a free and open internet, the very, very LAST thing anyone should desire is government regulation. The internet has been as free and open as it's been so far precisely *because* there has been no government regulation
To be more precise, you do not want under the control of *ANY* bit entity.
Be it governments, or be it huge corporation.
And here liese the problem...
If it's so terrible, why hasn't all those bad things already happened?
...because it took some time for the big corporation to be big enough and vertically integrated to be able to pull off easily the kind of shit that forced the creation of net neutrality regulations.
There's a difference between what was once just a bunch of universities communicating with each other on equal grounds, and a huge corporation basically having a monopoly on internet over a whole region and deciding what every one will be able to see or not.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
No, the government (in the form of a Republican Congress decades ago) made a deliberate decision not to let the government regulate the Internet.
That lasted until the Obama administration finally found a way around the laws (after losing several court cases) by reclassifying Internet access under Title II so they could start regulating it.
You're conflating regulating the internet (ie, the content and services on the internet) with regulating internet service providers (ie, the effective monopolies that give access to the internet).
Now we're just talking about repealing that and returning it closer to the "wild west" you remember so fondly.
No, we're not. We're giving the ISPs the ability to regulate content. That is exactly the opposite of the "wild west" approach.
Somehow we never had any irresolvable issues in the decades before the FCC had Title II authority to regulate the Internet, but after only a couple of years of validity (and use mostly to investigate charges of free Facebook access for people) repealing it is suddenly all going to doom the Internet forever.
You don't think that the consolidation that's occurred since then has changed the landscape at all? You don't think the reports that we're seeing about the type of plan seen in TFA have any weight behind them?
When Obama decreed Net Neutrality he of course fucked it up. Instead of getting new laws passed, he simply had the FCC implement rules treating them like Common Carriers.
Instead of getting new laws passed? How exactly was he supposed to do that with a congress that stated in no uncertain terms - and backed it up with their actions - that they would not work with him on anything? Stop pretending that this is a bipartisan fuck up. It's not. One party, and one party alone, has been pushing for the end of Net Neutrality, and now that that party has full control of congress and the white house, guess what we got? Hint: it's not new laws to preserve Net Neutrality.
And Net Neutrality laws were passed in response to ISPs beginning to implement censorship and "cost maximizing" shenanigans. Do you really think they'd pay to have the laws repealed if they didn't plan to resume (and expand) their exploitation?
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
Prior to the rules being adopted, some two years back, had ISP's actually done this thing you fear?
Yes they had and there is proof. They didn't charge their subscribers they extorted money from companies wanting to get to their subscribers. "It would be a shame if everyone of our internet subscribers constantly got **buffering** screens when trying to stream content from your site. If you pay us a % of your revenue we'll make sure that doesn't happen."
"A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals and you know it." - K
When Comcast started charging Netflix for content to be delivered to Netflix customers who already pay both Comcast and Netflix to wat cg Netflix content.
That's what changed. Sips want to charge content providers for delivering content. You want to use Facebook that's extra. You want to use AMAZON over Wal-Mart that's extra for this isp. Want to visit foxnew.com instead of msnbc.com. That's going to cost Comcast customers extra. Comcast owns manic so all of their content doesn't count againistt you. But fox is extra.
That is exactly what Obama prevented. But morons don't seem to realize the difference between content providers and distribution
i thought once I was found, but it was only a dream.
Donâ(TM)t you remember Comcast throttling all upstream BitTorrent traffic and then lying about it to their customers when they got caught? That wasnâ(TM)t a problem?
Unless you wanted to use facetime over your AT&T data plan.
As far as I can see AT&T did exactly what they say they won't do now, in 2012.
No, it wasn't. Paying an extortionist for the rest of your life is not a resolution. What people always miss is that the government is ALREADY involved in that it gave the power these telcos turned ISP's have in the first place by granting them exclusive rights of way. If you want to make it right then the infrastructure needs to be taken back and given to a third party to maintain much like the electric grid was when it was deregulated.
"A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals and you know it." - K
It is interesting to reflect that we just lived through the Internet equivalent of the swinging sixities "where anything goes". Future generations will have Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, Netflix and the MSM and that will be it for the Internet, all the rest, including this site will be history.
Fascinating how capitalism fucks everything just as assuredly as totalitarianism.
Facts are history now plebs have politics for religion on social media.
Hey, we've given capitalism a fair shake all over the world, and *every time* the same sorts of problems arise, the only variation is in how aggressively anti-capitalistic sentiment fights back.
Contrast with communism, which has never actually been tried at the national scale, and yet gets blackwashed with the abuses of the authoritarians that rose to power fraudulently claiming the banner.
Capitalism at least earned virtually every black mark against it on its own merits.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.