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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.
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
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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.
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?