Slashdot Mirror
FCC's Own Chief Technology Officer Warned About Net Neutrality Repeal (politico.com)
Margaret Harding McGill, reporting for Politico: The Federal Communications Commission's own chief technology officer expressed concern Wednesday about Republican Chairman Ajit Pai's plan to repeal the net neutrality rules, saying it could lead to practices that are "not in the public interest." In an internal email to all of the FCC commissioner offices, CTO Eric Burger, who was appointed by Pai in October, said the No. 1 issue with the repeal is concern that internet service providers will block or throttle specific websites, according to FCC sources who viewed the message. "Unfortunately, I realize we do not address that at all," Burger said in the email. "If the ISP is transparent about blocking legal content, there is nothing the [Federal Trade Commission] can do about it unless the FTC determines it was done for anti-competitive reasons. Allowing such blocking is not in the public interest."
>I had never seen such single mindedness "my mind is made up don't confuse me with the facts" behaviour from US politicians.
This isn't ignorance, but deliberate lying. They know what will happen, it just happens to be in alignment with their desires.
This is what happens when you put a fox in charge of the hen house. When a bunch of rich people obviously want to reduce the impediments to getting richer and have a history of making moves in that direction, it's probably a bad idea to take them at their word when they say they're going to help you out at their expense.
Disney bought 21st Century Fox. All of it. That means the Foul Rodent Empire is increasingly in a monopolistic position in the movie, TV and sports content fields, plus they have a nice chunk of Hulu.
But thank God Netflix might not face a little discrimination from Comcast or Verizon if they don't work out an agreement for all of that data that floods their networks. That'll save Netflix from one day being just another acquisition target of Disney at a reduced price after Disney chokes off most of the desirable content and forces Netflix to produce its own or go broke.
So 100% of the stuff I read in online forums is against this, so I am going to try and argue the other side. I'm doing this because I find it weird that in a controversial topic there aren't even any shills around arguing the other side as there almost always are in an online debate topic. SO here goes:
The big 4 Amazon, Facebook, Netflix and Google are rapidly consolidating to control just about everything we see, hear or do on the Internet all over the entire world. Reversing net neutrality will allow for more competition with these services. Look at China, they have their own Facebook, Google, Amazon, Twitter, etc. In some ways, such as mobile payments their tech is even ahead of us and they block all the big 4. I am thinking that the ISPs blocking or throttling these services would create more small versions of these services that would be run by ISPs, etc. State and local governments could negotiate directly with Comcast or whatever to do stuff in the public interest locally with these services because of the give and take with regulated utilities. It would bring back more local control and work to reverse the decreasing relevance of local governments.