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Bill That Would Restore Net Neutrality Moves Forward Despite Telecom's Best Efforts To Kill It (vice.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: Last month, Democrats introduced a simple three page bill that would do one thing: restore FCC net neutrality rules and the agency's authority over ISPs, both stripped away by a hugely-controversial decision by the agency in late 2017. Tuesday morning, the Save the Internet Act passed through a key House committee vote and markup session -- despite some last-minute efforts by big telecom to weaken the bill.
"Net neutrality is coming back with a vengeance," said Evan Greer, deputy director of consumer group Fight for the Future said in a statement. "Politicians are slowly learning that they can't get away with shilling for big telecom anymore," Greer said. "We're harnessing the power of the Internet to save it, and any lawmaker who stands in our way will soon face the wrath of their constituents, who overwhelmingly want lawmakers to restore these basic protections." Greer told Motherboard that several last minute amendments were introduced by lawmakers during the markup period in an attempt to water down the bill, but all were pulled in the wake of widespread public interest in the hearing. "It seems like the GOP retreated a bit given after the huge swell of public support," said Greer, who told Motherboard that 300,000 people watched the organization's livestream of the markup process. That attention "really emboldened the Democrats and shored up the ones that were wobbling," Greer said.
"Net neutrality is coming back with a vengeance," said Evan Greer, deputy director of consumer group Fight for the Future said in a statement. "Politicians are slowly learning that they can't get away with shilling for big telecom anymore," Greer said. "We're harnessing the power of the Internet to save it, and any lawmaker who stands in our way will soon face the wrath of their constituents, who overwhelmingly want lawmakers to restore these basic protections." Greer told Motherboard that several last minute amendments were introduced by lawmakers during the markup period in an attempt to water down the bill, but all were pulled in the wake of widespread public interest in the hearing. "It seems like the GOP retreated a bit given after the huge swell of public support," said Greer, who told Motherboard that 300,000 people watched the organization's livestream of the markup process. That attention "really emboldened the Democrats and shored up the ones that were wobbling," Greer said.
There's 2 seperate problems here;
The first is allowing content distribution companies aka publishers to also own and create content on a massive scale and in turn, dictate the discussion in a democracy. We know historically how disasterous it is to eliminate the ability of a body politic to discuss their differences and figure out how to manage the economic and political system; its the whole reason we have the freedom of speech.
The second is a bigger issue with local pay 2 play franchising agreements; ISP's pay government, government grants monopolies, ISP's charge whatever they want. The fundemental engineering problem there is implimenting public wireway that anyone can pay the local government to use which is a difficult endeavour to solve because the realization is we need to seperate data as its own utility from other utility services' infrastructure. We used to have that when POTS networks were a thing; we've since replaced those POTS networks with Coaxial cable networks (still copper) and Cellular networks both of which present new engineering problems that the market has shown itself unable and unwilling to solve. States are attempting to retire their POTS cable and are finding out 911 emergency service goes away with it which is literally what keeps roving violent gangs from rampaging the countryside.
Net Neutrality is one way of approaching the problem and a step in the right direction towards preserving a functioning economy and country. However until you begin breaking up media organizations and begin seperating publishers from content producers, you won't have a workable solution.
If we are going to talk about Netflix, they already offer (or used to offer) your proposed solution. Many ISPs generally refused to accept these boxes because it undercut their arguments about getting Netflix to pay them.
https://openconnect.netflix.co...
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
Both Netflix AND the ISP save tons of upstream bandwidth.
Or, without neutrality, ISP throttles the hell out of Netflix and zero rates CrapeeStreaming (a wholly owned subsidiary) and gives their customers the middle finger suggesting they go back to dial-up if they don't like it.