Posted on 12/22/2010 11:36:01 AM PST by opentalk
Despite what you may have heard, yesterday’s net neutrality vote at the FCC wasn’t the result of millions of Americans or even tens of thousands of Americans waking up and saying, “I think I am going to suddenly care about this!” No, like most Washington success stories, yesterday’s enslavement of the Internet was made possible by a small group of people with a lot of money.
“After McCain-Feingold passed, several of the foundations involved in the effort began shifting their attention to “media reform”—a movement to impose government controls on Internet companies somewhat related to the long-defunct “Fairness Doctrine” that used to regulate TV and radio companies,” writes the WSJ’s John Fund. Those outfits are Pew Charitable Trusts, Bill Moyers’s Schumann Center for Media and Democracy, the Joyce Foundation, George Soros’s Open Society Institute, the Ford Foundation, and the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, all of which have given money to left-wing froth factory Free Press. As a result of Free Press’s close ties to staffers for FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski, net neutrality crusaders gamed the debate from the beginning: “Some of the same foundations that have spent years funding net neutrality advocacy research ended up funding the FCC-commissioned study that evaluated net neutrality research.”
(Excerpt) Read more at dailycaller.com ...
The thing that most concerns me about this move is that the FCC says they have to let any application no matter the bandwidth have equal access to the connection from the Internet to your home.
This sets up a situation where there won’t be enough bandwidth for everyone which will drive up the cost or worsen the performance to the point where people will demand further government action.
Then the government can use the same logic as AM Radio, that the bandwidth is public because it is limited. Then they will move into the area of network management on what can and can’t be transmitted via your private Internet connection.
Eventually, this will mean regulations as far as content available to you which is the exact opposite to what these regulations are supposed to prevent.
Don’t look now, but the government is here and they want to make it better.
What about Verizon’s astroturfing here of so-called “conservative” publications? Not up to liberal carbon credit trading scam, but up there in stupidity.
Camel, nose, tent..............nuff said.
There are several folk on FRee Republic that INSIST the FCC is the good guys here and the cable companies, the telco’s and the ISP’s are the bad guys.
One merely has to note what groups are pushing ‘net neutrality’ to see on what side one needs to be.
Incorrect. ISPs can't discriminate based on APPLICATION. Bandwidth is not part of it. For example, Vonage VOIP and Comcast VOIP take about the same bandwidth. Net neutrality says Comcast has to let that Vonage VOIP through, preventing anti-competitive behavior.
This sets up a situation where there won’t be enough bandwidth for everyone which will drive up the cost
ISPs are free to tier differently-priced bandwidth levels to customers. They are also free to limit total bytes received by customers as long as that limitation is clearly communicated to the customers (no more hidden caps).
Sadly, much of the opposition to net neutrality is because of false information such as you got, and that was initiated by ISP astroturf groups.
Speaking of astroturf, let's look at the definition again. It is only astroturf it it's originated by an established organization and made to look like grassroots (thus the term "astroturf," fake grass). If the deception isn't there, then it's not astroturf.
The proponents of net neutrality were initially mainly established rights groups speaking as those groups. The initial opponents of net neutrality were, you guessed it, the telcos initially and then astroturf groups specifically set up by them for that purpose. Let's look at the main one, now defunct:
Organization: Hands Off The InternetTheir activities included massive ad buys by AT&T made to look like grasroots please to stop the big bad government. That's astroturf.Self-described: "a nationwide coalition of Internet users united together in the belief that the Net's phenomenal growth over the past decade stems from the ability of entrepreneurs to expand consumer choices and opportunities without worrying about government regulation"
Founders and funders: AT&T, BellSouth, Cingular, etc.
Chairs: Mike McCurry and Christopher Wolf, paid telco lobbyists
Save The Internet was the main opposition, and right on the home page it states that non-profits and businesses are part of it, and refers to two million users because of about two million signatures it has collected for pro net neutrality petitions. At the bottom in the normal "made by" place it states the organization that started it, the Free Press. The "about" page lists all involved non-profits, businesses, churches, etc. (hundreds of them).
That's not astroturf, that's plain-old issue advocacy.
You're several decades late on that. The seminal case that supported thefairness doctrine, Red Lion Broadcasting Co. v. FCC, hinged on the fact that the spectrum is a limited public resource. Only so many channels can be transmitted, only a clearly finite number of views can be out on the airwaves at the same time, therefore the content can be regulated in the "public interest." Remember, a couple powerful corporations having a large say on what information the people get helped start the Spanish-American War (Hearst and Pulitzer). The government probably didn't want a repeat.
The Internet is for all practical means unlimited in terms of the number of views that can be out there at the same time. In fact, we're suffering severe information overload with hundreds of millions of blogs and web sites. With a click you can get editorials ranging from "let's make everyone who crosses our borders a citizen" to "execute all illegals" and thousands of shades between just on one subject.
In short, the Internet fails the basic test that allowed fairness doctrine over the airwaves. It wouldn't hold up in court.
BTW, notice the Internet also fails the corporate power test. The large media corporations hold little power on the Internet. Their opinions carry to no more people than any one blogger sitting in his apartment. That is the situation under net neutrality. That will not necessarily be the situation without net neutrality. As the ISPs charge for access to their customers, the big networks will be able to afford it, but the blogger in his apartment will not, FR will not.
So think of that. Lack of net neutrality starts limiting the news sources available, making it so only the big guys get their voices heard. That sounds like the original legal rationale for allowing fairness doctrine for broadcast media, doesn't it?
Thanks again Libertarians! I thought y’all were for freedom.
Do you think this FCC is going to have to prove that the content is provided by just a few companies? or the fact that content hosted on the ISPs servers will naturally be easier to access than content served on other ISPs servers in a scenario of congested networks without network management?
If you have ever worked on a severely congested network, you would know that the content on the same network tier or a close network tier always works faster then content served on a far remote network tier even in the absence of network management.
FCCs rules just outlaw network management, it doesn’t level the playing field. Some content is going to be faster than others, if the content is too slow it just times out and becomes unreachable to your average internet user.
Your missing the point that ISPs could setup dedicated pipes to popular services so that you get faster service from lets say “You Tube”.
This is like building an express bypass that allows the network to better deal with the traffic and allowing the user to get faster service.
So, yes, application does have something to do with it. You have been brainwashed by the Internet Freedom Alliance or a similar group.
Network management doesn’t always mean denial of service or slowing down service. It also means speeding up service.
If the FCC Rules were strictly to prevent ISPs from blocking traffic for an application/protocol I would be a supporter.
The rules do that and far more. No preference is allowed, they can’t slow it down. They can’t speed it up. Nothing, they can’t do anything.
The only bandwidth management on the network they can do is in pricing. So prices go higher. For Broadband ISPs, this is a death sentence.
AT&T, BellSouth, Cingular are actually going to be the winners
The losers are Comcast, Cox, etc..
Pay-TV Industry Suffers First Subscriber Decline On Record
http://www.foxbusiness.com/markets/2010/08/23/pay-tv-industry-suffers-subscriber-decline-record/
Now to kill off the Broadband Subscribers......
Hmm.... FoxNews is #1 on Cable News..... But no more cable ...RIP
I've been brainwashed by having used the Internet since before the WWW. Bits are bits. That was until certain companies decided they prefer to lie to consumers or block traffic rather than build out networks, and put up tollbooths in the middle of Internet commerce for some extra income that really provides no service to anyone.
I'm not really a fan of these specific FCC rules though. I preferred the earlier bill introduced in the House. That one was was much more narrowly tailored, and included wireless, with wide leeway for ISP network management. It was three pages long, but the guts of it were only three paragraphs, the rest being the standard enforcement and definitions sections. Too bad the telco pimps in Congress killed it. That's what you get.
It is a contest now about who used the internet first ah? You would loose that one...but doesn’t matter
You aren’t going to convince me, I am not going to convince you.
Lets just watch the Cable Companies stock next year and see who is right. The stock market is the ultimate predictor.
If you see Comcast bombing, this will be a prime indicator that you have been had.
I just checked. Reasonable network management is an exception to both the "no blocking" and "no unreasonable discrimination" rules. Traffic shaping and capping are allowed as long as they are disclosed to the customer.
The absolute restriction on pay-for-priority does bother me. In one sense it's good because it prevents DU from being able to use it superior funding to get to people better than FR. Having big pockets still doesn't mean you can reach more people better than the little guy. The great communications and commerce equalizer of the Internet remains. This is the general neutrality concept we've always had.
On the other hand, as you were talking about different networks, local caching has long been common on the Internet. I hope that part doesn't affect things like the gamer packages, where the ISPs cache game and system content for consoles locally so gamers get the fastest possible experience.
“Reasonable network management”
I feel better knowing that the FCC will be the one deciding what is Reasonable/Sarc
Pay for Priority requires an ISP to have a dedicated pipe to get it to the customer end tier quicker. You are paying for priority but there is something concrete backing it up.
On both sides, you could pay for priority, maybe you want lower ping times when you play your PS3. It isn’t just companies that benefit by being able to establish these network pipes. Now you won’t have that option, you will have to fight traffic while you jay walk across the busiest freeway in the world.
Dedicated point to point is not a net neutrality issue.
On both sides, you could pay for priority, maybe you want lower ping times when you play your PS3.
Customers paying their ISP for a higher level of service is also not a net neutrality issue. But as I said I don't like these specific rules the FCC came out with anyway, and prefer either the ISPs behave, or narrowly-targeted legislation to make them do so.
The tiering this talks about is from the other end, towards content providers. Note the future tense. Tiering of service to customers has been going on for a very long time.
The Price System - it allocates scarce resources and services pretty well.
Just sayin’...
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