The following is my son’s take on this:
This is a good thing. There are two other sides here and
actually the FCC is the one saving your neck.
1. The government wants an internet kill switch. Not the
FCC. I’d rather have the communications people watching over
this than giving direct access to whatever liberal government
is in place.
2. This mostly looks like net neutrality coming up again.
The telco’s have been trying for years to throttle internet
access depending on your “status.” For example, if you are
big company that sells cogs you would pay more to have your
website go faster than a little company that pays cogs. Or
even more likely, you will have to pay “entry level” internet
access fees to get the internet but it would be “a-la’carte”
much like the crappy way cable companies have made cable very
complicated and expensive. The FCC has been fighting these guys
for years. Net neutrality means “all the internet all the time”.
It doesn’t matter what you pay or how controversial your message.
The internet stays open for business to anyone with something to
say. Because this is a government agency fighting a lobbying group
you hear these “fcc wants to regulate” messages but it clouds the truth.
They’re the ones trying to keep the playing field flat. I don’t
want the goverment regulating in the sense that they censor what
I can get. But I DO want them doing their true job as the government
telling everyone ELSE not to screw me and censor what I can get.
To quote Ronald Reagan:
The nine most terrifying words in the English language are, 'I'm from the government and I'm here to help.'
Even the recently released "Kill Switch" (note, also separate from net neutrality) bill didn't have a kill switch in it. At least I didn't see one when reading it. I've asked several times for people to point out the exact "kill switch" provision, but have never received an answer. It's possible there is one, but nobody has found it as far as I know.
For example, if you are big company that sells cogs you would pay more to have your website go faster than a little company that pays cogs.
The important issue is where this "go faster" is happening. Both are paying their own ISPs for their internet access. In the neutral Internet, it is entirely possible that the bigger company pays its ISP for higher bandwidth and lower latency. On the consumer side, it is also possible under the neutral Internet that one customer pays his ISP extra for higher bandwidth and lower latency than others. Pay for your level of service, quite straightforward in a free market.
The problem comes when the consumer ISPs essentially hold their consumers hostage, using them as assets to be leveraged. They tell the "cog" companies that if they don't want their access to the ISP's consumers restricted, they'd better pay up. It's basically highway robbery on the information superhighway, or a tollbooth if you prefer that metaphor. Everybody's already getting paid for their services under net neutrality, the ISPs are just getting greedy, and using their position as the gatekeepers to the Internet to extort money from those doing business on it
Also, the consumer ISPs would like to suppress competition for their offerings, especially VOIP and video. Without net neutrality, you will find Skype, Vonage, Netflix and Hulu not working too well compared to the ISP's more expensive offering, unless the company pays your ISP for the privilege of having you as a customer. And guess who pays that extra charge in the end? It's either Comcast or Sprint that has already admitted its own VOIP runs at a higher priority than the competition, so it's started.
And companies aside, all I can think of is those cash-rich Soros-funded and commercial liberal sites that can afford to pay off all the consumer ISPs to get their message through. Without fat cat donors and ads, Free Republic can't afford that. We're now back to the old days before the Internet, where you needed a large budget in order to be able to reach people.
-—————The government wants an internet kill switch. Not the FCC.——————
You should remind your son what the letter “F” in FCC means.
_ederal
Teach your son what the word “nationalization” means, then ask him “who’s going to stop the government from throttling?”
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-chat/2713730/posts
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-bloggers/2729438/posts
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-chat/2711488/posts
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-bloggers/2699462/posts
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/2699677/posts
You can sue a telco. You can’t sue the government. That makes net neutrality the greater threat.
The FCC is the gov't and to think a political appointee isn't going to go along with the people who appointed him seems like whistling in the graveyard to me.
I dont want the goverment regulating in the sense that they censor what I can get. But I DO want them doing their true job as the government telling everyone ELSE not to screw me and censor what I can get.
What is "their true job"? Once you allow regulation, historically the amount of control always increases. I don't know if it's because they view it as a make-work process or what, but it is very rare that a regulated industry gets less regulated over time.
I wrote about the road to serfdom and net neutrality last night.
The government is never on your side. Even if it is for a short while the next administration will almost surely screw it up.
All the ideas of the telcos screwing up internet access are laughable. Most of us have at least 3 companies trying to be our ISP (your cable company, your telco and verizon), if you live in a large or heavily teched city there will be even more. If the one you’re signed up on messed with one of your favorite sites because they won’t pay you can be switched over to one of the others in under a week. And they know that. That’s the nice part about the corporate “solution”, companies are highly replaceable. Now on the other hand if the next administration is even more of a control freak than the current and makes the FCC clamp down on some sites who you gonna turn to? Governments are very difficult to replace.
One of the things governments are historically terrible at is “fair”. That’s why we’ve been flushing money down social programs for nearly 50 years and the poverty rate has remained the same, “fair” is just not in the government’s skill set. That’s why the fairness doctrine failed, and why net neutrality will screw things up. Even if the FCC doesn’t get a bad mandate from a crumby administration it’s still the government being told to make things “fair” a mandate that no government agency has ever even come close to succeeding at.