Posted on 06/17/2010 11:04:29 AM PDT by woodb01
My call to arms came when the ISPs publicly announced they want to start restricting the Internet, when the ISPs started covertly interfering with traffic.
Yes, but just wait to you see what you get when the dems and their marxist bureaucrat regulators decide they need to make it more neutral.
Net neutrality precludes judging the acceptability or 'neutrality' of the content itself. Net neutrality is a policy for the network, meaning the network has to be neutral towards content. Net neutrality is not a policy for content, that's fairness doctrine.
IOW, net neutrality is freedom of speech.
In other words, destroy its neutrality. Looks like the ISPs and Democrats want the same thing, just for different reasons.
Just a sure sign of desperation. Their message is not being readily accepted by the masses, and they are no longer able to frame the debate around their one-sided rules. Their solution, throw out the rules and put ones in place that will hamper the opposition.
The Commission has three options for going forward. First, it can decide not to reclassify the Internet at all, continuing to treat it as an information service. Second, the FCC can completely reclassify the Internet as a telecommunications service, granting the Commission broad powers over it. Third, it could seek a middle ground, reclassifying the Internet as a telecom service but exempting Internet providers from most of the regulations associated with other telecommunications services.I guess it comes down to whom you trust less, the government or the private sector. In my experience, competition and profit motive (even in an imperfect oligopoly market like we have with the ISP's) is ALWAYS more trustworthy than an unaccountable behemoth federal government agency. Maybe you trust the FCC to keep its promise not to use its regulatory authority in most cases; I DON'T! Notice that the advocates of more government authority to regulate the ISP's cite the gulf oil spill and the financial markets meltdown as evidence of a need for more government interference over the private sector.This last approach, presented at the hearing as the “third way,” is the preferred avenue of Genachowski, who unveiled the plan in May.
The “third way” approach would still allow the government the authority to heavily regulate the Internet because it would be classified as a telecom service. However, under this approach, the FCC claims it will exercise “forbearance,” a regulatory doctrine whereby the government promises not use its regulatory authority in most cases.
Commissioner Michael Copps, at the FCC, sought to frame the issue in terms of consumer protection, claiming that “consumers find themselves in quite a box” because government, he claimed, had been “all but shorn” of the authority to regulate Internet service.
Copps said he was “worried” about relying purely on the private sector for Internet-based innovation, saying that the problems of such an approach could be seen in the 2008 financial collapse and the recent Gulf of Mexico oil spill.
Sort of like how Card Check is dubbed something along the lines of "Workers' Free Choice Act".
What is it? What exact steps would be taken? Do we need it?
Investigative journalism is dead in this country.
Not even close. Net neutrality is hand-off, keep it free. What's going on over net neutrality is more like how the left calls right-to-work states "righ-to-fire."
Because there have been instances and allegations where it's not working, where the ISPs are currently trying to break it.
What YOU call net neutrality is hands-off, keep it free.
What THE FCC will call net neutrality is the government decides what it means, and will promulgate all kinds of restrictions on the service providers to ensure the FCC’s determination of what the internet should be, and if the consumers are worse off as a result that is just the price of government-mandated freedom.
I just find it a little ironic that someone who chose a name like antiRebuplicrat inherently trusts a behemoth federal bureaucracy to do a better job of keeping the internet “free” more than the private sector.
Please pardon my dyslexic typing figners.
Network carriers, like ISPs, have to be neutral to the content and source of the data. There are many exceptions, such as reasonable necessary network management. This is the state of the Internet we're used to.
Some extremists on the net neutrality side say there can be no intereference, that all packets should be first-come, first-serve. That just shows a basic ignorance of how networks work, and the difference between the requirements of various protocols. I haven't seen a call for this extreme from anybody in the government.
What exact steps would be taken?
At best, none. Carriers don't degrade competitive content or block otherwise legal content, and the government doesn't penalize them for doing so.
Do we need it?
That's the big question. The ISPs have publicly stated they want to start doing this, even went on a compaign to portray content providers as freeloaders on their networks in order to garner support. They have started to mess with peer-to-peer traffic under the auspices of stopping "abusers" (i.e., people who actually use the bandwidth they pay for), and may mess with more if so inclined. The threat of regulation seems to have kept them mostly at bay though.
The private sector has already stated and shown a desire to make it not free. Where is the possibility of trust in that?
And the name comes from Washington's farewell adress about the parties making the government serve their needs instead of the government serving the people.
The FCC has decided it means exactly what I said it means.
Thanks. I am under the impression that net neutrality would function, for lack of a better phrase, as sort of a network traffic patrol officer.
More like people being able to complain to the government that officers are impeding traffic, and if your claim has merit the government will tell them to stop it. The ISPs already use traffic management.
Streaming video requires massive bandwidth (number of bits sent down the pipe) and so-so latency (how fast the round trip is), while virtual private networks (VPN) need moderate bandwidth, but very low latency (fast round-trip). Web browsing needs average to low bandwidth and latency. Email needs neither good bandwidth nor latency. So you can see it would be stupid to give an email packet as much priority in bandwidth as video, or as much priority in latency as VPN. All the packets of the email can afford to wait a few seconds and nobody will notice, while customers will be screaming if low bandwidth made their video choppy or high latency is killing their VPN.
But that is reasonable network management, well within net neutrality. It's not trying to stop or degrade traffic, or discriminate based on source, but make sure the existing network is used as efficiently as possible.
ISPs propose using these tools to give priority in traffic to the highest bidder, rather than just for the good functioning of the network. This would mean that your Hulu gets degraded because Hulu didn't pay your ISP like Netflix did. It could also mean FR gets hard to visit because Soros-backed liberal sites can afford to pay the ISPs, so the cash-strapped sites get put on the ghetto network.
Basically, without net neutrality we're back to only those with the money being able to get their message out. In addition, the current state if Internet commerce where any startup can have a store that can reach people as effectively as the big guys is gone.
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