Obama: Regulate broadband Internet like a utility so it 'works for everyone'

c/net ^ | November 10, 2014 | Don Reisinger

[LucianOfSamasota]

President Obama urged the US government to adopt tighter regulations on broadband service in an effort to preserve "a free and open Internet."

In a statement released Monday, Obama called on the Federal Communications Commission to enforce the principle of treating all Internet traffic the same way, known in shorthand as Net neutrality. That means treating broadband services like utilities, the president said, so that Internet service providers would be unable "to restrict the best access or to pick winners and losers in the online marketplace for services and ideas."

Obama wades into a contentious debate that has raged over how to treat Internet traffic, which has only heated up as the FCC works to prepare an official guideline. Those rules were expected to be made available later this year, though reports now claim they may be delayed until early 2015. The debate has centered on whether broadband should be placed under Title II regulation under the Telecommunications Act, which already tightly controls phone services.

[GeronL]

I suspect that eventually regulation will prevent the new and better option from joining the market

[Eva]

No you are you twisting my words. I want the I freedom to use the internet.

[Age of Reason]

No you are you twisting my words. I want the I freedom to use the internet.

Freedom is a nice idea, but the more complex our world becomes and the more crowded our world becomes, the less freedom you will have no matter how hard you protest, it is inevitable.

So explain to me why heavy users of the internet should not pay more than light users of the internet, or even people who don't use the internet, if some of their tax money goes to maintaining it.

I'm fine with metering the net. And they should tax it too, the same way they tax other vices.

[Eva]

I already pay more. I have no high speed internet.

I just don’t want the government or federal workers determining who pays more or what content is allowed . I don’t trust either the government or federal workers.

[palmer]

Same bandwidth, so you can’t trot out the erroneous “free ride” epithet against NN. That’s what this is about.

Uh huh. A contrived substitution of one drivelous video provider against a different one. Who cares. As for the rest of the content, which uses 100 to 1000 times less bandwidth, it will ALL be available either by going to it directly (the most likely case) or by going around any blocking (trivial, they do it in China 24x7)

[palmer]

Net Neutrality is about how the Backbone providers treat Content providers and whether they can offer an increase service level for more money.

Only for high bandwidth streaming video, a special case. For everything else it is a non-issue. The real reason that providers want to throttle content is so they don't have to build out their networks especially the backbone and peering which will have to handle 1000's of channels of stream video from the their competitors. If they do their own streaming in house they save greatly on network capacity. It makes a lot of sense to do it that way and they will doubtless offer the same content.

[palmer]

Sorry about jumping on you earlier with profanity, I got carried away. I have reread the arguments pro and con and I would call this the Netflix bill or Netfilx EO if Obama does it. Primarily it will guarantee that Netflix, Amazon streaming video and a couple of other players like that can stream a ton of content to the ISPs who then stream it to their customers.

Without the NN action by the government, the providers will work out an arrangement to stream the same video content themselves, sending it from their own banks of servers within their network to their customers. They save money by not have big fat pipes to Amazon and Netflix servers. Does it lock out those competitors? Maybe. But those competitors can also offer to put their servers in each ISP's network which makes a lot of sense from a provisioning standpoint.

The rest of the internet's content which uses orders of magnitude less bandwidth will be unaffected. Any attempt to block any content from anywhere can easily be routed around. There is an entire field of internet wizards like the Tor people who do that for a living (it doesn't look like Tor either, it is disguised in whatever streams the censors (Chinese, Arabs, etc) allow.