If you missed it, today the new FCC Chairman made a significant announcement regarding "Preserving a Free and Open Internet." Hint, here's one way to start - don't lock everything up in a PDF, but thats not the point. The stated purpose of the policy is
That’s why Congress and the President have charged the FCC with developing a National
Broadband Plan to ensure that every American has access to open and robust broadband. The
fact is that we face great challenges as a nation right now, including health care, education,
energy, and public safety. While the Internet alone will not provide a complete solution to any of
them, it can and must play a critical role in solving each one.
You'll excuse me if I read that an hear "We're from the government, we're here to help." in the back of my mind.I'm very leery of getting the government involved in regulating the Internet because I'd rather let millions of consumers decide how the network should work than just a few bureaucrats in the federal government. The latter also invites companies who want to undermine neutrality to concentrate their lobbying efforts on currying favor with the FCC.
TLF breaks down the whole announcement, Government thinks it can “preserve” Internet, scrutinizing the major arguments made by FCC Chariman Julius Genachowski.
Regulation always starts out small, before it grows really big. It has to: Loopholes and other unintended consequences (and opportunities) are always discovered after the “product” launches.
Finally, in the TLF comments section is Ed Felten's concise and rational position on net neutrality.
Even without a regulatory czar, wheels are turning to punish Comcast for what they've done. Customers are unhappy and are putting pressure on Comcast. If they deceived their customers, they'll face lawsuits. We don't know yet how things will come out, but it seems likely Comcast will regret their actions, and especially their lack of transparency.
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Sandy
The reason I support net neutrality regulation is that most of the providers in question have government-granted and -controlled monopolies, or at most have a competing technology that is also a government-controlled monopoly. It's not like you have a choice of cable or telephone providers (even if you have a fake choice of telephone companies, the wires are still maintained by one company who gets money whether or not you get network services from them, and they are the ones who would be implementing discriminatory service).
Until we get actual telephone and cable competition, if telecom providers want to be treated as common carriers, they need to treat packets indiscriminately. There is no problem if they implement rate limiting or other quality of service network manipulation, as long as they don't favor one set of bits over another. That way, for example, nonprofits who argue against government monopolies and subsidies won't find themselves being served up very slowly while politically-connected nonprofits' websites are treated favorably.
2009-09-22 9:35 am