SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
from the hopefully-not-paying-lip-service dept.
Fluffeh writes:
"When the D.C. U.S. Court of Appeals struck down the FCC's Open Internet Rules, a White House Petition was put up to 'direct the FCC to classify ISPs as "common carriers"'. With over 100k signatures, there is now an official response.
Absent net neutrality, the Internet could turn into a high-priced private toll road that would be inaccessible to the next generation of visionaries. The resulting decline in the development of advanced online apps and services would dampen demand for broadband and ultimately discourage investment in broadband infrastructure. An open Internet removes barriers to investment worldwide.
The petition asked that the President direct the FCC to reclassify Internet service providers as "common carriers" which, if upheld, would give the FCC a distinct set of regulatory tools to promote net neutrality. The FCC is an independent agency. Chairman Wheeler has publicly pledged to use the full authority granted by Congress to maintain a robust, free and open Internet a principle that this White House vigorously supports."
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Thexalon on Wednesday February 19 2014, @04:53PM
Please explain to me how a regulation about how existing ISPs handle Internet traffic priorities leads to a monopoly a la Bell Telephone. Because right now, your argument makes about as much sense as opposing a regulation requiring seat belts because it will force everyone to drive a Ford.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Specter on Wednesday February 19 2014, @08:23PM
Who's going to decide what's neutral? It's not going to be you or me. It's going to be some boob who thinks the Internet is a series of tubes and who's looking to 'retire' in a few months into a cushy consulting job with the people she's currently regulating.
Your helpful government regulators are going to get captured and instead of neutrality what we'll end up with is a byzantine series of rules that practically guarantee new entrants are barred from the market. You'll have your monopoly and then some.
In some sense we've already lost the argument because we've let it devolve to a battle between the content providers (who actually have what we want) and the ISP's who are desperately trying to avoid becoming fat dumb pipes. Lost in all of this is the fact that the ISP's have already been paid: we pay for that bandwidth in our monthly service.
What this is really about is the ISP's getting to take two bites of the apple by exploiting their government granted monopoly. They were perfectly happy to sell us access to the Internet so long as we didn't want to actually use it.
If we're really interested in neutrality we'd be looking at breaking the real monopoly on last mile service, not enshrining it into law under the guise of neutrality.
(Score: 1) by Thexalon on Wednesday February 19 2014, @11:48PM
It's not complicated.
Neutral router configuration looks something like this:
If packet from network A is destined for network B, forward out interface B.
If packet from network B is destined for network A, forward out interface A.
Non-neutral router configuration looks something like this: ...
If packet is from subnet A.1 which didn't pay the protection money, drop it.
If packet is from subnet A.2 which paid the lower amount of protection money, drop 5 and forward the 6th out interface B.
If packet is from subnet A.3 which paid the higher protection money, forward it out interface B.
The status quo is no net neutrality, captured regulators, a last-mile monopoly, and high barriers to market entry. Ergo, the existence of a net neutrality rule has absolutely no bearing on whether there is a last-mile monopoly, regulatory capture, or extreme barriers to market entry.
As far as using competition to get out of this problem, how do you want these new competitive markets to handle these problems:
- Which company is responsible for telephone poles or underground wire conduits? Does each potential market entrant have to handle their own, or are competitors required to make deals with each other so that there aren't 15 sets of poles along each street?
- Are competitors required to form peering agreements with each other? If not, what's to prevent Big Bad Telco from simply shutting out Mom and Pop ISP, making it prohibitively expensive or even impossible for Mom and Pop to get their customers information from the servers their customers want to reach, allowing Big Bad Telco to avoid competition?
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.