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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: 1) by cykros on Thursday February 20 2014, @04:34AM
Competition is not the issue, and is in fact a great boon to the ISP market. The issue is when there are no limits to what can be done in the name of competition that serve to protect society from the hazards of extremely powerful business machines (it beats calling them "people") and to direct their endeavors along more societally beneficial routes. Corporations are derived from a charter from government, and their original intention was to be TEMPORARY and created to address a specific project at hand. Over the years the corporate legal teams have been able to walk roughshod over the rule of law, however, and those restrictions that ultimately should be there are not, turning a corporation originally intended to provide for a boon to society into a weaponized attack-bot. Perhaps we should pay a little more attention to Asimov's rules of robotics.
Competition for ISP's should not rely on carving up the Internet into a series of tollbooths, but rather through leveraging superior infrastructure at affordable prices to improve the quality of the overall communications system. They can compete ruthlessly, but they have to play by the rules...and We the People need to ensure that those rules are in place to begin with.
Cry socialist all you want; corporations are entirely the creation of the government, which has since been parasitically made subservient to their creations. If true laissez-faire is what you're after, the myriad government structures that create these corporations in the first place are just as much an impediment as anything, as they are artificially granted preference in the market through the force of the legal system. Give me 100 ISP's to choose from, and I'll be a little more comfortable allowing some of them to play with bending the conventional wisdom of net neutrality, provided I have the choice to opt for a more conventional plan. Until then, rules need to be made and enforced.