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In the recent news, it seems Net Neutrality may not be quite as doomed as earlier news.
The Federal Communications Commission’s proposal for open-Internet rules will align with a blueprint President Barack Obama offered last year for strong regulation to guarantee Web traffic is treated equally, the head of the agency said.
From the article:http://www.dallasnews.com/business/headlines/20150107-fcc-head-plans-to-heed-obama-blueprint-to-ban-web-fast-lanes.ece
“We’re both pulling in the same direction,” FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler said Wednesday at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. “We’re going to propose rules that say no blocking, no throttling, no paid prioritization.”
I guess we will see how this actually turns out after the vote on Feb. 26.
Also noted on Ars Technica - Title II for Internet providers is all but confirmed by FCC chairman
(Score: 5, Insightful) by MrGuy on Friday January 09 2015, @05:06PM
"We're pulling in the same direction" can be a weasly way of saying "I want to call the thing I'm planning to do to be the same as the thing someone else suggested."
Recall Wheeler's last draft where "neutrality" had huge loopholes that would allow providers to provide "fast lanes," which he said was OK because he didn't call "whatever is left" slow lanes.
He does NOT say "we will regulate ISP's as common carriers." He states three things - no blocking, no throttling, and no paid prioritization. Common Carrier treatment would imply all three of those things, but those things do not add up to common carrier status.
Those all sound like good things, and maybe he means them (or, at least, has been persuaded to mean them). However, I could see each of these things stopping short of what they sound like they mean.
"No blocking" was in his last proposal (with the paid "fast lanes"). You weren't "blocked" if you didn't pay, but your effective bandwidth could slow to a crawl.
"No throttling" sounds very promising. However, I could see a major loophole like "except when it causes major network congestion" that would allow large bandwidth users to be held hostage. Call me a cynic. Or maybe it means "no throttling by provider, but throttling by type of traffic is perfectly OK."
"No paid prioritization" is really the big new thing, and would be really good in theory - you can't pay to have your content delivered faster than someone else's. However, the real question is whether they open the door for a possibly bigger issue - "pay to carry." OK, we won't make Netflix pay to have better bandwidth, but we can still make them pay for us to carry them at all. Wait - doesn't that fall afoul of "no blocking?" Maybe, but it depends on how they word and structure it. What if TWC and Netflix enter into an "exclusive content provider deal" where only TWC customers can access NetFlix. Or, more insidiously, what if netflix.com has to be available to all providers, but only NetflixDirect offers the ability to stream in HD, and it's "exclusively available from Time Warner Cable!"
There are a lot of ways that specific, targeted, "sounds good in theory" regulation on specific points can be gotten around. I trust a former cable industry lobbyist as far as I can throw him. And until I hear the words "common carrier" escape his lips, I consider everything he says to be something less than what he's marketing it as. Because we've been down the road of "See? It's sort of like net neutrality!" even though it isn't with him before.
(Score: 2) by fnj on Saturday January 10 2015, @02:51PM
Thank you for almost certainly by far the most thoughtful post in this discussion. I agree that the proposal may turn out in the specification and the implementation to not go far enough. On the other hand, the cacophony of moaning and wailing that it is too onerous and goes too far suggests that this may arguably be pretty close to the best compromise we would be likely to get, and it's a whole lot better than the status quo.