FCC's new net neutrality plan; Desirable or Disastrous?
 

Well, the FCC has ruled. And now the criticisms begin.

Net neutrality has become a very important fight, perhaps the most important fight of our lifetime; should backbone providers and ISPs be free to discriminate against particular types of internet traffic? Can they be gatekeepers? Or are they merely pipe providers?

The argument definitely has two sides, with the massive growth of internet-streamed video. Data through the 'net is increasing exponentially but carriers are not able to profit from it. Is this fair? Will this affect infrastructure buildout?

But on the other hand, carriers clearly want to capture end users and prioritize their own services. This could cause the internet to migrate to a model that looks a lot like the cellphone model; restrictive, with services that are provided a la carte or are restricted based upon carrier, device, and plan. No end user wants that, and most businesses other than the media businesses and the carriers don't want that either.

So, the fight rages. And now the FCC has ruled.

Here is Fox News' clearly negative take (with contributions from AP):
http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2010...trality-rules/

Here is a blogger's take - and I will note that he quotes far-leftist Al Franken in his blog - again, clearly negative:

http://www.bnet.com/blog/technology-...consumers/7503

For that matter, here is Franken himself:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9aE5DLymXu4

So.

The complaints - from both the Left and the Right - all say that the regulations proposed by the FCC will NOT manage to keep a level playing field on the internet, while it WILL let the government regulatory camel to get its nose in the tent.

But given the monopoly or duopoly of internet access in ALL markets in the US, we clearly have to do something to keep these huge media conglomerates from getting control of the internet and exercising that control to maximize their profits, minimize our choices, and - ultimately perhaps - control what we can and cannot do and see on the internet.

Comments?

I'm all for some kind of regulations to make sure that I can go to whatever site I want without it being throttled. I have the feeling that if ISPs do prioritize packets, then they can easily fall sway to political parties lobbying them to take precedence in traffic in terms of their rivals.

Same with news, I have a feeling that if Net Neutrality isn't passed, you will find big corps possibly 'news corp' as an example lobbying the ISPs to throttle traffic in favor of their site, and any rival news site will be cut down to almost 0kb/s or maybe 5kb/s.

Of course though some would argue this is too much regulation, and after all corporations can police themselves.

This is perhaps the only one time I am in favor of the FCC butting into big business, after all if it weren't for the FCC, we would all still be using services only from MA-Bell and only using MA-Bell sanctioned equipment. Who knows how the internet would be like if the FCC hadn't come up with the regulations on telecommunications.

The internet does also technically fall under the telecommunications services as phone lines are used to access it, but also coax/fibre too, but then again, digital phone lines are also on fibre/coax now, but the endpoint is still an RJ-11 connection.

http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2010/...trality-tiers/

This is one area where the "big bad gubmint" does need to step in, and no, the current FCC proposal doesn't do the trick. The only way to make sure companies can't throttle Internet content is to separate network operations from content. The Internet needs to be treated like public infrastructure.