Internet For the 1 Percent: New FCC Rules Strike Down Net Neutrality

[pa28]

From Democracy Now:

Former FCC Commissioner Michael Copps: “What we’re really seeing here is the transformation of the Internet where the 1 percent get the fast lanes, and the 99 percent get the slow lanes,” says Michael Copps, retired FCC Commissioner. “If we let that happen, we have really undercut the potential of this transformative technology. This has to be stopped.”

Copps again:

'they are going about this the wrong way and courts have told them that . . . the only way to get around is that part of the law that recognizes broadband as telecommunication services. The court literally told the FCC if you want to do open internet and internet freedom you should have classified broadband this way in the first place.'

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'this change is not going to come from top down . . . fast forward five years we're getting this sellout and internet for the 1% we cannot allow that to happen'

WATCH HERE: http://www.democracynow.org/2014/4/25/internet_for_the_1_percent_new

Chairman Wheeler indicated his desire to rewrite the rules to insure net neutrality as the court invited him to do. What happened in the intervening eight weeks?

[djean111]

1. Money and lobbyists is what happened, you silly thing.

[pa28]

2. I suspected as much.

[hunter]

3. I'm of two minds.

I'm not an audio-visual person.

The only communication that really matters to me is the written word.

We don't need broadband for that.

The revolution can still exist within the spaces of corporate broadband.

My youtube viewing bandwidth far, far, exceeds what I read and write here on DU.

The "Underground" will not go away unless it is actively suppressed.

I'm disconnected from broadcast, cable, and satellite television. It's all dead to me until it comes out on thrift store or RedBox DVD.

The T.V. "News" means nothing to me.

[pa28]

6. Former commissioner Copps makes a compelling point in the video.

He sees this decision by the FCC as leading to the "cablefication" of the internet. Eventually all that free material you have access to on youtube is going to be controlled and much more costly. Controlled by, of course, the cable companies.

[rhett o rick]

4. Chairman Wheeler's heart isnt into it. But who is surprised? nm

[pa28]

8. That's a polite way to put it.

He's a creature of the revolving door who delivered the goods.

[rhett o rick]

10. I agree of course. nm

[jeff47]

5. It's not quite that clear-cut

(copy-n-paste from another thread on the same subject)

Yes, common carrier is an option, and that gets us net neutrality. But it does a lot more than net neutrality.

When talking about ISPs, the big loss for us is making it much more difficult for ISPs to create tiers of service. Doesn't sound like much, right? Who cares if they have to offer everyone the same 10Mbps?

It matters because then the ISPs won't do network upgrades. IPSs rolled out upgrades in order to support the higher-speed tiers. Those rollouts make the next set of upgrades cheaper - the hardware becomes "common", and they figure out the best/cheapest way to do the upgrades.

It's kinda like Tesla's model: The insanely-expensive roadster let them figure out how to make the cars cheaper, resulting in the neruotically-expensive sedan. Which will let them figure out how to make a model that is merely "pricey", and so on.

Time Warner cable used to offer 10Mbps as their service. That was all you could get. Then they started tiered service - if you want to spend a shitload of money, you could get 100Mbps, or a host of speeds in between. That required TWC to upgrade their network, but the tiered pricing paid for it. That hardware upgrade also let them change their 10Mbps "normal" service to 15Mbps. Same cost, or at least cost on the same growth that the 10Mbps service was following.

So is net neutrality worth losing tiers, and thus upgrades?

If "normal" goes from 10Mbps to 15Mbps, but Netflix is throttled to 80% then no.
If "normal" goes from 10Mbps to 1000Mbps, but Netflix is throttled to 80% then yes - even the throttled data would be much faster.

What speed would we realistically get? Hell if I know. We'd need some coverage that wasn't "OMG!!! FCC SUX!!!!!" or "OMG!!! ISPs RULE!!!!" to find out what the most realistic result would be. From there we can figure out which route is better for us in the short run.

And in the longer run, we can work on getting a Congress that would pass new law so that the FCC can get us both net neutrality and tiers. And locally, fight for municipal Internet service.....and every other utility since none of those should be private.

[Jefferson23]

7. Recommend.n/t

[Enthusiast]

9. Kicked and recommended a whole bunch!

[polly7]

11. K&R! nt.