Net neutrality, beloved by Netflix, looks headed for the ax under Trump

[babylonsister]

http://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/news/2016/11/22/trump-team-appointees-indicate-net-neutrality-reversal/94266912/

Net neutrality, beloved by Netflix, looks headed for the ax under Trump
Mike Snider , USA TODAY 3:32 p.m. EST November 23, 2016


The days could be numbered for Net neutrality under the Trump administration.

Net neutrality rules, passed in February 2015 by the Federal Communications Commission and supported by Netflix, Google and other big websites, prevent Internet service providers (ISPs) from blocking and slowing the transmission of content. The contentious issue triggered lawsuits from the ISPs and drew an unprecedented outpouring of public comments.

Though Net neutrality wasn't a constant topic for Donald Trump as a candidate, he has been an opponent of the regulations, calling the FCC's adoption "a power grab" by President Obama in a tweet in 2014.

The president-elect's latest appointments suggest he'll try to bolster that view, supported by telecommunication companies such as Verizon and others, by reversing the rules. Jeffrey Eisenach, who joined Trump's transition team in October, and Mark Jamison, a former lobbyist for Sprint, were named Monday as members of the "Agency Landing" team focusing on the FCC.

Both advisers opposed Net neutrality. Net neutrality "is not about protecting consumers from rapacious Internet service providers. ... Net neutrality is crony capitalism pure and simple — an effort by one group of private interests to enrich itself at the expense of another group by using the power of the state," Eisenach wrote in 2014 in an article on the website of the American Enterprise Institute, a free enterprise think-tank where Eisenach was a visiting scholar from 2012 to 2016.

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http://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/news/2016/11/22/trump-team-appointees-indicate-net-neutrality-reversal/94266912/

[world wide wally]

1. Another issue never brought up during the election

[hunter]

2. If the old-school telcoms and cable companies are feeling suicidal, god bless'm.

They'd be pissing on Amazon, Google, Facebook, the movie industry...

Fun fact: Netflix is distributed from Amazon's "cloud." Amazon and Google will rent their vast server capacity to almost anyone, apparent competitors included. Even big budget movies are pushing beyond the limits of in-house server capacity and into the Google and Amazon clouds.

All these new industries are built on net neutrality.

If the telcoms and cable providers stand in the way of this they'll be roadkill. Even their lucrative sports concessions are about to fall. It doesn't matter if they've got know-nothing legislators and presidential appointees in their pocket or not.

I suspect what the telcoms are doing here is negotiating surrender. Their business model is obsolete.