This is a horrible week to be a nerd, a great week to be an ISP.
This past week we learned what the FCC wanted to put in place for “Net Neutrality”, and frankly it is a really bad thing. If you haven’t been paying attention, a few months ago, the FCC had to rescind the 2010 regulations on internet neutrality. The 2010 decision was an attempt to make the internet an even playing ground for all things on the net. Well, thanks to some poor language in the regulations it rescinded in January.
If you are an optimist, you might think this is a great thing. They can now work on making the regulations more legally sound. Of course since I am writing this post, that really isn’t the case. Based on preliminary reports the internet is subject to become a Pay-to-Play service. Actually it has already started to happen. Earlier this spring Netflix agreed to pay Comcast to open the pipes, so to speak. This is what the internet is going to start looking like shortly. If you want to use a service that takes up bandwidth, your ISP’s will subject you, or the service that you are using, to higher fees. They feel that the use of these services are actually harming their service overall.
The FCC has issued a clarification to what they plan on doing:
The allegation that it will result in anti-competitive price increases for consumers is also unfounded. That is exactly what the “commercially unreasonable” test will protect against: harm to competition and consumers stemming from abusive market activity. – https://www.fcc.gov/blog/setting-record-straight-fcc-s-open-internet-rules
The fact that they had to clarify that, “Commercially Unreasonable” statement tells me that it’s ambiguous language. The FCC states that they will protect the fairness of the internet. To keep competition even. But what about when we have Comcast and Time Warner talking about merging, thus removing realistic competition. Sure, we are not losing anything, but we have even less choice (I know, I know, cable companies are a bad example of competition since you don’t really have a choice of provider)
I have a better solution, how about the ISP’s invest in better infrastructure. We are falling greatly behind in the bandwidth speed race. Better yet, what about a national fiber network that would allow all ISPs and users to receive a blazing fast connection and since there would be so much of it, we could actually use it instead of a commercial ISP, and since we would be awash in bandwidth there would be no negative financial impact on ISP’s that want to provide special services. Oh wait, that’s not capitalistic enough. Unless you consider I could pay to get the services that I want, and at the speeds and quantity that I want.
Further Reading
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2014/04/fccs-new-rules-could-threaten-net-neutrality
https://www.eff.org/issues/net-neutrality
http://www.savetheinternet.com/net-neutrality-101
http://www.alternet.org/fcc-about-axe-murder-net-neutrality-what-you-should-know?