Neutrality Still a Toxic, Partisan Issue, Though it Shouldn't Be In a sane world, protecting the Internet marketplace from giant ISPs who've all-but purchased the government would be a bi-partisan issue, since everybody benefits from a healthy, vibrant broadband industry. But this isn't a sane world, and net neutrality over the last decade has become a highly toxic, partisan issue with Republicans generally against neutrality rules, and Democrats generally in favor of them (even if neither side understands half of the technical issues being discussed). That was on proud display yesterday on Capital Hill, where House Republications lambasted the FCC's new rule-making considerations as a "takeover of the Internet," with a lot of well-tread talking points you may have heard once or twice before about how the government was trying to ruin everything: quote: Net neutrality would amount to the FCC taking “control” of the Internet, said Senator Orrin Hatch, a Utah Republican. “Without government regulation the Internet is growing,” he said. “So what’s the problem? What is broken? What is it that needs to be fixed?” Instead of questioning witnesses, Senator Ted Cruz, a Texas Republican, gave a six-minute speech about what he sees as the evils of a “nanny state” of growing government regulation. Ignoring the Ignoring the countless examples of very real neutrality violations while pretending the broadband market is perfectly competitive is certainly stale, the goal is to put political pressure on the FCC should they honestly be considering Title II reclassification for ISPs. But does it really have to be this ugly and overly simplistic? Mike Masnick at Techdirt has a nice piece on why people really need to move away from viewing net neutrality through such a distorted, political lens. The idea that "all regulation is evil" is, for lack of a more nuanced term, dumb and unrealistic when talking about this market: quote: ...(This) gets back to the underlying claim about all of this that Title II is somehow "regulating the internet." It's not. It's never been about that at all. Quite the opposite, in fact. It's about choosing which form of regulation internet infrastructure will be ruled by. The anti-net neutrality crew like to make this mistake (and they make it often), trying to pretend that internet infrastructure is the internet. It's not. And internet infrastructure has always been heavily regulated, often out of necessity. In order to allow a cable company or a telco to install broadband infrastructure, local cities and towns often did special deals, handing over subsidies, rights of way, pole rights, tax breaks, franchise agreements and other such things to the broadband players. The idea that internet infrastructure has ever been "a free market" is laughable. Masnick also points to quote: A couple years ago, AT&T blocked Apple’s video chat app (FaceTime) for all customers who weren’t paying for unlimited voice and text messages – even if they were already paying for unlimited data (FaceTime used data, but not voice or text). AT&T simply straight-up refused to allow a competitor to beat them on price. In 2007, Comcast “throttled” (blocked) BitTorrent files that were moving over its network. Although many people use BitTorrent files for illegal activity (like everything else on the Internet), a great many small tech-savvy distributors rely on BitTorrent to transfer their hosting and bandwidth costs to consumers – which Comcast didn’t like one bit, since it meant consumers actually ended up using the data capacity they were paying for. We could go on, through data caps and artificial shortages, but I think you get the idea. The ISPs have become, or on the threshold of becoming, natural monopolists, and they are beginning to flex their muscles. There’s only one entity that can protect consumers and the market, imperfect though it is: the government. Both articles argue there's a growing number of Conservative and more Libertarian-minded folks that previously decried government regulation and the shift to Title II (that includes Masnick also points to this piece by self-labeled Conservative James Heaney, who also thinks Conservatives need to move past pretending broadband is a "free market," and open their eyes to the threat of aggressive monopolists left unchecked:Both articles argue there's a growing number of Conservative and more Libertarian-minded folks that previously decried government regulation and the shift to Title II (that includes the EFF ), who are now realizing that with the Comcast, AT&T and Verizon's of the world running amok, there needs to be intelligent rules of the road protecting not just consumers, but the Internet itself. Leaving the status quo intact in the hopes that phantom competition and nonexistent free markets will protect both simply isn't a reasonable position, regardless of political affiliation.







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Most recommended from 21 comments

Ghoul

join:2001-02-04

Mastic Beach, NY 3 recommendations Ghoul Member LOL, Karl Bode back to his old partisan BS Republicans are evil and don't want net neutrality, but the wonderful Democrats just want to give you internet freedom.



Funny, 6 years of Obama's FCC and 2 years of complete Democrat control of the government and they always acted on behalf of ISP's and the mega-corporations behind them without a squeak of support for net neutrality.



Now we suddenly have a change of heart? Yeah, sure. Reclassifying ISP's as public utilities is not necessary for net neutrality, but it does give the government broad new powers over the internet. I'm sure they'll only use those new, unnecessary powers for the good of the public, right Karl?

Flyonthewall

@206.248.154.x 2 recommendations Flyonthewall Anon Strawman and other poor arguments aside. This is all about the money, it's only been about money. They don't want customers using their internet to avoid subscribing to television. They haven't even begun to fight yet, there are lots more things they can do like force internet and tv to be bundled.



The FCC needs to force ISP providers to be separate entities from their broadcast media providers. So that Comcast TV actually competes against Comcast ISP properly instead of the lockdown they have currently.



The only way companies like Netflix can compete properly against Comcast is to ensure their internet service provider capacity is not tied to the broadcast television capacity. So then Comcast can't use their ISP label to fight against non-traditional media supply.