Title : WInners And Losers After Net Neutrality Has Been Trashed
link : WInners And Losers After Net Neutrality Has Been Trashed
WInners And Losers After Net Neutrality Has Been Trashed
Who can forget the stirring and robust defense of net neutrality - as well as its explication - by John Oliver some months ago? The segment can still be seen it at this link:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fpbOEoRrHyU
Oliver argued the net in its current form was not broken, while noting the FCC was pushing for a 'two tier' system. Killing net neutrality would allow private companies to go into the fast lane leaving everyone else in the slow line. To get your streaming movies or shows then might take twice as long as it does now, while higher paying corporate entities and ISPs like Comcast - could either afford to go into the fast lane or (in the case of ISPs) charge more to average Joes to use it.
.To refresh memories, the Obama FCC - to preserve net neutrality - ceased treating the internet as an unregulated information service- instead reclassifying it as a "telecommunications service". Thereby the FCC could assert authority to regulate the net as a utility under Title II of the Communications Act of 1934. Oliver was so energized at the prospect of the new FCC chairman (Ajit Pai) overturning the Obama FCC rules that he provided viewers with a rapid link to enter comments at the FCC - supposedly seeking them for 120 days: http://ift.tt/2BtyOWa;
Last week, the unthinkable transpired and Pai represented the tiebreaking vote to enable this travesty to pass. It behooves us then to look at winners and losers and also what the 3-2 decision means for free speech.
Led by Trump toady Ajit Pai, the FCC is now set to spend the coming months drafting new rules that, if implemented, will slow down the net considerably for any who use DL'ing, including streaming of videos (including for Netflix and Amazon services). Pai, like other Trump -appointed hacks (Tom Price at HHS, out to destroy Medicare, Scott Pruitt at EPA, out to destroy that agency or weaken it to the point of uselessness) is convinced the Obama era rules adopted in 2015 have "harmed the internet" by retarding investment in broad band infrastructure.
In other words net neutrality is a no-no because it represents the continuation of "heavy handed regulation which will chill investment in a service increasingly critical to life in American society".
According to Pai, mastering the lingo of Wall Street speak (WSJ, today, p. A11), the small ISPs are being left out of the market because they can't compete with the big boys. Pai claimed he "heard from 19 small, government -owned, municipal broadband providers" who insisted that Title II regs stood in the way of their further investment. In effect, depriving hundreds of thousands living in those municipalities of accessing new services and the small ISPs from deepening their networks.
In Pai's mind the basic error of too many on the left is thinking "there is a dichotomy between the consumer and the market". No, there isn't. It's all in our imaginations - or our paranoid ideations- take you pick. According to Pai (ibid., today):
"To me, markets and market -oriented policies have delivered far more value to the consumer than pre-emptive regulation ever has."
It appears then that Pai like his FCC R-commissioners, is ignorant or oblivious to the lessons of the 1996 Telecommunications Act. That also was promised to us as the be-all 'elixir' to finally get our cable TV rates down because of increased market competition. Instead, after a few years we found (n Maryland) competition diminished and less resourceful companies moved out allowing Comcast to charge whatever it wanted. People were furious because they'd been sold the "de-regulated bait and switch".
According to Pai, mastering the lingo of Wall Street speak (WSJ, today, p. A11), the small ISPs are being left out of the market because they can't compete with the big boys. Pai claimed he "heard from 19 small, government -owned, municipal broadband providers" who insisted that Title II regs stood in the way of their further investment. In effect, depriving hundreds of thousands living in those municipalities of accessing new services and the small ISPs from deepening their networks.
In Pai's mind the basic error of too many on the left is thinking "there is a dichotomy between the consumer and the market". No, there isn't. It's all in our imaginations - or our paranoid ideations- take you pick. According to Pai (ibid., today):
"To me, markets and market -oriented policies have delivered far more value to the consumer than pre-emptive regulation ever has."
It appears then that Pai like his FCC R-commissioners, is ignorant or oblivious to the lessons of the 1996 Telecommunications Act. That also was promised to us as the be-all 'elixir' to finally get our cable TV rates down because of increased market competition. Instead, after a few years we found (n Maryland) competition diminished and less resourceful companies moved out allowing Comcast to charge whatever it wanted. People were furious because they'd been sold the "de-regulated bait and switch".
If Pai's arguments were really sound why not first do all he and the FCC can to make all net speeds much higher as opposed to "comparable to Estonia" as Oliver joked in his piece. The reason is that Pai and his cronies want to slow net speeds down even more for the rest of us so that private entities, that can pay a lot more, get preferential treatment in the form of much greater speed, efficiency.
What about winners and losers?
After the FCC released its plan in late November, well-known telecom and media analysts Craig Moffett and Michael Nathanson wrote in a note to investors that the FCC plan dismantles “virtually all of the important tenets of net neutrality itself.”
That could result in phone and cable companies forcing people to pay more to do what they want online. The technology community, meanwhile, fears that additional online tolls could hurt startups who can’t afford to pay them — and, over the long term, diminish innovation.
After the FCC released its plan in late November, well-known telecom and media analysts Craig Moffett and Michael Nathanson wrote in a note to investors that the FCC plan dismantles “virtually all of the important tenets of net neutrality itself.”
That could result in phone and cable companies forcing people to pay more to do what they want online. The technology community, meanwhile, fears that additional online tolls could hurt startups who can’t afford to pay them — and, over the long term, diminish innovation.
Losers then will almost certainly include most millennials who consume their sports, news, entertainment via online streaming. They can expect speeds to slow to a snail's pace unless they pay more. Also affected will be those who do frequent youtube spots. With no net neutrality they will be relegated to the slow lane and take hours to upload even a five or ten minute video. In 2007, for example, the Associated Press found Comcast was blocking or throttling some file-sharing. AT&T blocked Skype and other internet calling services on the iPhone until 2009. They also aren’t backing away from subtler forms of discrimination that favor their own services.
Of course, the deep pockets of Google, Netflix, Amazon may well be sufficient - provided their share prices remain high - to pay off ISPs to make sure consumers can access our service.
A far more likely target for loss is free speech.With this FCC ruling, corporations will have control over what content citizens can access on the internet. It could be as simple as Comcast blocking websites with negative comments on their service. Or it could be as sinister as an ISP blocking access to political content, news and writing that it opposes. Just think of it! Much of the content on this blog is highly controversial, for example the strong anti-Trump stance, and also to a degree the anti-conservative stance.
If you are a proponent of every American’s right to free speech, this should be frightening to the core. No company or corporation should be able to control what information we can consume, with a few exceptions, e.g. bomb- making manuals put out by terrorists. But no interested reader should be denied anti-Trump material such as often appears on this blog.
ISPs like Comcast have said they would never take it this far. But why do they even need the option? When Comcast is your only choice, what prevents them from extracting every penny possible from you and the online businesses that constantly inundate our lives?
This is exactly why many of us inveighed against the 1996 Telecommunications Act. Writing in his book, The Problem of the Media, Robert McChesney had this to say (p. 51);
"The corruption in media policy making culminated in the passage of the 1996 Telecommunications Act, arguably one of the most important pieces of U.S. legislation. The law rewrote the regulatory regime for radio, television, cable television, and satellite communication - indeed, all of electronic communication including the internet.
The operating premise of the law was that the new communications technologies - combined with increased appreciation for the genius of the market- rendered the traditional regulatory market moot.
The solution therefore was to lift regulations and ownership restrictions from commercial media and communication companies, and allow competition in the marketplace to develop, and reduce the government's role to that of protecting private property.
There was virtually no dissent whatsoever to this legislation from either party, the law sailed through both houses of congress, and was signed by a jubilant President Clinton in February, 1996. Corporate CEOs regarded it as their "Magna Carta"."
The solution therefore was to lift regulations and ownership restrictions from commercial media and communication companies, and allow competition in the marketplace to develop, and reduce the government's role to that of protecting private property.
There was virtually no dissent whatsoever to this legislation from either party, the law sailed through both houses of congress, and was signed by a jubilant President Clinton in February, 1996. Corporate CEOs regarded it as their "Magna Carta"."
The preceding lesson from McChesney ought to be a no-brainer for us now: not to be fooled again by the "deregulation is good for ya" banter. Fool us once, shame on them, fool us twice, shame on US.
So far, there have been hundreds of public protests against Pai’s plan and more than 1 million calls to Congress through a pro-net neutrality coalition’s site. Smaller tech websites such as Reddit, Kickstarter and Mozilla put dramatic overlays on their sites Tuesday in support of net neutrality. Twitter on Wednesday was promoting #NetNeutrality as a trending topic. Other big tech companies were more muted in their support.
Public-interest groups Free Press and Public Knowledge are already promising to go after Pai’s rules in the courts. There may also be attempts to legislate net neutrality rules, which the telecom industry supports. Sen. John Thune, a South Dakota Republican, on Tuesday called for “bipartisan legislation” on net neutrality that would “enshrine protections for consumers with the backing of law.”
See also: http://ift.tt/2zbKCpP
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