You Can't Afford It

Courtesy: The Legal Artist

The concept:

Net neutrality (also network neutrality or Internet neutrality) is the principle that Internet service providers and governments should treat all data on the Internet equally, not discriminating or charging differentially by user, content, site, platform, application, type of attached equipment, and modes of communication.

- Wikipedia

The dialogue about the future of our rights as digital citizens just got ugly.


I'm sure that Tom Wheeler means well. It says right here on his Google Profile that he's a Venture Capitalist first and O, yeah, also the new head of the FCC. And he was a lobbyist. For cable and wireless companies.

There is no conflict of interest here at all, right?

Mr. Wheeler's proposal that there be a "fast lane" for data-intensive services like Netflix is a brilliant passive- aggressive tactic. In creating a paid preference on digital broadband, the argument goes, we can accommodate consumers of large data without impacting everyone else. This is disingenuous.

Without a Netflix-, Google-, Facebook, Amazon-sized budget, exactly how is anyone going to benefit from this regulation of public spectrum except those that pay? Further, why is the FCC even in control of this regulation?

Dubious Things

Time Warner Cable (soon to be Comcast) offers high speed internet. "High Speed Internet" is a concept. Like rainbows and unicorns. Pay up to 10X more per month and cruise around the internet like you're driving a Porsche on meth.

How is that not a violation of Net Neutrality? Because you have a choice to either opt-in, or opt-out. What I see happening is a coalescence of non-choice. If I would like to use Netflix, I will have to absorb the cost of their preferential agreement. Without say. As an individual, I have no access to create or publish on this new "high speed" internet highway thingy. I am relegated to being a smaller player since I don't have an enormous, gazillion dollar budget.

This is just wrong. And, weirdly, the major players know it.

The major players have begun an offensive, even though they would benefit from such an overhaul of FCC policy:

"The new proposals made by FCC chairman Tom Wheeler have been hugely controversial ever since they were first reported this month. While Wheeler wants to prevent companies from degrading anyone’s traffic to favor their own, he also wants to give ISPs the ability to charge certain companies extra to ensure that their traffic gets delivered more quickly than on the standard web. Net neutrality advocates have charged that this will create a two-tiered Internet where big incumbent companies are able to have a permanent advantage over small startups because they’ll be able to ensure that their data travels on a faster pipe."

- BGR, Apr 30, 2014, By Brad Reed