FCC dubbed 'Ministry of Truth' over net neut rules A senior telecommunications counsel to the House Energy and Commerce committee has blasted the Federal Communications Commission for laying down official net neutrality rules, comparing the FCC to Orwell's Ministry of Truth. Neil Fried – a Republican adviser to ranking members of the Energy and Commerce committee, the driving …
Can a content PROVIDER be expected to act in all fairness when it can also (like Comcast and Time Warner, who both own television networks) be a competitive content PRODUCER? Since being a common carrier would crimp its own products, why wouldn't Comcast or Time Warner put a crimp on competitor companies like Netflix? It's like demanding a railroad carrier (by law a common carrier) not discriminate when it also happens to own mines or timber plots.
Supposedly, Net Neutrality is meant to address what looks like an inherent conflict of interests.
So on the one hand we have the government taking more control of the Internet to protect its freedom, (oh yes right, like that will happen).
Yet on the other hand, we have the companies seeking to carve up the Internet and in doing so, they will need to force deep packet inspection technology on us to spy on us all, so they can then workout what data to charge different amounts for (plus then they sell our data to others). So we then have to suffer them effectively saying, this byte will cost you X, and this byte will cost you Y etc..
We are doomed to be controlled both ways. Checkmate. The control freaks win. But then sadly was their any doubt they would ever fail to gain more control over us. :(
What should happen is just ban (and make totally illegal) all DPI and all spying on data, ISP's are carriers, not spies. But the government won't play that move, because they want more control one way or the other. They are playing us for fools and they are winning. :(
@dpg21 : "But they are! Its just that the government has a different definition of "freedom" to every one else."
Hence the article referring to "doublethink and newspeak"
i.e. from 1984, "WAR IS PEACE, FREEDOM IS SLAVERY, and IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH"
The 1984 Ministry of Truth is really a Ministry of lies. Doublethink and Newspeak are really just ways to cover lies with duplicitous words. Which is exactly the game every government uses against us.
In spite of Neil Fried's appallingly illiterate verbal vomiting, the principle of a free market may be correct.
Any provider who interfered with their service provision to excessively exploit their subscribers would haemorrhage customers in short order.
Phorm came to be perceived as a pariah.
Pre-emptive government action does seem to be unnecessary.
The "principle of a free market" would indeed be a good thing if Americans had much choice of telecoms supplier and there was a well informed customer base. The entire question of net neutrality arises because of market dominance in many areas by one or two suppliers. Classical economics assumes an infinitely large market (ie: no dominance) and perfectly informed consumers (ie: no slave-mentality Americans who believe that democratic decision-making must *never* inconvenience the greed of unaccountable corporations.)
When people like Fried talk about the individual, they don't mean you or me, they mean Verizon, Microsoft or Union Carbide. They are, in fact, the *true* believers in a totalitarian ideology!
These camps existed well before the FCC engaged in its unprecedented power grab. Both the Congress and the US court system bitch-slapped them on this very issue only a scant few weeks before they issued their "rule making" decision.
As for Tom Tauke's comments, that's executive speak for "Please don't beat me no mo'e masser! I be good! Honest I will!"
What they don't tell you in this "democratic debate" about "net neutrality" is that this is all about the big content providers trying to prevent the network operators from bringing down prices for preferential throughput, thereby preventing competition from startups.
I for one am getting rather tired of the American PRopaganda habit of spinning every corporate or political power issue as a "struggle for liberty / against oppression", which is the only thing Orwellian about this.
Preferential throughput via CDNs and private peering agreements has been standard practice for big content providers for years, so that's not the issue here.
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