Net neutrality Thursday PROTESTS: Time to learn your chant Internet activists are planning a series of protests across the US on Thursday against a "hybrid" net neutrality plan that was leaked late last week. Protesters will gather outside the White House and in 14 other cities at 6pm to protest the plan "to show President Obama and his FCC chairman that the public will accept nothing …
@Mark 85
"Hang Wheeler" - Well, he's obvious already "well hung". :) It takes a lot of sack to do/say what he does.
"10 Lobbyists with cash inside the US Capitol Building would probably work, though." - Me & my mates are ready to travel. We require expenses, and will only "tax" donors with ~10% of donations (after expenses, ass-u-me-ing there are enough of them).
Oh - some us are probably on the "do-not-fly" list.
Because I don't know even.
I read through the EFF posting but I am none the wiser.
Except that's not something any of the net neutrality proposals will fix. What they will do is put the US government in charge of what the maximum speed of the internet will be.
If you want those issues addressed that goes through the FTC not the FCC.
The Net Neutrality people want to prevent telecoms companies holding content providers to ransome unless they stump up some extra cash to "expedite" their traffic. The danger is that now that cable companies are offering their own media streaming services, they will artificially slow the traffic of their competitors. There have been a number of reports from customers that their experience shows that this is so.
It's a little complicated by the fact that Netflix *do* pay to host their content in certain select places by dropping their servers at ISP pinch points but this is to help them and the general Internet. Some ISPs are reportedly seeing this as a cash opportunity and saying to the likes of Netflix, "we want some of that action: it'd be a shame if something happened to your traffic" if they didn't. I don't see any problem with the prior, but obviously the large cable provider monopolies put them in a good position to threaten the latter leading to money being extorted from the content providers unless they pony up.
The situation is more complicated still by the fact that the economies of the backbone providers are different to the last mile ISPs. They have peering agreements for passing on traffic. Given that the backbone providers are peering (symmetrical rather than mostly just one-way like the ISPs) there is some to-and-fro regarding the justice of those agreements. However, this is largely a separate issue.
the ability to create a tiered service to consumers – while addressing the concerns of large content companies who fear being discriminated against unless they pay fees.
Everyone knew that Wheeler is there to give his old masters what they want. I expect if people put up enough fuss they will decide to study things some more and try again during the super bowl or something like that.
Don't the constant efforts of the FCC (and others in US gov't) to protect and extend and preserve the rights and revenue streams of the monopoly telecom and cable systems in the US strike anyone as totally inappropriate? The plans and programs, and rules and regulations of various state agencies should be to protect the public interest, not to expand the profits of monopolies.
Granted, protecting the public interest should include seeing to it that the companies survive, and the services continue. But it seems consumer concerns--especially their wallets--should be paramount. In the US, the priorities are completely reversed. This current "wholesale/retail" proposal is totally stupid--and unnecessary. There isn't one major monopoly cable or telecom company in the US that isn't making nice profits under the -current- systems. They don't need to get bigger, merge into bigger monopolies, get more profitable, or more powerful, in order to further the public/consumer interest. Just the opposite. This new proposal would actually be a DIS-incentive to the monopolies to ever get better. They'd just extract more money, eventually passed on to the consumer. And actually slow the advance of the technology.
This approach by the lobbyist-controlled regulators and legislators, is in nobody's interest but the stockholders of the monopolies. It stinks.
The American people pretty decisively rejected exactly this kind of executive fiat behavior.
Even I wound up with a Republican governor and I reside in the hell know as the People's Republic of Maryland, bluest of the blue states, dependent on the federal government for all of its wealth while at the same time sporting some of the richest counties in the USA.
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