Goodbye to Net Neutrality
This is yet another blatant broken promise by Obama. He promised that he would be a champion of net neutrality, yet picked a Commissioner who sold out consumers and innovators in order to enrich telecoms. Tim Wu explains at the New Yorker:
The new rule gives broadband providers what they’ve wanted for about a decade now: the right to speed up some traffic and degrade others. (With broadband, there is no such thing as accelerating some traffic without degrading other traffic.) We take it for granted that bloggers, start-ups, or nonprofits on an open Internet reach their audiences roughly the same way as everyone else. Now they won’t. They’ll be behind in the queue, watching as companies that can pay tolls to the cable companies speed ahead. The motivation is not complicated. The broadband carriers want to make more money for doing what they already do. Never mind that American carriers already charge some of the world’s highest prices, around sixty dollars or more per month for broadband, a service that costs less than five dollars to provide. To put it mildly, the cable and telephone companies don’t need more money.
Net Neutrality explained
At Public Citizen, Andrew D. Selbst explains the importance of Net Neutrality:
Common carrier regulations are a century-old concept that has been applied to telecom services from its early days. The concept originates from travel: If you are a bus operator, you must allow anyone with a ticket to board and ride. Applied to telephones, common carrier obligations are the reason that your phone company cannot first listen to your conversations, and then when you discuss switching carriers or call a competitor to sign up, kill your connection or make it so full of static that you cannot hear. If the idea of a telephone company doing that seem preposterous, it is only because common carrier obligations on telephones are so ingrained into our expectations. In terms of the internet, net neutrality simply requires that the ISPs treat each bit of data identically, and send it where it needs to go at the same rate of speed, regardless of its source (subject to legitimate network management concerns). Net neutrality merely regulates the “paved road,” and not the “cars,” in the old metaphor of the “information superhighway.” We would not expect the operators of the road to choose speeds that a car can travel, depending on where it comes from or who is in it. Without net neutrality rules there is nothing stopping ISPs from simply blocking websites and media they don’t like because the websites and media compete with their offerings or haven’t specifically paid them off. This is not just a scary hypothetical. AT&T recently released a plan called “Sponsored Data” that works as follows: AT&T has already set an artificial data cap on its consumers (itself a policy design solely to extract the most profit out of them). Now, AT&T will allow a provider, like Netflix, pay them for the privilege to reach the user without affecting the user’s cap. Thus, other competing sites become comparatively more expensive since they will run through the user’s data limit. To take another example, Comcast and Time Warner both have online TV services, which allow customers to watch cable programming on their computers or mobile devices. The cable companies’ online TV services don’t count as data under their artificial caps either, so that the home-grown online TV service is preferable to Netflix, a competitor. Then as cable prices get ever higher, the ISPs can point to all the “free” new online TV services they’re offering as justification for higher prices.
FCC complicit in trying to give big corporate media more outlets
Word is that Murdoch now covets the Los Angeles Times and the Chicago Tribune — the bankrupt-but-still-dominant newspapers (and websites) in the second- and third-largest media markets, where Murdoch already owns TV stations. Under current media ownership limits, he can't buy them. It's illegal ... unless the Federal Communications Commission changes the rules. But according to numerous reports, that's exactly what FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski plans to do. He's circulating an order at the FCC to lift the longstanding ban on one company owning both daily newspapers and TV stations in any of the 20 largest media markets. And he wants to wrap up this massive giveaway just in time for the holidays. If these changes go through, Murdoch could own the Los Angeles Times, two TV stations and up to eight radio stations in L.A. alone. And he's not the only potential beneficiary: These changes could mean more channels for Comcast-NBC, more deals for Disney and more stations for Sinclair. For anyone who actually cares about media diversity and democracy, the gutting of media ownership limits will be a complete disaster.As indicated in this article, we've been through all of this before. The idea that we need increased media concentration was battered down from many angles because it was a terrible idea. Now the charge is being led by an Obama appointee, Julius Genachowski. Here is more information regarding the over-concentrated media ownership in the United States. Here is yet more detailed information from Free Press.
Obama versus Romney on net neutrality
What are the current positions of Obama and Romney on net neutrality? Ars Technica reports:
Last November, the Obama Administrations issued a veto threat on a Senate resolution that would overturn the FCC’s net neutrality rules. At the time, the White House said, “the open Internet enables entrepreneurs to create new services without fear of undue discrimination by network providers.” The presidential statement expressed concern that overturning the FCC rule would “cast uncertainty over those innovative new businesses that are a critical part of the Nation’s economic recovery.” These comments indicate a strong commitment to the FCC rule, but since then the president has remained nearly mum on the subject. For his part, Romney has criticized open Internet protections in his economic platform, saying that the FCC “imposed network neutrality regulations (defying both the legislature and judiciary) that restrict how Internet service providers manage the digital transmissions flowing through their networks.” His answer to a question posed at a town hall meeting in New Hampshire last December offered one blunt hint about his policy preferences. Asked what role he thought the government needed to play in regulating the Internet, he responded, "Almost none."