Net Neutrality is losing the war

[wufwugy]

I should probably add/clarify some stuff

I am far from qualified to express much opinion on this matter, yet so is everybody else. This is a whole bunch of unknown territory that even the industry insiders and analysts couldn't predict effects with a high level of accuracy. I've been wracking my mind trying to figure out this thing, yet I can't even get by one of the first steps (analogy). I don't know if a corporate monopoly of the internet would be like cable TV or like microsoft or Wall Street. I'm naturally very paranoid about these things, and the hypotheticals are all possible, yet most are not remotely probable.

What I do know for fact, however, is that corporate interests ARE NOT consumer interests, and if consumers benefit from corporations writing the rules it's associative at best. This doesn't mean that agencies like the FCC are better though. They've done a lot to fuck up communications where they have a ton of regulatory power.

I predict changes will be made towards tiered access not unlike TV, consumers will end up paying more collectively, and megacorps like google and comcast will become stronger. My worry stems much from the fact that it's hypothetically possible to be much, much worse. It is completely possible that google could get powerful enough that they basically own the internet; it's this kind of thing, but to lesser degrees, that I think would cause problems.

But no, it's not going away, changes will be made, but as to what degree are unknown, and they will be very, very slow.

[mcatdog]

What I do know for fact, however, is that corporate interests ARE NOT consumer interests, and if consumers benefit from corporations writing the rules it's associative at best. This doesn't mean that agencies like the FCC are better though. They've done a lot to fuck up communications where they have a ton of regulatory power.

I'm not sure there's a big difference between corporate interests and regulatory agencies. What usually happens is politicians pass a new law and leave it to the regulators to clarify the details. However, the politicians don't have time to do more than take an occasional look at what, for example, the FCC is doing, but the ISPs and other special interests spend their whole lives thinking about communications. They have their lobbyists influence the regulations so that they just protect the ISPs own monopoly arrangements. This is what happened a few years ago when the FCC ruled that ISPs don't have to provide broadband open access, allowing ISPs to have monopolies.

The regulatory process actually worked in our favor when banks successfully lobbied to take the teeth out of UIGEA enforcement but it almost always hurts the average consumer when corporations hire lobbyists that basically write the regulations themselves. Same thing has happened on Wall Street, in health care, etc.