Net neut rumble flares as FCC vote looms On Tuesday, the US Federal Communications Commision announced that it would meet on December 21 to vote on what chairman Julius Genachowski calls "draft rules of the road to preserve the freedom and openness of the Internet." On Wednesday, the jockeying for position among the Genachowski and the FCC's warring commissioners …
Baker and McDowell are honest politicians - when they've been bought, they'll stay bought. An unregulated network is one where big companies get to make rules to suit themselves - if 80% of Comcasts broadband customers have no other option for high speed internet access, then "market forces" effectively don't exist.
Bill Moyers is the left's equivalent to Beck - they're both conspiracy theory nutjobs. I'm sure Matt Damon has some interesting thoughts on the subject, why don't we quote him too?
This article is ridiculous and quite frankly a one-sided hack job. The author is either ignorant or intentionally omitting the impact of the Comcast verdict to tar and feather Baker and McDowell. Their argument's are not coming out of thin air or their "anti-regulatory" ethos - in April of this year the courts ruled "that the FCC does not have the authority to enforce net neutrality " (to quote Tech Crunch here: http://techcrunch.com/2010/04/07/fcc-comcast-decision-casts-a-shadow-on-broadband-plan/).
Do I need to say that again... maybe in all caps? The courts - who are responsible for interpreting legislation and as a check against the Executive Branch deciding if they do/do not have the authority to do things - set the precedent in April that under the existing legislation the FCC ***was not allowed***.
It's debatable if any of the schemes mentioned in the article will stand up in court, but the safest route to put something in place without risking it going down in flames during the next big court date is to wait for the legislature to properly grant the authority. If you don't like the lack of progress, why don't you take a look at the Democrats who owned the Executive and both houses of the legislature?
Seriously, if I want to read this kind of crap I'll go to DailyKOS, TYVM.
</Rant>
...the new congress extends tax cuts for the very rich at the same time as it cuts off a couple out of work Americans.
Don't get me wrong, there is nothing wrong with making money, but money should not be able to buy polititians.
IMHO the turning point came when TV and radio airtime became so expensive that you couldn't get elected without millions of bucks. And thats for Mayors and suchlike. Add an order of magnitude per step as you climb the ladder to the Presidency.
(Joke)
My ISP has just devised an excellent idea to improve cash-flow. We will have auctions for popular categories of websites. Only the top 3 biders in each category will be able to serve pages to our users.
For example, after Amazon, Borders and WHSmith have won the top 3 places, no other on-line bookstores will be available to our users. To ensure that everything is fair, the auctions will be re-run every month, and you only get to place one bid, and cannot see what your competitors have bid. The extra money will prove a nice windfall to our shareholders, and as CEO I will get a bigger yacht.
We have checked with Meredith Baker, and what we are going to do is perfectly acceptable. Get used to it.
I haven't seen anything that shows Congress has actually granted the FCC the sort of authority they're planning to try and exercise. Hey, didn't work the first time, so we'll just do it slightly differently, and it'll be okay now! Uh, no. And the chances of Congress granting them that authority are slim to none. The lame duck session currently running is worried about maybe passing a continuing resolution to keep the government running, and how ot censure Chuck Rangel....not letting this blow-hard do whatever he feels is necessary to fulfill an amorphous 2008 campaign promise of net neutrality. It even looks like they're not going to be able to fix some looming tax rate reversion.
In other words, Comcast, Verizon, and Google will file an injunction, and win. Again.
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