7/29/2017

Net Neutrailty Debate Begins...Again

I have mentioned my co-worker before, he of many liberal outlooks gained by his many years in a college environment. There are a number of things that we disagree about and that we debate about, here and there, now and again

One of the latest topics has been about Net Neutrality and his take on the matter is that the Trump Administration is undoing “all of the good work done by Obama and his minions in the FCC.” I took a different tack, letting him know that much of the debate over Net Neutrality took place during the Bush Administration. It was the Obama Administration that screwed it all up.

My point to him was that putting Net Neutrality under Title II was the wrong way to go about it and that stripping the existing Net Neutrality rules was the right thing to do while he though we should tinker with it until “it was right”.

I admit that there are times when tinkering with some of the rules and regulations can fix some smaller and less intrusive problems with government regulations, but that when the problems are huge and would require tweaking over years or even decades that some times it is better to scrap the whole thing and start with a clean sheet of paper. Tweaking Net Neutrality is one of those huge problems that won't be solved that way. Here's why.

Net Neutrality is the good principle that a provider of information access service, a device, or a platform must be neutral regarding the content accessed or transmitted by its service, device, or platform.  In particular, Internet Service Providers must not discriminate between net traffic based on the content or originating website.  Also, they must not give preferential treatment to their own services, such as voice over IP, relative to their competitors. The principle of Net Neutrality was accepted and applied by the George W. Bush administration toward broadband ISPs.

...[W]hen Obama was elected in 2008, he appointed his classmate and fundraiser Julius Genachowski as Federal Communications Commission (FCC) Chairman.  Under the pretext of net neutrality, FCC crafted multiple regulations that made broadband ISPs almost unable to manage their own networks, and put their whole operations in the legal grey area.  Not incidentally, the robust growth in broadband providers’ competition that preceded Obama election stopped and many new broadband technologies (like WiMAX) became buried. For the first time in the history, Internet access prices started to rise!  But that was only a prelude to the real action.

That “real action” was writing the rules in such a way that the Internet was no longer an open system with “the FCC vested into itself total control over the whole Internet backbone, all Internet access (other than obsolete dial up) by all consumers, and all broadband and mobile ISPs. The order sprawls on more than 300 pages, never mentions “net neutrality” (except in the footnotes).”

I could go on and on ad nauseum but it's better if you Read The Whole Thing for yourself. Pay particular attention to the comments as they are even more informative that the post itself.