NFT: Net Neutrality thread: big news!!!

Yesterday, Republican opposition in Congress folded in the face of popular support for Net Neutrality.

Net Neutrality means that your ISP (Verizon, Comcast, Cablevision, TWC, etal) is prohibited from charging different rates to visit certain websites, or charging websites to get faster delivery over an ISPs network. The NN movement wants the FCC to treat broadband Internet like a public utility (called "Title II") to maintain equal access among the sites that Internet users can visit and publish.

NYTimes:

Quote:

Republicans hoped to pre-empt the F.C.C. vote with legislation, but Senate Democrats insisted on waiting until after Thursday’s F.C.C. vote before even beginning to talk about legislation for an open Internet. Even Mr. Thune, the architect of draft legislation to override the F.C.C., said Democrats had stalled what momentum he could muster.

This is big for two reasons:

1) Although nothing is yet set in stone, NN may be preserved in some form, without some raidcal hair-brained overhaul to 'enhance' the free Internet.

2) Popular support (with 11th hour help from Silicon Valley) beat beack a major industrial lobby on the Hill in favor of consumers and entrepreneurs. A rare occurrence, to say the least.

More from the Times:

Quote:

In mid-October, the tech activist group Fight for the Future acquired the direct telephone numbers of about 30 F.C.C. officials, circumventing the agency’s switchboard to send calls directly to policy makers. That set off a torrent of more than 55,000 phone calls until the group turned off the spigot on Dec. 3. In November, President Obama cited “almost four million public comments” when he publicly pressured the F.C.C. to turn away from its paid “fast lane” proposal and embrace a new regulatory regime. Since then, the lobbying has grown only more intense. Last week, 102 Internet companies wrote to the F.C.C. to say the threat of Internet service providers “abusing their gatekeeper power to impose tolls and discriminate against competitive companies is the real threat to our future,” not “heavy-handed regulation” and possible taxation, as conservatives in Washington say.

Here, Consumerist blog breaks down, in Comcast's own words, why NN needs to be preserved. In short, Cable companies, who enjoy monopoly status in many markets, are experiencing troubling trends in their overpriced and subpar tv service, including falling revenues and subscribers despite raising prices. They can only raise prices so much, and need an unregulated monopolized Internet in order to be able to raise revenues from their broadband-only subscribers.

Consumerist: 2 charts from Comcast show why NN is vital - ( New Window )