arstechnica.com — The Federal Trade Commission today dealt a serious blow to "Net Neutrality" proponents as it issued a reporting dismissive of claims that the government needs to get involved in preserving fairness of networks in the United States.
Jun 27, 2007 View in Crawl 4
netcompetition1Jun 28, 2007
Exactly, this is a very practical approach to deal with net neutrality, an issue that seeks new regulations predicated purely on speculation and baseless claims of what could happen. I work with the Hands Off the Internet coalition on this issue and as we have been noting there are consumer protection and anti-trust laws in place to deal with any potential wrongdoing. The focus should be on fostering greater broadband deployment and increasing access speeds and the way to accomplish these goals isn't by enacting heavy-handed regulations.
straxusJun 28, 2007
The most frustrating part about this, is how everyone on both sides focuses on ISP choice. ISP choice has *nothing* to do with the net neutrality debate. It wouldn't matter if you had 50 local ISPs to choose from, because ISPs are only providing last mile access. The second you visit a site, that traffic has to travel through routers owned by either AT&T or Verizon. If AT&T degrades traffic over thier routers from YouTube because Google won't pay up, then it doesn't matter what ISP you are using. *Your* traffic from YouTube and Google gets the slower rate, and there is not a damn thing you can do about it. Switch ISPs all you want. It doesn't change the situation.
pfhreakJun 28, 2007
"It no longer matters that the industry is doing nothing wrong... We are now in an age where even though nothing illegal or immoral or wrong is being done, people STILL want the government to fix it....how ridiculous."This is becoming a big issue now just because the telcos have been talking about changing the current, de facto neutrality practices. Rather than waiting until the telcos implement "pay us or our users don't get to see your site" gatekeeping, which they've been saying they were going to do, people are coming out now to push for net neutrality legislation. It's not a case of "oh, they might do something wrong", it's a case of "oh, they're saying they're going to go do something wrong".
peppermintpigJun 28, 2007
You can't have monopolies without the use of brute force, or government (supporting those corporations with brute force). This can't be pinned on Ron Paul, or any of his supporters who understand the situation. People of principle who value liberty reject the initiation of force in all its forms. In Net Neutrality, just like with the fair tax, people think shuffling the deck chairs on the titanic will improve the situation.
peppermintpigJun 28, 2007
So you trust everybody in the government to fix this?
macewanJun 28, 2007
Has anyone linked to the complaint section of their site? We need to express our displeasure.
benonymousJun 29, 2007
Shane?
Closed AccountMar 28, 2008
lol! Lnet, you made me choke on my coffee. By the way, if you type google into google, you can break the internet. Be Careful!