The Federal Communications Commission has voted to move forward with a plan to restore Obama-era net neutrality protections. The rules could be re-established as soon as next spring, but the FCC’s effort could face legal challenges.
The Federal Communications Commission has voted to move forward with a plan to restore Obama-era net neutrality protections. The rules could be re-established as soon as next spring, but the FCC’s effort could face legal challenges.
Because there’s a non-zero chance that the service providers will pull the same kinds of stunts that some police departments did in the wake of all of the post-George-Floyd ideas we had about “reform”.
The providers will most likely throw a tantrum at the increased regulation and we will get everything from “weaponized incompetence” to “malicious compliance” along with a petulant toddler level of foot-dragging. They will then probably claim that everything that’s going wrong with their services is now due to these new choking, stifling, innovation-killing regulations that are none of those things in actuality and then they’ll do their level best to lobby things back to their current state at the very least and more likely an even worse state for the consumer.
I’m not saying we SHOULDN’T restore net neutrality to the state it was in, I’m just saying that the providers are probably going to be big babies about it and pass the pain on to the customer.
AT&T, Comcast, Charter, Cox, Verizon, CenturyLink, and T-Mobile have basically invisibly colluded themselves into one big ma bell lookalike by one or more of them setting “market pricing” and waiting for the others to follow suit because “profits”.
Why be competitive when you too can rake in record profits by silently agreeing to the rip-off?
The least we can do is limit their ability to pull stunts like marginalizing content they don’t get make extra money off of prioritizing.
I can get why someone might not be excited about this because it’s going to suck for consumers in the short run and it’s really not going to solve the problem at hand, it’s just going to do a tiny bit to keep it from progressing even farther into “enshittification” territory as the providers keep moving the pot towards boiling.
Until we remove the ability for corporations to buy legislation, though, the problem will continue.
This is a classic “don’t let perfect be the enemy of good” situation and you’re framing it as if I am against all the things you are calling for.
No, and if it came off that way, I apologize. I’m just saying I can see why some people would think this isn’t going to be particularly effective in the short term. It’s hard to show enthusiasm for a move like this when setting it up in the first place saw things getting repealed and left us where we are now.
Good is absolutely a step in the right direction and we should be taking it in the hopes of getting closer to perfect.