Whilst the rest of the world falls about our ears, I’d care to discuss “net neutrality” today.
Here are three articles that I read for reference:
1. New US Push To Regulate Internet Access
2. Takeover Of Internet
3. Some Search Engines to Profit
Interesting article here. Internet censorship article here. ISPs and Net Neutrality article here.
Can someone elucidate: why is the FCC considering internet regulation, what brought us here, why is this good — or bad — and what are the ramifications of potential FCC regulations?
In clear and easy to understand words and phrases, please?
BZ
A friend of mine is going to China next month and worries about getting Internet access, especially search engines.
She says it’s hard to imagine being in a country where you get censored for typing “Liberty” into the Google page. She’s right.
What Comcast specifically was doing began happening months ago: in short, they were slowing down the speed of internet access to some consumers. These are folks that Comcast worried were illegally downloading video, an activity that uses a lot of broadband width. Comcast wanted to decrease the download speed, ostensibly to cover their butts against lawsuits wherein plaintiffs (read: movie studios and record labels) could claim Comcast was a de facto conspirator to piracy.
The FCC, in seeking “net neutrality,” would guarantee that companies (such as Comcast) would not be able to slow down traffic in this way. So, the claim of “regulation” is actually exactly the opposite: it’s COMCAST (and, presumably, other ISP’s) who want to regulate the internet. The FCC is trying to insure that access is open to all.
The same reason they got into the mess with steroids and baseball – they have NO reason to get into it, they just can’t keep their meddling hands out of something that actually works, so they can gum it up.
Everybody has their hands in my pockets but me!
*
It is one more step in the censorship chain… period.
Someone needs to look at Venezuela’s Dictator and his actions since he took office. This playbook has already been written and Obamamao is following it.
1. Nationalize the media; Only have one station left not in the tank.
2. Nationalize industry: GM and the energy
3. Nationalize Banks
4. Nationalize oil (In progress)
5. Control free speech (In progress)
6. Demonize opposing views: Ongoing.
The potential for government censorship of opposition to the government administration (federal) is boundless if the web loses net neutrality. Such censorship would be accomplished by Draconian regulation, at the least. And some sites could get banned outright as “hate crimes,” Jihad Watch, for example.
So, if I am reading this correctly, regulation by the FCC would assure constant bandwidth speed for all the users. . . ?
BZ
“…regulation by the FCC would assure constant bandwidth speed for all the users?”
That’s what I read from it. In actuality, any claims of “censorship” need to be directed at the COMPANIES, not the gov’t. It’s the companies (I probably shouldn’t pluralize that, as I’ve only read of Comcast attempting this) that are trying to censor what their users do with the ‘net.