Net neutrality is a lie and John Oliver is wrong (but I still love him). You may have noticed sites promoting Internet Slowdown Day today. It came about because the FCC announced earlier this year they were revisiting regulations on how you connect to websites and other online services. It has been spurred on, as most things are in Washington, by (two) lobbying groups: the content providers such as Netflix, Amazon, and YouTube vs. the Internet providers such as your cable company and the Tier 1 providers that make up the backbone of the Internet. Those behind the Internet Slowdown Day purport to support net neutrality” which is the idea that every Internet site and service should load as fast as possible on your device and at no point should an Internet service provider be allowed to selectively tinker with the speed of some services. Sounds great, right? Unfortunately, the content providers have capitalized on consumers shared hatred of Internet service providers and have been able to convince many people that this fight has only two sides, framing it as The World vs. The Internet Service Providers”. Consumer interests only intersect with content providers like Netflix in that we want access to their services, free of torment by service providers. However, we do not directly share in the content providers interest of maximizing the amount of money they can make off of us by keeping their costs down. In addition to trying to prevent the FCC from siding with service providers, the net neutrality lobby is trying to get Congress to re-classify Internet service so that the FCC is able to further regulate it like a public service. This may also sound like a great idea, but instead of writing a new law tailored to the Internet, Congress is only willing to consider re-classifying it under the rules written over 80 years ago for common carrier electricity. This alone makes a great case against further regulation. Consumers lose if the FCC rules in favor of either side and they certainly should not be co-opted into this war unless theres truly a third side. The best way forward is for the FCC to change nothing and force the content providers and service providers to figure out how to adapt and innovate on their own, at least for now.
Posted on: Wed, 10 Sep 2014 22:35:40 +0000