Say goodbye to net neutrality
Trump and his sleazy friends continue smashing everything.
The Federal Communications Commission announced on Tuesday that it planned to dismantle landmark regulations that ensure equal access to the internet, clearing the way for companies to charge more and block access to some websites.
The proposal, put forward by the F.C.C. chairman, Ajit Pai, is a sweeping repeal of rules put in place by the Obama administration that prohibited high-speed internet service providers from blocking or slowing down the delivery websites, or charging extra fees for the best quality of streaming and other internet services for their subscribers.
Good for AT&T and Comcast, bad for everyone else.
The plan to repeal the 2015 net neutrality rules also reverses a hallmark decision by the agency to declare broadband as a service as essential as phones and electricity, a move that created the legal foundation for the net neutrality rules and underscored the importance of high-speed internet service to the nation.
The proposal is widely expected to be approved during a Dec. 14 meeting in a 3-to-2 majority vote along party lines.
Smashing all the things.
Bernie would’ve won! How dare we blame voters for not seeing this coming, when all they did was vote for the party who promised to do this, and against the party who promised not to!
On a hobby forum I used to hang out on, one guy had a tagline reading: “Going Galt if net neutrality passes”. I have no idea WTF he thought he was going to do: move to a compound in the bush and build a new libertarian internet running over Reardon fiber? I never asked, because I (and the admins) try to keep political arguments out of that sort of venue.
Libertarian internet…heh heh heh. Every user builds her or his own infrastructure. Freedom!
Which, funnily enough, was the original concept of the civilian internet essentially. Just a great big interconnected hodge podge of stuff, all running on the individuals kit and connected over whatever backbone you could afford. It could also be described as socialist (there was a high degree of cost subsidy and ‘greater good’ reasoning) or anarchic (consider packet routing).
Not everyone else, to be fair. It’s great for most big corporations.
And terrible for everyone else. It’s anti-allthegoodstuff like democracy, innovation, justice, fairness…
Which is why Trump and his cronies like it.
I meant to mention this earlier but it slipped my mind. The EFF has a tool to help you write to the powers about this: https://act.eff.org/action/congress-don-t-sell-the-internet-out