Net Neutrality - Who needs it ?

[Lamplighter]

Apparently Verizon is not happy, Skype is, and other corps have mixed reactions but are going along.

Errrr... Except for the incoming oversight by Republicans,
Rep Cliff Stearns and Sen Kay Bailey Hutchison who are vowing
to overturn ruling.

Computer World
FCC's Net neutrality vote hit from both sides
By Grant Gross
December 21, 2010 03:46 PM ET

Reaction to the FCC's decision was met with criticism coming from groups
on both sides of the seven-plus-year net neutrality debate in Washington, D.C.
Several consumer and digital rights groups pushing for strong net neutrality rules called the vote a missed opportunity.

The rules, pushed by FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski, prohibit broadband providers from blocking legal Web content,
and they prohibit wired providers from unreasonable discrimination against Web traffic.
The exempt specialized, or managed services, offered by broadband providers and exempt mobile broadband providers
from the prohibition on unreasonable discrimination.

[TheMercenary]

I have mixed feelings about it. It is not about the attempts to ensure free and open access, it is about the fine print when a branch of government, in this case the FCC, just says it suddenly has some power it never had before without Congressional oversight. Isn't this a similar situation where people complained about other entities overstepping their perceived bounds? I am more bothered by the fact they just took it upon themselves to begin to regulate something that they never regulated before.

[TheMercenary]

Wow. This really changes the way I am looking at the whole issue.....

The Net Neutrality Coup
The campaign to regulate the Internet was funded by a who's who of left-liberal foundations.

The Federal Communications Commission's new "net neutrality" rules, passed on a partisan 3-2 vote yesterday, represent a huge win for a slick lobbying campaign run by liberal activist groups and foundations. The losers are likely to be consumers who will see innovation and investment chilled by regulations that treat the Internet like a public utility.

There's little evidence the public is demanding these rules, which purport to stop the non-problem of phone and cable companies blocking access to websites and interfering with Internet traffic. Over 300 House and Senate members have signed a letter opposing FCC Internet regulation, and there will undoubtedly be even less support in the next Congress.

Yet President Obama, long an ardent backer of net neutrality, is ignoring both Congress and adverse court rulings, especially by a federal appeals court in April that the agency doesn't have the power to enforce net neutrality. He is seeking to impose his will on the Internet through the executive branch. FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski, a former law school friend of Mr. Obama, has worked closely with the White House on the issue. Official visitor logs show he's had at least 11 personal meetings with the president.

The net neutrality vision for government regulation of the Internet began with the work of Robert McChesney, a University of Illinois communications professor who founded the liberal lobby Free Press in 2002. Mr. McChesney's agenda? "At the moment, the battle over network neutrality is not to completely eliminate the telephone and cable companies," he told the website SocialistProject in 2009. "But the ultimate goal is to get rid of the media capitalists in the phone and cable companies and to divest them from control."

A year earlier, Mr. McChesney wrote in the Marxist journal Monthly Review that "any serious effort to reform the media system would have to necessarily be part of a revolutionary program to overthrow the capitalist system itself." Mr. McChesney told me in an interview that some of his comments have been "taken out of context." He acknowledged that he is a socialist and said he was "hesitant to say I'm not a Marxist."

For a man with such radical views, Mr. McChesney and his Free Press group have had astonishing influence. Mr. Genachowski's press secretary at the FCC, Jen Howard, used to handle media relations at Free Press. The FCC's chief diversity officer, Mark Lloyd, co-authored a Free Press report calling for regulation of political talk radio.

Free Press has been funded by a network of liberal foundations that helped the lobby invent the purported problem that net neutrality is supposed to solve. They then fashioned a political strategy similar to the one employed by activists behind the political speech restrictions of the 2002 McCain-Feingold campaign-finance reform bill. The methods of that earlier campaign were discussed in 2004 by Sean Treglia, a former program officer for the Pew Charitable Trusts, during a talk at the University of Southern California. Far from being the efforts of genuine grass-roots activists, Mr. Treglia noted, the campaign-finance reform lobby was controlled and funded by foundations like Pew.

"The idea was to create an impression that a mass movement was afoot," he told his audience. He noted that "If Congress thought this was a Pew effort, it'd be worthless." A study by the Political Money Line, a nonpartisan website dealing with issues of campaign funding, found that of the $140 million spent to directly promote campaign-finance reform in the last decade, $123 million came from eight liberal foundations.

So the "media reform" movement paid for research that backed its views, paid activists to promote the research, saw its allies installed in the FCC and other key agencies, and paid for the FCC research that evaluated the research they had already paid for. Now they have their policy. That's quite a coup.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000...inion_LEADTop=

[xoxoxoBruce]

Last chance.
http://www.alfranken.com/index.php/s...y_vid?gfhgf=rw

[Pico and ME]

Merc, the corporate giants don't want internet regulation because they don't want anything preventing their control of the money they make (and prevent littler companies from making) off the internet (and phone and cable). They just want to keep raising the rates they charge me without being hassled.

[TheMercenary]

Is it just about rates? Or is it about controlling access?

[Pico and ME]

Its always about money.