Net Neutrality

If you’re reading this, you probably agree with me that the Internet is an amazing thing. It's a crucial driver of free speech, innovation, education, economic growth, creativity and so much more. We wake up with it in the morning. We’re on it all day long. And it’s the last place we go before we finally say good night. To time travelers from the pre-Internet era, such a close relationship with an impersonal entity—a network—would seem strange, like an infatuation with a road. But if you explained that what we’re infatuated with is the ability to connect across vast spaces, to access information in the blink of an eye, to change entire paradigms in business, politics and social life, the obsession would start to make sense. And if a federal agency took a sledgehammer to this network you love, you’d get pretty upset. Yet, that’s where we are. This week we learned that the Federal Communications Commission is considering rules that would kill—rather than protect—net neutrality and allow rampant discrimination online. The plan, a response to the January court decision that struck down the FCC’s open Internet rules, would allow giant corporations to dominate the Internet like never before, dividing traffic into fast and slow lanes and jeopardizing our rights to connect and communicate.

FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler wants you to calm down. A firestorm of public outrage flared up after his latest plans to permit a pay-to-play Internet leaked. The Federal Communications Commission lit up with angry phone calls, irate emails, and a lot (I mean a lot) of bad press. In a speech on Wednesday at the big "Cable Show" in Los Angeles, Wheeler had this to say to his former industry colleagues: "Reports that we are gutting the open Internet rules are incorrect. I am here to say wait a minute. Put away the party hats." And in a blog post on the FCC website, Wheeler claimed that the many critics of his plan are "misinformed." Does that mean that it's time for Net Neutrality fans to put down their pitchforks? Hell, no. It's time to get even louder. He Still Doesn't Get It Try as he might to convince people that he's on the right course, Wheeler doesn't seem to grasp one basic problem: Encouraging online discrimination in the name of the open Internet is unacceptable. Yet that's exactly what his plan would do: allow Internet service providers to charge new fees to content companies for preferential treatment.

The internet is fucked, and the US government is making it worse. Political cowardice set the FCC up to lose its first battle for net neutrality regulation: the rules that keep the internet as you know it free and open. The idea of net neutrality is that all traffic is created equal — whether it's a movie streaming from Netflix, or a WhatsApp message, or a Tweet, or a round of Titanfall. But according to a report from the Wall Street Journal, the FCC is now considering new rules that tear down the fundamental principle of net neutrality. The proposal would allow profit-hungry behemoths like Comcast, AT&T, and Verizon to become gatekeepers that give preferential treatment to companies that pay the most for special access to internet users. "Cowardice and complicity plague the FCC"