Internet Rabble

An excellent (if ranting) article on the net neutrality battle from Mike McCurry's blog:

MyDD :: Mike McCurry: More on Us Being Internet Rabble: "Here's the deal. The internet has always had rules. One of those rules is that even if you own a pipe, you're not allowed to tell people what they can put through that pipe. You can't block web sites, you can't say 'don't stream video', and you can't dictate what people and can't say. You do have to pay for the pipe you use; Google pays millions a month on one end, and millions of consumers pay smaller amounts ($20-$60) a month on the other. But no one can tell you what you can do with those pipes. It's very much the opposite of cable TV. There are no gatekeepers, and that's by design. This has created a highly competitive marketplace.

Through a series of regulatory decisions from 2002-2005, the FCC stripped these protections for broadband pipes. Now telecom companies can do whatever they want, and they have basically announced business models that depend on their ability to turn the internet into a more cable-like service. This new playground for them is tenous, because the FCC could at any point reverse themselves. To firm this up, the telecom companies want to legislate a change in the rules, stripping authority from the FCC to hold ISPs accountable for degrading service.

So that's what this is all about.

Now, in their ad campaigns, the telecoms are portraying something very different. They are trying to pretend that they don't want government regulating the internet. In fact, they just want to make sure that the rules that have worked for thirty years are stripped away so they can control it."