FCC loses court case to Comcast regarding Net Neutrality

[tSwitch]

This is pissing me off.

"A federal appeals court has ruled that the Federal Communications Commission lacks the authority to require broadband providers to give equal treatment to all Internet traffic flowing over their networks," the Associated Press reports.

The wire service says that "Tuesday's ruling by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia is a big victory for Comcast Corp., the nation's largest cable company. It had challenged the FCC's authority to impose so called 'net neutrality' obligations. It marks a serious setback for the FCC, which needs authority to regulate the Internet in order to push ahead with key parts of its
massive national broadband plan."

Julius Genachowski, chairman of the FCC, has made the case that the Web should be accessible to everyone on the same terms with no legal content blocked.

Source

If you don't want the internet to become like cable is, please fill out this form and speak out against this crap: LINK

[Diokatsu]

Fuck.

[winkio]

Google saw this coming a while ago, that's why they are trying to own the next generation of infrastructure.

[Tyril132]

That pretty much sums up my opinion of the situation. I've been following the debate since 2008 and frankly, it makes me physically sick to think that this is the direction we're very quickly heading.

January 2008, Time Warner Cable first introduced their intention to move to a "consumption based billing" plan to continue profitable net neutrality. In 2009, information was released that packages would be 10GB, 20GB, 40GB, and 60GB, and featured overage charges of $1 per GB, capped at $75, and Time Warner launched the pricing system in several markets including Rochester, NY, Beaumont, TX and Austin, TX. There was a public outcry. Early April, they announced that they would offer larger packages. Public dissatisfaction did not recede. On April 16, they were forced to abandon the plan altogether.

I lived in Belgium for almost 10 years before moving back here to the United States. Belgacom-SKYNET, the country's largest telecommunications provider, had a virtual monopoly on the industry and an identical business strategy - except they got away with it because users had no viable alternative. Customers were charged for the number of individual telephones and computers they had, SMTP/HTTP hosting was shut down unless you paid a ridiculously expensive "business" premium, and their basic pricing structure followed the same bandwidth caps proposed by Time Warner.

Customers have shown that they refuse to be gouged for basic services that they have come to expect. The net neutrality debate has arisen as a direct response to this outcry... (if we can't make extra money charging you for bandwidth, we'll save money by deciding what you can and can't do in order to save bandwidth.) They're not ensuring that "all customers have equal access" to their services, it's a load of bullshit. They're padding their profit margin. In Skynet's case, they get away with price gouging and have recently decided to invest in content restriction anyway. So clearly, this is not something they're doing for the good of the consumer.

Signed. Dealing with that kind of bullshit was a living hell that I refuse to ever deal with again, even if it means going back to smoke signals. Frankly, I doubt a petition will do much good... but here's hoping.

[Blizzard]

This is horrible. I was expecting internet access to become free for all rather than bullshit like this. :/ I guess we're still far away from free internet.

[Ryex]

I used the link. and so you guys know

it is because the FCC classified the internet as a tier I that this happened. all they have to do to fix this is reclassify as tier II and use it's power of forbearance to say "this and this part of a tier II regulations don't work for the internet so we will ignore that". I read some where that that was indeed what they were planing to do.

[Wizered67]

Noooooooooo!!!!!!!!!

[RogerSmith]

Signed and sent.