On Fri, Feb 27, 2015 at 3:06 PM, Curly McLain <126die...@gmail.com> wrote: > It is as much about that as the ACA is about healthcare. (only makes it > worse and way more costly) THat is why you can't read it. > > Oppose it. > > Favor it or do nothing: you will get worse service for a lot more money
I work in an area that is very heavy with technology jobs - Cisco, Broadcom, EMC, NetApp, Google, SAS, Qualcomm, Merrill Lynch, GSK, etc. Political views are all literally over the map - broadly, Chapel Hill is very Democrat, Cary is very Libertarian and/or conservative, Durham is very liberal, Raleigh is very Republican. We don't agree on much, lunch is usually interesting when there is politics afoot. A year ago, AT&T was blocking Netflix; Verizon sold Durham to Frontier, who is just horrid; Time Warner will send you to collections even if you are paid up, doesn't provide service, etc. etc.. Same issues for everyone. We all hate all the local providers. Network neutrality was one of the few things we all agreed on, at least to a few months back. (The big challenge is reasonable network management, but ultimately you have to trust the company to do the right thing, or else regulate them to do something specific.) Reasoning seemed to be: - The liberals resent that ISPs are milking them for every dime, coming and going. And that they can buy politicians or whatever. If I had a nickel for every mention of Citizens United... - The conservatives resent that ISPs restrict access to legal content on a whim, like 3-D gun models or sites they decide not to like, often for political reasons. - The libertarians resent the enforced non-competition and fleecing of customers. - The neo-liberals resent that those of us living in rural areas don't get access to a network, and aren't allowed to get access to a network. We nerds were talking about this long before Obama and the news organizations weighed in. (This was back when we thought the FCC chair was just another patsy for the CTIA, like his predecessor.) The courts ruled that Verizon needed to be regulated as a utility in order to be restricted by such rules as 'provide access to legal content' and 'not block competing content' and 'not block things you don't like for political reasons', even as a monopoly provider. Given that Verizon was already doing all three of these (hence the lawsuit), and the only way to change the behavior was to implement the rules, we were basically all in favor of implementing the rules. I'm more libertarian than most of my colleagues/friends so it was a harder sell for me. Pragmatically, I don't see how we can get any real deregulation in the ISP market, so if there is going to be content-blocking and whatnot going on I'd rather it be done publicly rather than by private corporations at random. At least if we're going to block the American Nazi Party or the IRA or the RNC we'll know it's blocked, as opposed to what Verizon was doing and silently killing off sites they didn't like. Frankly our infrastructure is bad, and expensive, and has a terrible reputation for reliability, but that's not something the FCC is addressing. The new rules, according to what has actually been said by actual FCC commissioners, will make it harder to block content, which may or may not lead to higher prices. The rules do not guarantee access like the CLECs used to have, at least according to the FCC commissioner. Of course the FCC doesn't publish interim rules, so while theoretically something has been done we won't know until it's official. Obviously I have a problem with that, but if the rules are too far from what was presented a few weeks ago then the FCC will lose its allies and Congress will happily overturn them posthaste, so I expect they are mostly similar to what we nerds were wanting. Anyway, that to say that as a nerd I'm pretty happy with what has been publicly discussed by the FCC folks, from an IT/legal standpoint. Best, Tim _______________________________________ http://www.okiebenz.com To search list archives http://www.okiebenz.com/archive/ To Unsubscribe or change delivery options go to: http://mail.okiebenz.com/mailman/listinfo/mercedes_okiebenz.com All posts are the result of individual contributors and as such, those individuals are responsible for the content of the post. The list owner has no control over the content of the messages of each contributor.
