ISPs will be required to not block traffic that is lawful but what is the definition of lawful? Would wikileaks be considered lawful? What about the Snowden documents? What about encryption?
This is a dangerous road we are going down.
No matter how cynical you want to be about the FCC, Comcast, Verizon, et al. have already proven themselves to be actively harmful. Anything restrictions the FCC creates can hardly be worse than the "fast lane" plans. The FCC is also answerable to elected officials, for better or for worse - even at worst, I think that's better than being answerable to no one but a pocketbook.
That's not to say that the current batch of telecoms are trustworthy, but at least there is recourse in the form of competition (see: Google Fiber), while if the FCC goes off the deep end we're irrevocably pooched. And...we have immediate history demonstrating that the FCC is corruptible for external agendas. I don't know why people think they would suddenly become above reproach if net neutrality legislation were enacted.
I'd check that assumption. There's plenty of evidence to show that government does a poor job regulating companies. Often times it's the companies that control the regulations.
Have you ever used a telco or cable company in the US? It's not exactly 'free and open'
With Title II regulation, they would be classified as a common carrier and would have many more restrictions in how they could discriminate among the various kinds of traffic that passes through their network.
I guess the reason I'm not as worried about it as you is because I feel like it will be easier to get the FCC to bow to public pressure (eventually?) if they do something stupid, more than I trust any of the ISPs which IMO have been behaving stupidly for quite a while now.
Edit: typo
Other examples of ISPs violating net neutrality is charging different rates for different traffic on mobile networks. For instance, T-Mobile says your plan is unlimited as long as traffic goes to / from the primary device (such as your handset). But if you connect secondary device through it (for example through WiFi hotspot), your traffic will be treated differently and you'll have a monthly cap.
Discriminating traffic is exactly the problem that net neutrality rules are supposed to prevent.
Howso? It's a pretty broad reading of NN that would force Comcast to build beefier connections to Level 3 and Cogent in common data centers. I'd be very interested to hear the interpretation of any currently proposed NN policy that would have resolved that dispute in a positive way for Netflix.
Because they did it for non technical reasons, i.e. just because they could. They abused their monopolistic control in order to extort money from Netflix. Net neutrality should address such abuse, but the problem here is not so much in definition of such behavior as in its detection, since there is hardly any transparency in what is going on.
http://lifehacker.com/use-a-vpn-to-bypass-your-isps-throttli...
For instance afaik the FCC - not Congress - defines "profanity."
Logically, this does not imply that ISPs have to start filtering for illegal content, but that is nevertheless what people started worrying about.
Now, in the smack middle of a major city with a large technology presence, I have 0 of the first kind and 1 of the second kind.
This is _not_ progress.
Otherwise let engineers, customers, and businesses figure things out for themselves competitively – as has worked just fine so far without involving the FCC's powers of censoring, taxing, delaying, price-fixing, wiretapping, and favoring-incumbents.
I don't want a Chinese firewall.
I though we already have legislation in place to define them as "Common Carreires" absolving them of any legal responsibility when illegal content crosses their pipes. However it requires them to not perform any filtering.
I have the feeling we are making a new law to permits ISP to filter and not be legally responsible if illegal content crosses their pipes.
Why can't we just define carrier's as common carriers?
USPS has a whole bunch of law saying what can or can't he sent via postal mail. They absolutely do filter the post - not very well but it happens. https://postalinspectors.uspis.gov/aboutus/laws.aspx
What it seems people are asking for is that ISPs never filter any traffic at all for any reason and also never suffer any consequences for not filtering that traffic.
Giving Internet carriers "common carrier" status is likely to include laws that make them gather evidence and prosecute people involved in online gambling; child sexual exploitation; pyramid schemes; lottery tickets; credit card fraud; extreme pornography; etc. giving them common carrier status is likely to lead to more, not less, intrusive monitoring and filtering.
Admittedly, these aren't apples to apples comparisons, but it strikes me as somewhat ironic that after all of the hullabaloo with the NSA spying and such that we still hold the belief that the government is every trying to do the "right thing".
Or am I missing something?