By Dan Calabrese ——Bio and Archives--December 15, 2017
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Mr. Pai has attempted to counter the predictions of doom by arguing that people will still be able to use the internet as they always have. He released a video recently in which he dressed up as Santa Claus and a Jedi warrior, in order to underscore that consumers will still be able to shop on the internet and follow their entertainment favorites. Large cable and wireless firms such as Comcast, AT&T Inc. and Verizon that provide internet access to most consumers also sought to reassure consumers. AT&T executive Bob Quinn said in a statement that his company has made legally-binding net-neutrality commitments and doesn’t intend to “block websites, nor censor online content, nor throttle or degrade traffic based on the content, nor unfairly discriminate in our treatment of internet traffic….In short, the internet will continue to work tomorrow just as it always has.”
Those firms, however, have felt hobbled by the 2015 rules, which restricted their ability to leverage their power over the internet’s pipes. They also feared that the government would begin to regulate their pricing. Mr. Pai has argued that the key to the new rules’ success will be transparency—the idea that consumers will know exactly what they are getting. For instance, a buyer of a monthly cellphone plan would be able to find out if access to a particular streaming-movie service is prioritized over other traffic from a rival service. His plan envisions enforcement of that transparency by both the FCC and the Federal Trade Commission, whose mission is consumer protection against anticompetitive and deceptive behaviors.The freedom to build fast lanes with different pricing is not about blocking content because of a political agenda. It's about having the ability to offer different levels of service and price them accordingly. It's also about giving people the option of accessing everything on the Internet freely. Netflix, Facebook and Google, all of whom opposed the repeal, are gigantic users of data. If you want to sit and binge-watch Netflix for hours on end, without closing off all your capacity to other things, you're going to need lots of speed and lots of broadband. ISPs want to invest in that speed and broadband, not only in major cities but in rural areas as well. Yet the net neutrality regs made the economics of doing so nearly impossible for them. An Internet dominated by these gigantic data suckers would be very much like broadcast television before cable and satellite services became ubiquitous. You had CBS, NBC and ABC. Didn't like what they were offering? Maybe a local UHF channel was showing reruns of Andy Griffith. Or you could watch Masterpiece Theatre on PBS. Didn't like that? Read a damn book, Sparky.
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