About Net Neutrality…

So, as we expected, on December 14th the FCC voted 3 to 2 to repeal regulations put on internet service providers back in 2015 which, in very simple terms, would require internet service providers to treat all data as equal – that is, forbid them from providing preferential treatment to the data of one service versus another.

I won’t go into explaining it all – I’ll leave wiki links down below for what they are worth, but I will say this much: this isn’t about what that corporate shill Ajit Pai says it is. This has jack all to do with his claim that such legislation hinders internet service providers from innovating, or whatever he’s doing, and has everything to do with the current political climate in the U.S.

I would go further, but I already did in the original form of this article and honestly, as deeply as I felt what I said there, Xadara just isn’t the place for such. I try to avoid politics here where possible, but goddamnit that’s all this is – the current political game of “erase the previous guys legacy” using his name as a scapegoat to make Net Neutrality sound bad, when in reality it protects the populace from having a critical resource possibly blocked by various paywalls and added fees beyond those we would normally pay for access to whatever sites and services we want.

It’s being done in corporate interest, no matter how much they say it isn’t. Big business pays the people in politics, they enact legislation which benefit those businesses, everyone but the actual bulk of the populace wins.

I know the most common statement about net neutrality is the proposition that ATT, Comcast and the like will begin to charge separate fees for access to, or faster connections to certain popular services. I’m not saying it will happen, but without Net Neutrality laws as they were being established, there is nothing to stop companies from doing this if they wished, and contrary to what Pai and others in support of the end of Net Neutrality would tell you, no, the “free market” wouldn’t solve the problem – you can’t pick another company that doesn’t do this when all of them do.

It’s like overdrafting fees at a bank – it’s always $35 dollars. Why? Becuase that’s what the banks are capped out at! If they could charge you more, they would, which means even if such restrictions were placed on such a “service” if one were to exist, they would still more than likely charge whatever the maximum is.

Of course, this is all hypothetical, sure, but as I said.. nothing prevents it, now does it? They’ve thought about this. They have tried to implement it in very small scale before. Even beyond that, just the ability for a service provider to decide they want to limit or outright block types of traffic simply because they don’t like it, without any oversight and indeed them being shown to lie about it in the past even when caught doing such, well, that still shouldn’t be anything anyone but a corporate shill would want. Doesn’t hurt them, right?