A federal appeals court ruled today that the FCC lacks the authority to enforce Net Neutrality in a case against Comcast.
“This decision destroys the F.C.C.’s authority to build broadband policy on the legal theory established by the Bush administration,” said Ben Scott, the policy director for Free Press, a nonprofit organization that advocates for broad media ownership and access.
I am against Internet providers deciding what traffic their customers are entitled to. At the same time, I am not sure how I feel about government regulation of the Internet. The best solution would be for communities to own their own Internet backbones, where a misbehaving Internet provider could simply be discarded in favor of one more accommodating. Such is not the case when citizens don’t own the Internet pipe connecting their home (a.k.a., the last mile).
On the other hand, government regulators would at least be answerable to the electorate, which isn’t a bad thing.
The FCC says in a statement that it will continue to pursue ways to ensure Net Neutrality:
“The FCC is firmly committed to promoting an open Internet and to policies that will bring the enormous benefits of broadband to all Americans. It will rest these policies — all of which will be designed to foster innovation and investment while protecting and empowering consumers — on a solid legal foundation.
“Today’s court decision invalidated the prior Commission’s approach to preserving an open Internet. But the Court in no way disagreed with the importance of preserving a free and open Internet; nor did it close the door to other methods for achieving this important end.”
Um, isn’t local communities government?
aren’t even…
actually, a local community discarding a carrier seems inefficient. They could be persuaded (read, bought) by a carrier…Anytime government is involved we have no choice. Again, this is a problem with cronyism. Just my 2 cents…
Are you against grocery stores deciding what food you eat? You seem to think that customers are completely powerless over their ISPs, when recent experience has shown the truth to the the exact opposite – TimeWarner’s plans for usage caps were killed by customer dissatisfaction. If someone actually tried to implement redirecting Google to Bing or blocking access to sites, they would quickly lose market share to any competitor who didn’t. Even in our strangled competitive system today, such controls have been possible for decades and have not been implemented at all, which should make it obvious that ISPs have no real business interest in doing those kinds of things.
And since when was the FCC ever accountable to the electorate? I’m not opposed to municipal networks, though I think a competitive system is better – as scootdawg pointed out, what would happen in a lot of places is that the internet monopoly would simply be contracted out by the city or county, which is hardly better than our current situation.
Do we really want the Keystone Kop bad-word and wardrobe-malfunction police poking around in ISP routers to verify that only approved traffic is being forwarded?