Thursday, February 26, 2015

Big Brother Votes To Police The Web

UPDATED 1PM:  By a 3-2 vote, the FCC approved robust rules of the road for the Internet on Thursday, and Variety is reporting supporters believe will prevent conglomerates from consolidating control over the flow of online content, but that critics characterize as a huge regulatory overreach.

The FCC’s approach is one favored by many public interest groups, Hollywood content creators and a large number of web companies including Netflix and Twitter: It is reclassifying Internet service as a Title II telecommunications service, a regulatory designation akin to that of a utility.

The FCC’s move was intended to give it solid authority to impose rules over Internet service. They prohibit ISPs from blocking or throttling content, as well as from collecting payments from content providers for speedier access to their subscribers. The latter has been commonly referred to as the idea that ISPs would eventually create Internet “fast lanes.”

The sharply divided 3-2 vote on Thursday may not spell the end of a decade-long debate over net neutrality but a new period of contentiousness. The FCC’s approach is strongly opposed by cable and telecom companies which provide wired and wireless Internet service, along with congressional Republicans who have already launched hearings and inquiries into the FCC’s rulemaking. They say that the reclassification of the Internet will burden the industry with unnecessary regulation.

In unveiling his proposal earlier this month, FCC chairman Tom Wheeler even called them “the strongest open Internet protections ever proposed by the FCC.”

At the meeting, Wheeler said that the Internet was “simply too important to be left with out rules and a referee on the field…It is simply too important to allow broadband providers to be the ones making the rules.”

He said that the plan was no more a “secret plan to regulate the Internet,” as some critics have charged, than the First Amendment was an effort to regulate free speech.

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