The FCC’s bluff has been called and the courts have basically taken a giant shit on Net Neutrality. The way is paved, at least on paper, for ISPs to revert to a fully cable-TV model of tiered access, speeding up (and slowing down) all manner of services however it suits them. The obvious one that everyone goes to: Comcast, but for the consent order forced on them by the NBCU merger, could start their own Netflix-like service and then exempt it from throttling or broadband caps, with the result that Xfinity customers could either struggle with Netflix at 128kbps and three movies’ worth of data per month, or else subscribe to Comflix.
This is bullshit. It’s bullshit that stemmed from the original misdiagnosis that ISPs were “information services” rather than “communication services.” That might have been true for the likes of AOL or Compuserve or Prodigy. but it was never true for broadband ISP services. Comcast might try to spin their “triple play” offerings as “information services” based on the presence of TV, but as television converges with the Internet, it’s becoming more false with each passing season.
Right now, there is exactly one surefire way of bringing this back under control: Congress will have to declare broadband ISPs to be common carriers and communication services. Good luck with that. There’s no more reason for this to pass Congress than anything else, unless somebody comes up with a wiggle that allows the GOP’s mental-defective wing to be separated from its techno-libertarian pretenders so the latter can team up with Democrats on a quick fix. And to be blunt, the same thing needs to happen to wireless, because AT&T has already announced a plan for “Sponsored Data” that will allow companies to pay for their content not to count against user quotas…which opens the door for wireless data to be used only to access those services willing to pay the freight themselves.
It’s really hard not to be pessimistic about the direction of the country. But hell, we don’t have kids, so in fifty years or so it won’t really be our problem anyway. Right? It’s a shitty attitude, but then, we have pretty shitty politics.
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