Huge net neutrality win
Save the Internet has the details.
The intertubes war isn't over, but I can see the end from here.
If this holds, lefty blogging will live to kvetch another day.
The intertubes war isn't over, but I can see the end from here.
If this holds, lefty blogging will live to kvetch another day.
posted by bluememe at 12/29/2006
1 Comments:
Savetheinternet has missed a very important point.
Lots of people are running around saying that AT&T's concessions in order to acquire BellSouth means Net Neutrality has been saved once and for all!
Nothing could be farther from the truth. First, if nothing else happens the regulations expire in two years, which coincidentally is the amount of time AT&T needs to finish it's TV-over-phone plans. So all they did was buy themselves time as a trick to get the FCC to approve the merger.
But most importantly, the FCC itself ruled on December 20 to single-handedly enact Sen. Tubes (Stevens) failed bill within six months.
So unless the Senate stops the FCC from granting to itself the authority held by Congress, and unless someone sues them to stop it, Net Neutrality will be a thing of the past by June.
See their two-page Report and Order here:
http://hraunfoss.fcc.gov/edocs_public/attachmatch/DOC-269111A1.pdf
They specifically state that Congress' regulations are 'unreasonable' without defining what reasonable would be. The FCC specifically states that Public Access is 'unreasonable'.
Congress mandated that cable TV companies must set aside a small percentage of their total bandwidth for Public Access.
When Cable rolled out their expanded digital packages and went from 74 channels to over 200, they successfully bribed congress to exempt all that new bandwidth from the Public Access rule.
So just what is the FCC's problem? It's obvious to me that this whole R+O was written for them by the Telco and Cable executives that have said that poviding ANY bandwidth to non-income generating companies is 'unreasonable'.
So this AT&T thing is a huge smokescreen that most of us have fallen for. And within 6 months Public Access could cease to exist.
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