The once obscure topic of Net neutrality is now front page, lead story in the Sunday LA Times.
Phone, cable may charge dot-coms that want to race along the Internet.
That headline is a bit misleading. It’s more that the cabelcos want to charge more and give the same speed or worse, slow everyone else down. And should the decades-old tenet of Net neutrality be voided by these greedheads, then in a few years, who knows what could happen. Maybe they’ll decide they don’t like political blogs, or sign a deal with Google and block Yahoo, or jack prices up to nosebleed levels.
Do you trust ATT to do the right thing and protect the consumer and keep the Net open? I don’t.
None of this happens in other countries, where the Net is seen as a public good and more protected from interference by private companies. Worse, the US, supposed high tech leader of the world, is now something like 14th in quality of net access. In France, for example, citizens get vastly faster transfer rates than here, and pay much less.
Consumers and Net users gain nothing and stand to lose much should the cablecos win here. This is predatory capitalism, attempting to enrich the few while making things worse for everyone else.
“None of this happens in other countries.” — Umm, China?
Also, “predatory capitalism” is redundant.