How Net Neutrality Actually Ended Long Before This Week

As I have often noted in the past, Net Neutrality could reign ONLY if the FCC and FTC forced the separation of Content provisioning from Broadband pipeline signal distribution. The FCC actually did this in the 70's when they forced TV networks to open up competition for Content production by forcing the TV networks (today AKA Cable and Telco) to divest studio-controlled production. Legislation may be the only answer to solve this problem.

I was an executive at the leading online brand back in the 90's (when that meant something). And in my hands on experience, the idealism of net engineers has always been met with a very bitter dose of reality. Our SVP of engineering drove a luxury car with the license plate "KILL AOL" ... and look where both AOL and Yahoo! are today. The internet is brilliant at what it does: convey a digital packet from point A to point B. And that still works. I hand code HTML on my web domain and get appreciative emails from readers around the world. I have no issues with "net neutrality," because that is an argument about corporate customer service, not free speech. I have no sympathy for people who say they "have to use" Facebook. You're a prole, a data bee making profit for the corporation. Their service is free, and you get what you pay for. Wait, isn't that why net neutrality was revoked? So that we'd only get what we pay for? What a strange world that will be. The real crime is the embargoing of the intellectual property in books, periodicals and museums behind paywalls and copyright niggles. Of course, you get what you pay for -- but it's $30 per document, one document at a time. If you want information to be free -- the heroic ideal -- focus your attention there. It's corporate theft of the public treasure, pure and simple. Farhad! Write about Aaron Swartz and Alexandra Elbakyan instead.

The end of net neutrality should serve as a reminder that there will always be those who control what we see, hear and do. For me, I realized the end was near when I caught the first clear violation of the Smith-Mundt Act. The last nail in the coffin came yesterday, in a twelve (12) minute video in the NY Times entitled: "Facing Facts HD". In that video we are told how Facebook(TM) intends to rid us from HOAXes in their news feed, using the magic of artificially intelligence. Which HOAXes were they were referring to, I wondered? I scribbled down a list, and pondered if my life would be enriched or impoverished if they were removed forever: Santa Claus The immaculate conception Bat Boy Uncle Ted's fishing stories The Loch Ness Monster Big Foot UFOs

In other words, take your medicine like good boys and girls. Uncle Adjit knows what's best for you. The Decline and Fall continues on schedule...

Mr. Manjoo's arguments for net neutrality seem to assume the the internet is here for its users. Nothing could be further from truth. It's here primarily so companies can make money. Any benefit a user might experience is entirely coincidental. Even now the internet is being further developed to provide more control of (not by) its users, but that's another story.

There is a single gleaming detail you point out: Net neutrality is overwhelmingly popular... literally, no normal civilian in this country wants to repeal it. You either don't understand it, you want to protect it, or you work for an ISP/Data Company. There really isn't an inbetween. Now, let's look at that with context. The VAST majority of this country wants to preserve net neutrality protections, yet the GOP will vote thru a repeal that less than 10% of the population wants. These shills are owned, they would sell your first amendment freedoms if they thought it was a guaranteed donation for the next election cycle. Wake up America, you're not being governed you're being ruled.

What's interesting to me is that while we see all the news about disrupting world order but it's still fine for mega-bucks companies to do as they please, as they have always done. I remember the gloom and doom that went on in the early 1980's about breaking up AT&T companies into the resulting "baby bells". Now those little companies, like Verizon, are comfortably throwing their weight around. Nothing changed in the so called "world order".

internet service in most markets is delivered by a few providers in each market. in the best circumstances there is a cable company, legacy phone company (DSL and perhaps FIOS-like service) that are ubiquitous in a geographic area, and perhaps a satellite company. the latter two generally offer lower-speed service. at best, the IS market is a highly-concentrated duopoly, in some instances a virtual monopoly. IS service is not regulated for prices, terms, and conditions, either on the retail side or the content provider side of the market. thus, the IS provider has a bottleneck and therefore great market power that can be used on both the content side and the retail user side. a company which offers IS/legacy telephone/cellular/TV has even greater power when it offers its own content. vertical integration, such as with Comcast which owns NBC-Universal also produces content, exponentiates that power. this verticality was at the core of the AT&T divestiture of 1982, and the movie studios' divestiture of theaters in the 1950s. allowing an ISP/cable TV provider to also produce its own content allows for all sorts of mischief such as discriminating against content providers in favor of its own content. Net neutrality must be maintained in order to give content providers and end-user customers a chance. otherwise, decisions on programming and service prices will be in the hands of a very few people - not good for competition or democracy.

Since the Internet belongs to the American people -- we paid for its development , so by any reasonable definition it's ours -- shouldn't the American people determine the rules? If so, let's have an FCC that responds to those wishes and restores Internet neutrality WHILE ALSO addressing Farhad Manjoo's complaint by banning all advertising online. Every lat jot of it. That would instantly kill the giants. And while we're at it, we could also ban all data gathering, whether "consensual" or not.

lets get used to the fact that we are an oligarchy and the oligarchs control the internet, the media, the economy, the government, all countervailing power (unions, regulators, non-profits) have been weakened to the point they are almost useless. Fortunately, the oligarchs still are willing to entertain us, so yuck it up while you still can.

We need a parallel clandestine internet, like the postal system in Thomas Pynchon's "The Crying of Lot 49". We Await Silent Tristero's Empire :-)

Poor article. Very short on facts to support the premise (or disprove it).

The author presumes that Net Neutrality ever existed at all. I'm not sure that is the case.

Follow the money and you will see why it ended Campaign contributions, Charter Communications Election Cycle, PAC Summary Data, Charter Communications 2008 $ 90.1 K 2014 $ 266.6 K 2018 $1,485,1K Increase 2008 to 2018 : 1,648.16 % Data https://www.opensecrets.org/pacs/lookup2.php?strID=C00426775

I have Atlantic Broadband, who has been raising the price, dollar by dollar, for several months. My speed (much buffering, and ultimate failure to load) has also suffered, bit by bit, during the same period. We need far more competition, far less consolidation/monopoly.

So... I'm one of those small start-up tech companies mentioned in the article. I use the internet to deliver Privacy as a Service to users. It's beyond me to even imagine how net neutrality or the lack thereof will even marginally impact my service. It's totally irrelevant to my company. And it's a red herring to promote somebody's agenda, whatever that might be. I'm relying on the marketplace of ideas to either accept or reject my service. If I'm good enough, I'll have lots of customers. If I'm not, then I'll fold my hand and try something else. But to think that AT&T or Comcast or any other corporation is going to influence my outcome is absurd.

Recall that cable TV was sold as commercial free. Before you can say "Cancel my cable" video streaming will go the same way. It's the way of the world, and we elect and re-elect the people that keep it happening.

The internet had/has the possibility to bring the world together, like it never has before. In many instances, it has. However, more and more we will be put into castes (much like arbitrary lines on a map) where we will have our noses pressed up against the glass. Furthermore, what we see, hear and search for, will be dictated by that faceless conglomerate that will be dictating our every whim. We are all going to be reduced to watching cat videos. ( no slight to cats )

Good reasoning. I content though that we the people of America are at fault and have voluntarily given the control we had as people over content away. Net Neutrality be damned. When Google gave us a search that displayed not the "most relevant" but the "most liked" content at the top, we jumped. We had alternatives - remember AltaVista delivered the most relevant information very unlike Google. We abandoned AltaVista. There are plenty other business models than ad based model like Facebook that could have succeeded. But we preferred ads over content believing it is free. (We have gone through this with TV where we voluntarily give half an hour of our time to commercial advertisers for half an hour of content). I am not trying to defend these large companies. But we must recognize the roles we ourselves play when we voluntarily give up control as individuals.

You asked: Did they hate clean water too? Yes in the sense that EPA has been removing any regulation hurdles so corporations can poison our water, air, land... Greed has no limit!

The FCC is a patronage branch. When both the Executive and the Legislature are in cahoots, we'd be hard-pressed to do anything about it. We also allowed the Supreme Court to be shaded their way, too. Call your reps, on the phone. Also, you know, VOTE. Soapbox, ballot box, ... hope it won't come to the third one..

The biggest threat to a free and open Internet is not the removal of Net Neutrality but rather the terrible FOSTA-SESTA law which was passed recently. It's already shut down Backpage and caused Craigslist to shut down their Personals and Services sections. I understand and share the desire to end child trafficking, but this law gives law enforcement the tools to shut down any site they claim to potentially involve trafficking or other illegal sexual activities. Even if the charges are false, the cost and time to defect themselves will make it impractical to resume operation. I'll wait to see if there is any negative effect from removing Net Neutrality, but the chilling effect of FOSTA-SESTA is evident already.

"Did they hate clean water, too?" NO, they hate people that steal water, aka want it free. The plant that uses 10 million gallons of water shouldn't pay the same amount that I pay for using 1,000 gallons. Get it? It called a free market. Subsidizing Net flicks and all the gamers that slow down my internet is not what I want. Pay for what you use, don't to steal it.

I see panicked messages and articles about the Internet being controlled by monopolies. To the contrary, competition for Internet customers is fierce. In Nashville, where I live, there is a price/speed war going on between Comcast, Google and AT&T. Due to the competition, Comcast (my provider) is providing me with 300 Mbps Internet for less than i used to pay for 50 Mbps. They have moved their customer service centers from cramped, hot strip-mall cubicles to luxurious places with lounge chairs, large screen TVs, and lots of service agents. So what are the chances that Comcast will start limiting speed or access to particular sites? None! if they do, there will be a flood of customers rushing to Google. I've was one of the original beta testers of Comcast broadband in the early days of the Internet. The improvements in speed, price and service are astounding, and they continue.

It is horrendous that our government doesn’t follow the will of the vast majority of us. The way around this in this instance is MUNICIPAL BROADBAND. The way to fix this overall is to elect CORPORATE FREE candidates.

Monopoly is now the rule, not the exception in the United States. The Internet was a last frontier. Nearly every major industry has been allowed to be swallowed up by big money: Health Insurance. Cellular companies. Airlines. Cable TV. Pharma. Newspapers. Supermarkets. The USA hasn’t had an antitrust lawsuit in decades, since the breakup of the Bell telephone companies. Citizens are the products now. We are being served up to pay higher prices, with less service. It makes me sad to see the Internet go to the monopolies.

One of key characteristics defining oligopolies is high barriers to entry. The real question is whether the internet is a natural oligopoly or whether market consolidation has become artificially enforced. There's some reason to consider wide area networks a naturally occurring oligopoly. You're talking about a vast network of infrastructure. Scale is obviously a competitive advantage. Also, IPv4 addresses are resource constrained. In theory, IPv6 will eventually supplant the scarcity but that's a long ways off. For all intensive purposes, telecoms currently control the pipes connecting you to the net neutral distributed internet as we know it. What about the digital realm though? You can host a website with nothing more than a computer and little know how. What is the argument for mass consolidation among web hosting services and SaaS in general. There's some cool features that come along with cloud computing and virtualization but the cost savings isn't really related to the scale of physical implementation. I could rent a server space and host a whole heap of different computing services on my own. The real advantage comes from under pricing the alternatives. Amazon web services wants to make sure using anything other than Amazon web services is going to be more difficult for you the consumer. In this case, typically a small business. They can take a hit on margins and finance the operation from other business sectors. That sounds like market interference to me.

What the FCC has done is: 1. Restored the policy framework that governed the Internet from 1996-2015 (the golden age*) in which the FTC takes action against ISPs for anticompetitive acts. We've always had regulation. Blocking and throttling of internet content that was illegal in 2015 was (pre-2015) and is (now) still illegal. 2. Returned the Internet to a “Title I” info service classification as directed by Congress in 1996, undoing the 2015 FCC’s controversial+likely illegal designation as a “Title II” telecoms service. Only Congress can do it - not unelected bureaucrats. * Americans today enjoy more content per capita than any nation on earth. Since 1996, speeds have increased 3000-fold and prices have fallen per unit by more than 90 percent. The fact is that 95% of the Internet traffic today is already delivered on fast-moving freeways called Content Deliver Networks (CDN), which have never been part of network neutrality regulation - and which allow start-ups to have more flexibility when they challenge the giants Google, Amazon, Apple, and Netflix. Last, ISPs are not the gatekeepers (which can deter a free and open Internet) you should be worried about. Governments (and their never-ending desire to surveil) are the greatest threat to a free an open Internet.

" hey, let’s prevent phone and cable companies from influencing the content we see online" What about preventing search companies from influencing the content we see online? Or social media companies? Let's regulate google, facebook and twitter so that content is treated equally! You realize the idea of content being treated equally is a fantasy and if anything you should be focused on the internet companies not the cable companies. What evidence is there that cable companies actually do this? While it's completely self evident internet companies influence the content we see and yet I don't hear raging calls for regulation. I really don't understand how net neutrality has become the favorite pet issue relating to the internet. Let's throw aside basic economics about price discrimination and incentives to invest (let alone any empirical evidence that this has happened in the past). We will see if this apocalypse you are prognosticating truly comes to fruition.

In short, we are back to the gilded age of 1894 where the wealthy get tax breaks and their corporations are granted monopolies. Comcast, AT&T, Verizon, and others paid millions for the ditching of net neutrality rules. They will behave as all monopolies have in the past, i.e., high prices, bad service, no innovation and stifled competition. One solution may be to treat ISPs like utility companies; grant them a government monopoly with public commission oversight.

This is a great example of how American democracy has been redefined in my lifetime. Government no longer exists for the people. It is controlled by, and exists to benefit, billionaires and big corporations. In every policy area, from health care to tax law to education to banking to telecommunications, the policy of the U.S. government is now to help corporations exploit their workers and loot their customers. This inversion of what America used to mean is going to affect every aspect of our lives. We are only seeing the very beginning. The future is servitude.