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It's a Saturday night, and there's nothing on cable. Instead of watching another re-run of another cooking show, or paying $4 to see a movie on pay-per-view, you flip on the Wii to catch a movie on Netflix.
So many folks are doing the same, in fact, that at times the company's movies represent 20 percent of the Internet traffic in America. Much of it is carried through broadband connections provided by cable companies.
It's part of the ethos of the Internet. All information is treated the same and transmitted equally. Including Netflix's movies. But it also means that cable companies in a very real way are helping their primary competitor steal their business.
Is it any wonder, then, that the nation's big Internet providers - most of them also cable companies - desperately want to be able to decide whether you can watch Netflix? And how much more you should have to pay to do so?
Until recently, such questions were largely theoretical, confined to the debate surrounding "net neutrality" - whether Washington needed to help ensure that the Internet remained true to its principles of information nondiscrimination.
And then Comcast decided it was going to charge Netflix a fee. Comcast, you might remember, is about to buy NBC Universal, a move that would make it even more directly a competitor for Netflix's service since NBC also owns part of Hulu, another Internet video outlet.
"In theory, without government action, Comcast could speed up streams of NBC programs and slow down streams of its rivals' programs," The New York Times wrote.
That is the primary fear of proponents of net neutrality, an issue that has few rivals in its vulnerability to demagoguery.
Backed by cable companies and other Internet providers, opponents of net neutrality have claimed that it represents government intrusion on the Internet. What those companies actually want, of course, is the freedom to restrict the Internet themselves.
"This may be one of those teaching moments for consumers to understand what's at stake," Michael McGuire, a media analyst for Gartner, told The Times.
Indeed. When called out on its proposal, Comcast made the usual claims of dedication to an open Internet and said that the content of traffic is irrelevant. It didn't persuade.
"On its face, this is the sort of toll booth between residential subscribers and the content of their choice that a net neutrality rule is supposed to prohibit," said Harold Feld, legal director of Public Knowledge, in a statement quoted by The Times.
On Wednesday, the chairman of the Federal Communications Commission proposed a rule to make it illegal for providers to discriminate among the various kinds of Internet traffic.
Since Congress has roundly failed to bring clarity to the subject, the FCC is the only authority that can maintain an open net. Partisan paralysis may be an excuse for inaction on Capitol Hill, but it's a ridiculous reason to permit broadband providers to set the online rules by which we'll all have to abide.
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Preserve neutrality from both business and government
I definitely agree that we need to maintain an open and neutral internet. Still, I hesitate to give the government too much power to which it's able to regulate the internet and it's providers. We should only extend the power of the FCC to prevent ISP's from throttling or blocking any site on the internet over another site. This does not mean extending regulations on ISP's similar to those of telephone companies in the past. The government has already made inroads into controlling the internet such as the Internet Shut Down switch in case of cyber attack and the latest internet blacklist bill that would allow the government to block websites they deemed illegal, even without a court decision. These show how the government is also a threat.
Actually ...
http://news.cnet.com/8301-13578_3-20001825-38.html
The Federal Communications Commission does not have the legal authority to slap Net neutrality regulations on Internet providers, a federal appeals court ruled Tuesday.
A three-judge panel in Washington, D.C. unanimously tossed out the FCC's August 2008 cease and desist order against Comcast, which had taken measures to slow BitTorrent transfers before voluntarily ending them earlier that year.
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No, the FCC doesn't have such authority.
The court ruling
The three-judge panel did rule against the FCC back in April, but as that same story points out, the ruling applied to the commission's Internet principles, which weren't enforceable. An adopted rule would be enforceable. Our position remains that measures are needed to prevent Internet service providers from manipulating traffic to certain sites based on content.
CNET also has this FAQ that might be helpful: http://news.cnet.com/8301-30686_3-20015590-266.html
I believe one is addressing a slightly different aspect
If I recall correctly there was a portion of this editorial that stated congress was dragging its feet. I'm guessing it was on "net neutrality" laws. However with this April 2010 court ruling we know for a fact the FCC doesn't have the authority to lay out similar net neutrality rulings by itself. Which was why I brought up the case for the editorial I responded to did in fact say the FCC is the only authority that can enforce an open net in light of congress's do-nothing-ism. As of April 2010 it specifically doesn't have that authority. And adopted rule, which doesn't exist yet, isn't something that gives the the FCC powers to do anything. You can have a position, but that FCC position would be incorrect (until it changes).