Friday, May 19, 2017

The End of the "Free" Internet


Mike Snyder. May 18, 2017. The FCC votes to overturn net neutrality. USA Today, https://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/news/2017/05/18/fcc-votes-overturn-net-neutrality/101828412/
The Federal Communications Commission has officially begun undoing net neutrality rules the agency passed two years ago.  The FCC voted 2-1, along political party lines Thursday, to begin a rule-making process to replace the Open Internet order, or net neutrality rules, adopted in 2015 by the agency, then headed by Chairman Tom Wheeler, a Democrat. 
Those original rules included provisions preventing Internet service providers (ISPs) from blocking or throttling legal content users sought to access, as well as preventing ISPs from accepting payment to prioritize some data. 
The 2015 rules derive the FCC enforcement power from regulations formulated for telephone companies within The Communications Act of 1934. Republicans have called such regulation as heavy-handed and burdensome for ISPs.
George Orwell on the control of information (from 1984):
And if all others accepted the lie which the Party imposed—if all records told the same tale—then the lie passed into history and became truth. 'Who controls the past' ran the Party slogan, 'controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.'
The free Internet must be dismantled because it empowers the people to produce their own news, their own interpretations.

Democratization of production is quite dangerous for those who would seek to control information flows.

4 comments:

  1. Replies
    1. Not really exactly. Pay more for poorer service. The predation tsunami begins.

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  2. Soon Orwell's 1984 will be trite pseudointellectual-garbage. Things are so very bad for many and getting worse. The nuclear a security state. People living in, eating, drinking chemical and radioactive filth. The 1984 meme does little to encompass dispossession and mass incarceration. It is almost a propaganda tool used to manufacture consent.

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