Net Neutrality Dies At Ripe Old Age Of 45
Kevin Drum laments, as the Wall Street Journal reports that the FCC has given up on ways to enforce equal access.
…Google and Microsoft and Netflix and other large, well-capitalized incumbents will pay for speedy service. Smaller companies that can’t—or that ISPs just aren’t interested in dealing with—will get whatever plodding service is left for everyone else. ISPs won’t be allowed to deliberately slow down traffic from specific sites, but that’s about all that’s left of net neutrality. Once you’ve approved the notion of two-tier service, it hardly matters whether you’re speeding up some of the sites or slowing down others.
This might have been inevitable, for both legal and commercial reasons. But that doesn’t mean we have to like it.
D.B. Hirsch is a political activist, news junkie, and retired ad copy writer and spin doctor. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.