Awesome decision
And the surprise for me was that Sensenbrenner/Conyers worked together on this and it got out of committe before anybody laid a hand on it 🙂
Even though there are some fairly cohesive arguments to contradict network neutrality, wherein the thought is that regulation stifles entrepreneurship.
There are a few problems with this argument and the present state of the network itself that makes a good case against de-regulation.
If one is to say that the people should not be over-regulated; this would not be the case with very large companies that now own a very sizeable and visably huge (you can see it on the map of the internet) chunk of the physical network. Whereas, before, the network was neutral just by virtue of the fact that the internet was one giant 'bucket-brigade' and if one company threw a fit and wanted to start shaping packets enough to make other networks irritated, then they would be avoided, with other AS's routing around them.
The deal here is; either you are being sold de-regulation, so as a startup you can have a shot; OR you are being Orwelled to death so that you consent to something that can only really benefit a large oligopolist with an already sufficient network. So, if the gov't let's everybody shape packets on their network infrastructure, do we all win? Of course not, I don't have a network infrastructure. This also gives the corporations that are already successful more ability to actually create a barrier to entry to other upstarts.
Hey, I figure (and I'm right) that I already pay for my bandwidth. Therefore, shaping and discriminating packets after the fact, forcing me and my communicators to pay twice, feels like it falls under some kind of racketeering. AT&T isn't just letting the NSA spy on you...both the NSA and AT&T use Narus software for their own, somewhat different reasons. NSA uses Narus as an advanced 'Carnivore' 😱 . AT&T uses it for analysis to learn what type of packets are going across for QoS concerns. Part of the Narus product description is that it can determine what packets are of a certain type. For instance it can detect, shape, or drop skype calls.
Hmm. I already pay for 1 mbps upload and 1.5 down and I assume everybody else pays their bills...so why can't I use my skype?😕 The answer is making sure you get what you ALREADY paid for. This is Network Neutrality.