Wednesday, November 29, 2017

The future of internet freedom

FCC Chairman Ajit Pai delivered an important and illuminating and aggressive speech with wide ranging ramifications. Everyone has this precisely reversed. They're informed and alarmed by the internet giants with most to lose by internet freedom. They prefer regulation to protect their dominance of their corners of internet space.

Rules adopted by FCC under Obama subjected internet providers to utility regulations to stop them from blocking access to pages or slowing connections or prioritizing content.

Critics of Pai claim that changes will clear the way for fast lanes.

Pai describes the negative impact the regulations had on private internet investment.

Pai rebuked sharply his critics attacking Hollywood celebrities with outsized influence in shaping debate. He responds directly to Cher, Mark Ruffalo and Kumail Nanjiani. Pai attacked frontally Facebook, Google, Twitter, and YouTube.
“And unfortunately, Twitter is not an outlier. Indeed, despite all the talk, and all the fear, that broadband providers could decide what internet content consumers can see, recent experience shows that so-called edge providers are in fact deciding what content they see. These providers routinely block or discriminate against content they don’t like.”
It' a ripping good speech. Available in three formats on FCC website.

Everything that I've read online, to 100%, is directly opposite the facts delivered in this brilliant speech. Every single item on Reddit, every last video on Youtube. Every internet article on this subject takes the surface interpretation. Not one of them mentions how regulation destroyed innovation. That's how pervasive the misinformation. That's how poor American education. The Obama 2015 regulations read exactly like pages ripped out of Atlas Shrugged, regulation for the sake of it, to tweak something not broken with devastating affects that are invisible because there is no accounting for things that don't happen, like innovation and investment held back. This is the corrective to that, and it is resisted fiercely to 100%. All the comments to videos on YouTube mention guns and bullets and Hitler and Stalin while ignoring the controlling of content bias already taking place due to absence of competition that happens due to heavy-handed and unnecessary regulations.

1 comment:

Leland said...

Glenn Reynolds, who way in the beginning supported the idea, has been sounding the alarm over this for many years. It is quite amazing how many people think freedom comes from government regulation. A coworker had never heard of QoS (Quality of Service), yet he thought he was some genius on Net Neutrality. When we challenged his ignorance, his support for Net Neutrality boiled down to his personal hatred for Comcast. Just what we need, regulation based on hate. We got quite a bit of these regulations from Obama.