FCC Passes Net Neutrality

[A Black Falcon]

http://mediadecoder.blogs.nytimes.com/20...-fight/?hp

Fantastic news, now let's just hope that this holds up... this is badly needed.

[Dark Jaguar]

A neutered version that hardly does what it needs to do... Cell phone companies are exempted for no good reason that I can see, and realistically "mobile broadband" is where most people will be doing their net surfing in the future.

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/...orters.ars

[A Black Falcon]

Currently there are no rules on net neutrality at all, so this is a huge step forwards, weaker than it should be or not. This is far, far better than if nothing happens on the issue and companies start to segment the internet... so it doesn't cover cellphones. Oh well, it does cover the entire regular web, and that's a huge deal.

[Dark Jaguar]

Thing is, cell phones are PART of the "regular web", and an increasingly important one. This is a "step", but why not a giant leap here? The current version is full of so many loop holes, and you can bet these loopholes, and this bill's mere existance, are going to be constantly thrown back in the face of future expansions on it.

I can hear it now, "The previous bill's greatness is in how it recognizes the inherent different between wireless and wired internet."

[A Black Falcon]

I think my great dislike of cellphones colors how much I care about that... :)

Even beyond that though, I think part of the excuse was that cellphones that use the internet like this are a quite recent thing (it's harder to determine rules like this for something newer, evidently) and the FCC commissioner decided to go for a compromise position which wouldn't really satisfy anyone but he thought would be more likely to be supported or something along those lines.

Despite that though the two Republicans on the panel oppose net neutrality, as do the Republicans in congress, so I'm sure at some point in the future this rule will come under attack. So maybe they should have pushed more, but maybe one of the Democrats on the panel would only support this much or something? I'm not sure. But yeah, I think passing some form of net neutrality is important. I agree that I'm sure that once we learn the details of the rules there will be things for everyone to dislike, but that can be improved on over time, I think.