I’ve been more or less going through the motions with little passion on this hellsite. E-mailing my reps, signing petitions, reblogging loud all-caps posts talking about being shut down and the world is ending and all that rot.
But I never actually looked into the researching the plans for the revisions to the net now for myself.
The thing about tumblr is that its aggressive and hyper-librel. On here its far easier to reblog and go with the flow to appease the loud typers with their huge font sizes and all-caps.
The thing is, for the most part, tumblr has a very unhealthy relationship with looking at both sides of a situation. Its fed by mass hysteria and has to be soothed by those with the time and patience to fact-check for themselves instead of blindly agreeing and following.
Those that do a lot of the shouting have a very ‘fingers-in-ears’ approach to learning from the side they disagree with and like to paint said side like a huge, terrible villain.
I’ve been kind of lax about the whole thing, mainly ‘cause I’m already addicited to the internet and some small part of my thinks my life might improve if I wasn’t on it all the time. However, that’s small minded so I started to read into the issue myself.
So be prepared for some unpopular opinions accompanied by links.
To start with, Ajit Pai is not an evil bad guy mc-dictator. He’s a chairman for the FCC, which stands for the Federal Communications Devision.
Think of the FCC as a sort of ACLU for the internet. It has rules and regulations and providers and site holders go to them to solve problems. However, it does not have unyielding power and say-all.
Say a provider does what we’re all fearing, they block you from viewing content in an effort to boost their own content. This actually happened in 2005:
“The most famous example of an ISP acting badly was a company called Madison River Communication which, in 2005, blocked ports used for Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) services, presumably to prop up their own alternative; it remains the canonical violation of net neutrality. It was also a short-lived one: Vonage quickly complained to the FCC, which quickly obtained a consent decree that included a nominal fine and guarantee from Madison River Communications that they would not block such services again. They did not, and no other ISP has tried to do the same; the reasoning is straightforward: foreclosing a service that competes with an ISP’s own service is a clear antitrust violation. In other words, there are already regulations in place to deal with this behavior, and the limited evidence we have suggests it works.“
Thompson, Ben. “Pro-Neutrality, Anti-Title II.” Stratechery by Ben Thompson, 29 Nov. 2017, stratechery.com/2017/pro-neutrality-anti-title-ii/.
The FCC ruled that yes, that behavior was bad and it shouldn’t be allowed to happen. It has only happened once in the past and the FCC made it clear that it does not support that. So, lets look into the sort of things the FCC is looking to change, in their eyes, for the better of the internet.
Despite what we’ve been reading the FCC isn’t hellbent on giving money-grubbing cable companies the keys to the internet to regulate the sites we go on. Rather, its more like a phone plan where you have different stages you can pay for in order to have different things. This is something we’re already accustomed to, data plans. Most of us have a phone with a data plan, right? And your provider probably has a variety of data plans to choose from with data caps at a certain about of gigs up to more expensive plans that offer unlimited gigs. Your access to the goods provided on your phone are not limited, you are only limited by your gig usage. Ex: my two brothers and I shared a data plan together because it was cheaper to split it that way. Through this data plan on our phones we all, collectively, had 5 gigs of data that we could use per month. Not very much huh? Well, we’re cheap. And you know what? It was fine. We used our data sparingly and hooked our phones to wifi when we could. If we went over our data we got a warning that we would have to pay $x to get an additional gig to ride out the month. We still had access to whatever we wanted: internet, spotify, netflix, youtube. We just payed for the cheapest plan that had a small data cap. Eventually we got sick of the data cap and upgraded to unlimited.
Now, you’re probably thinking: I don’t WANT to spend more to access the same stuff I LIKE the internet as it is
Well, lets keep digging.
the internet we have now already has certain data caps and exceeding it already causes our internet to move slow, especially with streaming videos, downloading huge files, etc. Our internet providers’ biggest selling point is fast download speeds and instant streaming. They offer a variety of capped data plans varying speeds for different prices. Again, we STILL have access to all the SAME content, just at varying speeds depending on our own needs and willingness to pay for certain plans.
ie: my mom skims facebook every other day and checks her e-mail on weekends. She doesn’t need high speed for that, she’s content with what she has. Now, my dad and I use the internet to create videos, stream and teleconference. We need faster internet speeds so we pay for more gigs.
That is how the internet currently is.
So what does the FCC want to change?
The FCC actually wants to rollback some of the harsher regulations that have been set in place since 2015:
“The Federal Communications Commission has announced a total repeal of Obama-era net neutrality rules, a sweeping rejection of Obama-era rules meant to keep the internet a level playing field and prevent companies from charging additional fees for faster internet access. US telecoms have pledged to broadly respect net neutrality principles, however, and this ruling will give internet service providers the freedom to experiment with new pricing models and prioritization of content.”
Coren, Michael J. “Without net neutrality in Portugal, mobile internet is bundled like a cable package.” Quartz, Quartz, 30 Oct. 2017, qz.com/1114690/why-is-net-neutrality-important-look-to-portugal-and-spain-to-understand/.
Now I know you read that and are jumping to THIS scary image”
Which, by the way, is fake. It’s from 2014 and it was a mock up image for fake ‘internet plans’
The phrasing is also off. What we need to think of is that cable companies are competitive. The ones with the lowest prices get the MOST customers. So say Verizon says ‘hell yes, I’m gonna charge you $45 extra bucks to let you get better streaming speeds to youtube and netflix.’ but then over there in the corner Comcast is like ‘huh, that’s a lousy deal, we’ll let you keep accessing those speeds for $15 a month!’ and then At&T is like ‘Screw that, you guys can keep those speeds for no extra cost!’ That’s business competition, and yeah, some providers aren’t available in certain areas and that price gouge can be obnoxious but we’re already dealing with that in my city where certain neighborhoods have this provider and some have a different one.
What you might be fearing is ‘well, what if they all raise their prices astronomically and don’t back down?’ Well, that’s a monopoly and those are very illegal. Remember how the FCC busted Madison River Communications? You bet your butt they’d bust a monopoly. Systematic abuse is already not tolerated and evidence suggests that its not the goal of the reform.
So what IS the goal of the reform?
The reform wants to roll back some heavy regulations that occurred over the past two years (like speed regulations, data caps, etc) to allow the internet to expand it broadband and development like it did before 2015. Sounds ok.
Personally, I really not worried about this. The more I read about it the less horrible it sounds. A lot of posts have brought it way out of proportion and yes there are some aspects about this that I really really don’t like.
I DON’T like that verizon censors tumblr posts about Net Neutrality.
I DON’T like algorithms that filter people into their own niches and don’t allow them to think for themselves (show the people what they want and they won’t complain about what they don’t see)
I’ve taken a wait-and-see approach now that I’ve read up on plans and FAQs and the various debunked rumors for the reform.
Honestly if the cable companies screw around the people will just drop them and go with the least scummiest one. Hit ‘em where hurts, in their wallet.
This ends my insanely long piece but this IS tumblr so I implore you to not just take my own research at face value. I want you to look things up for yourselves and make a well-reasoned and educated decision.
Yes I’m for an open and free internet, so is Ajit Pai, he just wants to change some things to make it better.
