Gamefront.com: Appeals Court Ruling Kneecaps Open Internet

[Ducimus]

Snippet:

This morning, the United States Appeals Court for the District of Columbia struck down key Federal Communications Commission rules designed to protect net neutrality in a narrow but serious ruling that has potentially dire consequences for both average online users and smaller websites attempting to compete fairly with larger sites. The affected rules, created in 2010, were designed to ensure that broadband providers don’t implement policies intended to favor some content and service providers over others. A consortium of interested parties led by Verizon immediately moved to sue over the regulations, culminating in this morning’s decision.

Article:
http://www.gamefront.com/us-appeals-...et-neutrality/

[ETR3(SS)]

*insert facepalm pic here*

An ideological victory for the free marketeers, in reality a kick in the teeth for small business and consumers

[Skybird]

Last autumn, Germany's Deutsche Telekom announced that it wants to limit "flatrates" for highspeed cable connections. The full speed or higher data limits should be payed for. At the same time they want to not limit net services and programs like media content (internet TV) that is associated with different payware services offered by Telekom.

None of that is unreasonable. The copper cables in germany almost all have been laid and payed for by Telekom over the past decades. The market is increasingly battled for, they want to win customers like any other company as well, and why they should be forced to lease their investments in cable networks for under-valued prices to their direct competitors, is not understandable. Even more when said competitors have the option to not use the copper cable network by Telekom, but to offer TV cable-based services (which also are much faster in Germany than the regular telephone lines). In my federal state for example, Unity Media is the provider of such services (we have state-wanted monopoles for TV-cable provider: one provider per federal state only, with Kabel deutschland being the greatest and de facto being the national monopolist due to the huge number of federal states it claims.)

For telephone cable networks the situaiton is different in the US, more providers there have established there very own cable networks. In Germany it is just one, and generally all others (who came later) must lease the right to use that network.

What it comes down to: after a court decision, Telekom in effect can limit the speed or data volume of internet traffic for new customers, but cannot chnage contracts with current customers who booked a flatrate; and Telekom is not allowed to advertise any offer by itself for such limited usage (data volumes limited) a "flatline". Quite reasonable, I would say.

Those competitors using the network by the Telekom, must pay for leasing the right to use it, and the price should be depending on whether or not they want to use the full available speed, or not. Which also is nothing scandalous.

From this perspective, the American court ruling now is not that unreasonable. Nothing is for free, right? And to expect a competing company to assist and help its direct rivals, at its own cost, is against economic logic. If rivals do not like it, they must establish their own cable networks. If they cannot afford that, they play in the wrong league.

However, "free internet" (which is an illusion anyway considering the amount of data collection and data spying done by Google, NSA and such) is desirable. But it cannot be achieved by ruling that one competitor has the right to parasitically live at the cost of another, but it can only be had by finding ways to get real competition between companies. A politically regulated market arrangement is not the solution, but prevents real competition.