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ATT and Net Neutrality

2009
16
December

From Ars Technica:

Now AT&T Vice President James Cicconi says that's fine, just as long as the final Order "eschews a strict nondiscrimination standard and instead focuses on 'unreasonable and anticompetitive' forms of discrimination that adversely affect consumers." This phrasing is somewhat similar, AT&T notes, to the old 1934 Communications Act common carrier language that banned telcos from engaging in "unjust and unreasonable discrimination."

For those of you who are scratching your heads and pondering the difference between a strict standard and an anti-anticompetitive one, here's the distinction as AT&T sees it. The problem with a strict standard is that it could put the kibosh on the "availability of creative and innovative services that consumers may want to purchase."

Even worse, AT&T says, "a strict nondiscrimination rule would completely ban voluntary commercial agreements for the paid provision of certain value-added broadband services, which would needlessly deprive market participants, including content providers, from willingly obtaining services that could improve consumers' Internet experiences."

Good job, AT&T. You fail to once again completely miss the issue and act against your own customers. Net neutrality wouldn't be an issue if local ISPs didn't get locked out by established players crying foul to government and having startups shutdown, and if the entire backbone of the internet weren't controlled by 1 or 2 companies. In our case that would be Tier 1 networks; Verizon and AT&T. Even if you manage to set up your own ISP like cities like Lafayette, LA have done, you still have to push your stream up Verizon or AT&T's pipes. Maybe it's time we started a whole new internet.


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