Re: It�s Official � The FCC Will Vote to Take Over the Internet in December

[Michael Haney]

On Fri, Dec 24, 2010 at 10:58 AM, Douglas Pollard <dougpol1 at verizon.net> wrote:
SNIP
>     My argument is why don't we try the providers solution as to how we
> pay for our Internet and if it sucks the government will be perfectly
> willing to jerk the whole thing away from the providers and give it to
> us free and raise the taxes to pay for it??  That way my year old mother
> inlaw has no computer can help pay for it.
SNIP
>

There's a big problem with your idea.  Several actually.  For one you
cannot trust businesses, they're out to make money.  That in itself
isn't wrong, but these businesses often use questionable practices in
order to make money and that's wrong.  They skirt the law, go out of
their way to find loop holes to avoid the law, and even blatantly
break it without any care of getting caught because thanks to their
lobbyists the penalties are quite literally tiny slaps on the wrist.

The other major problems is that the US Congress is in the back pocket
of Wall Street.  Lobbying is out of control.  Corporations spend
millions of dollars getting Congressmen to shape the policies and laws
of this country to their own liking.  They don't always get their way,
but 90% of the time they do, and on the issue of Net Neutrality
they're fighting really hard "against" it.

A Tiered Pricing Internet is bad for the US Economy.  Its bad for many
Internet based businesses, some of which are small and just started
out and so they don't have a lot of money, and it sets up a situation
where provides who are also cable TV providers can unfairly compete
with services that offer video like Hulu, Netflix and Youtube.  You're
idea would allow businesses to abuse the system in a way that could
caused immense damage to the Internet, the economy, and possibly even
the world economy.  Its about as bad an idea as Trickle Down
Economics, which has been proven a failure time and time again but the
GOP keep trying to impose it again, and again, and again.  Doing the
same thing over and over again and expecting a different result is one
of the classic signs of mental illness.

Net Neutrality will ensure fair competition, fair competition will
spur new innovation, from that will arise new Internet companies which
will create jobs, and its a repeating system that will continue to
grow.  A Tiered Pricing Internet will stifle innovation, that will
kill the incentive to develop new businesses on the internet thus
preventing job creation, and in turn it will slowly kill off
businesses that don't have the money to pay for better provider
bandwidth.  Only businesses with big corporate backing or those
created by the providers themselves will flourish will independents
will suffer.  These anti-competitive practices will have an even more
devastating effect on the economy than the Digital Millennium
Copyright Act and the Iraq War put together.

-- 
Michael "TheZorch" Haney
"The greatest tragedy in mankind's entire history may be the hijacking
of morality by religion." ~ Arthur C. Clarke
"The suppression of uncomfortable ideas may be common in religion and
politics, but it is not the path to knowledge, and there is no place
for it in the endeavor of science. " ~ Carl Sagan

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