Every year, the internet gets a little less fair. The corporations that run it get a little bigger, their power grows more concentrated, and a bit of their idealism gives way to ruthless pragmatism.
And if Ajit Pai, the new chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, gets his way, the hegemons are likely to grow only larger and more powerful.
This column is nominally about network neutrality, the often sleep-inducing debate about the rules that broadband companies like Comcast and AT&T must follow when managing their networks. But really, this is a story about ballooning corporate power.
John Oliver has a great video about the fight for net neutrality in the United States, and set up a website that makes it easy to send comments to the FCC to compel them to maintain net neutrality.
Your link to the gofccyourself site in chrome is sending users to osnews… it does not like that you left off http. You have: http://www.gofccyourself.com and not http://www.gofccyourself.com.
This makes the link go to http://www.osnews.com/www.gofccyourself.com in Chrome/Chromium/Firefox.
I posted my own blurb to the FCC. As far as these things go though I don’t think they really tend to care about what outsiders think. The new FCC head is from Verizon and seems determined to weaken industry oversight.
I’m doubtful many of the posts are read at all before making decisions.
Who could have predicted that after the GOP got control of Congress and the Presidency?
Of course they are dismantling net neutrality. Did you think they were going to choose your best interests over the profits of AT&T.Verizon, and Comcast?
It’s not just in the broadband space. In order to cater to huge corporations, the GOP is dismantling everything from regulations designed to protect your retirement savings to ones that limit pollution spewed into the air you breathe and the water you drink.
If you voted GOP, you voted for this. If you were too dumb to recognize that when you cast your vote, you are too dumb to cast votes; stay home on election days.
Edited 2017-05-11 09:07 UTC
As far as I’m concerned, neither party has our best interest anywhere on their agenda. Republicans want more corporate control to steamroller the individual, and the democrats want more government control of the individual lives of our people (and a cut of the corporate profits too). At neither extreme are our best interests represented and, considering what a joke the US’ supposed net neutrality policy really was, it’s not going to hurt us one bit if it’s gone. As with everything the US does, the names of the policies do not represent the same take on the English language that you might expect.
darknexus,
+1, can’t upvote.
Politicians have always following this winnong combination of lying during campaigns, appealing to what voters want and not what you can give them, vilifying opponents over things that have nothing to do with their qualifications. Then when politicians are elected, they can ignore all their constituents because it’s more rewarding to side with corporate money. This is what we’ve come to expect from politicans.
Trump came in saying he’d buck these things that everyone hates about politicans, and enough people were stupid enough to believe it that he got elected and now he’s taking the role of lying politician to a whole new level.
Frankly, I hate that the US is stuck with a two party system. I hate that our election system discourages independent voting. Sometimes I wonder if we should just get rid of political parties entirely, they’re clearly not representing us.
Good idea, but how? Even if all political parties were abolished today, those with enough similar beliefs and/or goals would congregate and form new ones even if unofficial. Humans are still social/pack animals at the core, unfortunately, and most are more comfortable following as opposed to thinking.
darknexus,
I don’t really know. How about about picking a dozen candidates by lottery and voting between them based on how well they campaign, haha.
If only the politicians were themselves of the lower and middle classes that could help fix the representation problem. How do you fix corruption? Maybe use their greed against themselves by making them give up wealthy lifestyles if they want to serve public office. :/
I’m in the UK and if I click on the John Oliver YouTube
video link, I get “The uploader has not made this video available in this country”.
Of course, I’ve already watched the Last Week Tonight episode that aired the net neutrality segment, but that wasn’t via YouTube 🙂
Please do not change the way the internet runs. Keep politics and board room dealings out of the internet.
If you do you will be destroying all the reasons why the internet became popular and powerful. It will be like hitting the brakes on progress.
If you think back 5 or 10 years ago. What would have happened to the internet if net neutrality rules were changed back then. What impact would that have had on the internet?
Better yet, go back to just before the internet started to become popular. Everything was ready to explode in popularity and whole companies would born because of the internet. But none of that would have happened if the brakes were applied like the changes proposed to diminish or eliminate net neutrality.
Google would be a sliver of what it is today. There would be no Facebook.
What about your smart phone? What would you do with it? Forget about the internet as you know it. That wonderful reality wouldn’t be anything like it is today. The App Store on iPhones and others wouldn’t exist since the infrastructure that is the internet which all downloaded apps are downloaded through would be a shell of what it is today. Everything would be much, much slower.
That smart phone? It would basically be a mobile phone. And since there wouldn’t be much you could do with it, well most people wouldn’t be buying one. At least they wouldn’t be upgrading since there wouldn’t be any reason to. Because the internet wouldn’t be the internet, Apple wouldn’t have created the smart phone. We’d still be using flip phones and have nothing in the way of apps and the internet as we know it now. Apple would still be a small company selling only computers.
Hundreds of companies and millions of jobs would not exist if it weren’t for the way the internet has worked up until now.
Is this the world that you want to live in? Not me. Please don’t change net neutrality.
Thanks
You do realize that all of that internet building you refer to happened before anyone even thought of implementing “net neutrality?” Your post is confusing. You imply that you don’t want it changed and to keep politics out (which I agree with) and then go on to say we shouldn’t be without net neutrality (which, by its very existence, is the very definition of regulating the internet). These two viewpoints are diametrically opposed in the context of the events you mentioned.