[olug] Net neutrality wins! (for now, anyway)

[T. J. Brumfield]

I'm a Libertarian. I don't like government regulation normally. But we
needed Title II status. It isn't massive regulation. It is common sense
protections.

Once Verizon established last year that they weren't bound by net
neutrality, they and other companies started to throttle Netflix to extort
additional money from them. Companies like Time Warner are reporting 97%
profit margins because all the major ISPs collude to not compete. Title II
is opening the door for companies like Google Fiber to come into cities to
compete, lowering prices and raising speeds.

Not to mention that without Title II status, companies could have gone
further than throttling and just flat-out blocked content they didn't like.
Title II protects us from censorship.

Complaining that net neutrality is regulation is akin to comparing the Bill
of Rights to regulation. It is literally a minimal framework to protect our
freedoms.

On Thu, Feb 26, 2015 at 9:16 PM, Tim Larson <larson at towncommons.com> wrote:

> On 2015/2/26 6:58 PM, Lou Duchez wrote:
>
>> “The action that we take today is an irrefutable reflection of the
>> principle that no one — whether government or corporate — should control
>> free open access to the Internet,” Chairman Wheeler stated prior to the
>> vote.
>>
>
> Yet that's exactly what this does - sets precedent that the internet is
> regulatable by gov't. Freedom is never lost all at once, but incrementally.
>
> Tim
>
> --
> Tim Larson
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