As bad as today’s Circuit Court ruling looks — limiting the Federal Communications Commission’s ability to regulate internet service providers and opening up the possibility that Comcast and other providers can apply different rules to different content — there may be a way around it.
According to this post by Megan Tady from the Free Press “Save the Internet Coalition,” the FCC opened itself up to this ruling through its own mistakes and failures:The FCC has found itself in the ridiculous situation of attempting to regulate broadband without the authority to do so unless the agency takes strong and decisive action to “reclassify” the service under the Communications Act.Here’s the deal: under the Bush FCC, the agency decided to classify and treat broadband Internet service providers the same as any Internet applications company like Facebook or Lexis-Nexis, placing broadband providers outside of the legal framework that traditionally applied to the companies that offer two-way communications services.That’s the loophole that let Comcast wiggle out from under the agency’s thumb.
The FCC has it within its powers, Tady says, to make “an easy fix”:
The FCC can change broadband back to a “communications service,” which is where it should have been in the first place. By reclassifying broadband, all of these questions about authority will fall away and the FCC can pick up where it left off – protecting the Internet for the public and bridging the digital divide.
The hope, she says, is that “this court decision will hopefully force the FCC to take action that will ultimately come back to haunt them.”
That’s the hope, anyway. Let’s see if Barack Obama’s FCC (pictured) is more willing to back American citizens than the Bush FCC.
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Countries like South Korea, Japan and Sweden, for example are light years ahead of us as regards speed and availability of the Internet. A few companies dominate the market in the US, they have a virtual monopoly (no pun intended) and prevent any real progress.From USATODAY in 2007:The USA trails other industrialized nations in high-speed Internet access and may never catch up unless quick action is taken by public-policymakers, a report commissioned by the Communications Workers of America warns.[snip]The median U.S. download speed now is 1.97 megabits per second — a fraction of the 61 megabits per second enjoyed by consumers in Japan, says the report released Monday. Other speedy countries include South Korea (median 45 megabits), France (17 megabits) and Canada (7 megabits).
A CWA sponsored study? No bias in that. And, why do we automatically assume that GRAZILLION bits speeds are needed? If there's a truly free Internet, the marketplace will tell us where investment is needed.
I don't know why libertarian has a problem with the CWA study, they are just stating what is obvious and what everyone knows. The US lags far behind many countries because we don't have competition because a few companies dominate the market and are blocking any progress.It's not just the CWA.Broadband Internet speeds in the United States are only about one-fourth as fast as those in South Korea, the world leader, according to the Internet monitoring firm Akamai.And, as if to add insult to injury, U.S. Internet connections are more expensive than those in South Korea, too. In a worldwide comparison by Speedtest.net, the U.S. (which averages 6.8 mbps in Speedtest's calculation) is the slowest country of the 29 surveyed. That's right. Dead last. South Korea is in the lead with a staggering 20.4 megabits per second, its average citizen being able to download a full-length movie in a matter of seconds. Japan and Sweden are also (unsurprisingly) better connected than us, and even Latvia is twice as fast with an impressive 12.4 average.The U.S. continues to lag behind rich nations in Europe and Asia in adopting high-speed Internet connections, a critical form of technological infrastructure, according to data from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.