McCain Moves to Block FCC Net Neutrality
October 23rd, 2009 | Published in Technology
This is disappointing. Just as net neutrality was making progress, McCain is trying to block it:
The FCC voted unanimously yesterday to move forward with the debate in an effort to formalize net neutrality guidelines. Senator John McCain followed up by introducing a bill that would prohibit the FCC from governing communications….
McCain’s bill, the Internet Freedom Act, seeks to do the opposite of what its name implies by ensuring that broadband and wireless providers can discriminate and throttle certain traffic while giving preferential treatment to other traffic. Basically, those in power or those who pay more will have better access. Apparently we have different definitions of ‘freedom’.
According to the text of the McCain bill, the FCC “shall not propose, promulgate, or issue any regulations regarding the Internet or IP-enabled services.” Isn’t that what the FCC does? Isn’t that sort of like introducing a bill to prohibit the Treasury from printing money, or a bill to prohibit the IRS from collecting taxes?
I find it ironic he named the bill “Internet Freedom Act” — doesn’t he realize how Orwellian that is? It’s not freedom for people or the internet… it’s freedom for carriers to restrict access and throttle bandwidth however they please.
That is, AT&T could turn off VOIP access. Verizon could throttle bittorrent traffic down to nothing. Time Warner could block access to competitors. They could all block access to Google unless Google paid them money.
You can’t allow phone carriers to block access to competitors numbers, and you can’t allow internet carriers to block access to competitors websites.