Verizon and Metro PCS are already in a court dispute over such regulations in a district court of appeals. It just so happens that last year, this same court ruled against the FCC, saying that it overstepped its authority in reprimanding Comcast for filtering out traffic to a website that it clamed consumed large amounts of bandwidth.
Now, as much as I would love to believe that market forces, left to their own device, will be more efficient than with government regulation, the financial disaster of the last two-and-a-half years leaves me all but exhausted on that notion. Why not learn from facets of free-market failure and try to transpose that knowledge to other areas (i.e. the net neutrality issue). I think that it's a bit out-of-touch to suggest we let the market guide itself completely. Just last year, Comcast essentially blackmailed a partner of Netflix, which the partner obliged to keep its customers happy.
Rep. Greg Walden (R-Ore), who sponsored the amendment to the bill and sits as chairman on the House Commerce Subcommittee on Communications and Technology, said his measure is "about keeping the government out of the business of running the Internet." I found that quite rhetorical, as he seems to be equating these measures by the FCC (which are promoting an absence of restrictive and discriminatory policies) to some authoritative government intervention that stifles freedom. Furthermore, as noted in the article, the rules do give ISPs flexibility to manage data on their systems to deal with network congestion and unwanted traffic as long as they publicly disclose those practices. Essentially, the rules seek to abolish the aspect of "paid prioritization," or favoring traffic of business partners or the ISP itself.
Any thoughts? Perhaps I am missing the "pros" of letting ISPs control the internet and am solely focused on the "cons." Regardless, I think too much of anything is a bad thing--whether it be too much autonomy on behalf of the ISPs or too much government control over how they let the ISPs do business.
