Net neutrality (also network neutrality, Internet neutrality, or net equality) is the principle that Internet service providers and governments should treat all data on the Internet equally, not discriminating or charging differentially by user, content, site, platform, application, type of attached equipment, or mode of communication. The term was coined by Columbia University media law professor Tim Wu in 2003 as an extension of the longstanding concept of a common carrier.[1][2][3][4]
There has been extensive debate about whether net neutrality should be required by law, particularly in the United States. Debate over the issue of net neutrality predates the coining of the term. Advocates of net neutrality regulations such as Lawrence Lessig have raised concerns about the ability of broadband providers to use their last mile infrastructure to block Internet applications and content (e.g. websites, services, and protocols), and even to block out competitors.[5] On the contrary, opponents claim net neutrality regulations would deter investment into improving broadband infrastructure and try to fix something that isn't broken.[6][7]
Neutrality regulation proponents claim that telecom companies seek to impose a tiered service model in order to control the pipeline and thereby remove competition, create artificial scarcity, and oblige subscribers to buy their otherwise uncompetitive services[citation needed]. Many believe net neutrality to be primarily important as a preservation of current freedoms.[8] Prominent supporters of net neutrality include Vinton Cerf, co-inventor of the Internet Protocol, Tim Berners-Lee, creator of the Web, law professor Tim Wu, Netflix CEO Reed Hastings, and Tumblr founder David Karp.[9][10][11][12]
Neutrality regulation opponents from the likes of IBM, Intel, Juniper, Qualcomm, and Cisco on the other hand claim that regulations would deter investment into broadband infrastructure, saying that "shifting to Title II means that instead of billions of broadband investment driving other sectors of the economy forward, any reduction in this spending will stifle growth across the entire economy. Title II is going to lead to a slowdown, if not a hold, in broadband build out, because if you don’t know that you can recover on your investment, you won’t make it." [13][14] Prominent opponents also include Netscape founder and venture capitalist Marc Andreessen, co-inventor of the Internet Protocol Bob Kahn, PayPal founder and Facebook investor Peter Thiel, Internet engineer and former Chief Technologist for the FCC David Farber, Broadcast.com founder Mark Cuban, and Nobel Prize economist Gary Becker.[15][16][17][18][19]
Examples of net neutrality violations include when the Internet service provider Comcast intentionally slowed peer-to-peer communications.[20] In 2007, one other company was using deep packet inspection to discriminate against peer-to-peer, file transfer protocol, and online games, instituting a cell-phone style billing system of overages, free-to-telecom value added services, and bundling.[21]
Critics of net neutrality argue that data discrimination is desirable for reasons like guaranteeing quality of service. Bob Kahn, co-inventor of the Internet Protocol, called the term net neutrality a slogan and opposes establishing it, but he admits that he is against the fragmentation of the net whenever this becomes excluding to other participants.[15] Vint Cerf, Kahn's co-founder of the Internet Protocol, explains the confusion over their positions on net neutrality, "There’s also some argument that says, well you have to treat every packet the same. That’s not what any of us said. Or you can’t charge more for more usage. We didn’t say that either."[22]
On 31 January 2015, AP News reported the FCC will present the notion of applying ("with some caveats") Title II (common carrier) of the Communications Act of 1934 to the Internet in a vote expected on February 26, 2015.[23][24][25][26][27] Adoption of this notion would reclassify Internet service from one of information to one of telecommunications[28] and, according to Tom Wheeler, chairman of the FCC, ensure net neutrality.[29][30] The Obama administration said that it would not let the public see its 332 page net neutrality plan until after the FCC voted on its implementation.[31] The FCC was expected to enforce net neutrality in its vote, according to the New York Times.[32][33]
On February 26, 2015, the United States FCC ruled in favor of net neutrality by reclassifying broadband access as a telecommunications service and thus applying Title II (common carrier) of the Communications Act of 1934 to Internet service providers.[34][35][36][37][38] The FCC Chairman, Tom Wheeler, commented, "This is no more a plan to regulate the Internet than the First Amendment is a plan to regulate free speech. They both stand for the same concept."[39]
Network neutrality is the principle that all Internet traffic should be treated equally.[40] According to Columbia Law School professor Tim Wu, the best way to explain network neutrality is as a principle to be used when designing a network: that a public information network will end up being most useful if all content, sites, and platforms are treated equally.[41] A more detailed proposed definition of technical and service network neutrality suggests that service network neutrality is the adherence to the paradigm that operation of a service at a certain layer is not influenced by any data other than the data interpreted at that layer, and in accordance with the protocol specification for that layer.[42]
The idea of an open Internet is the idea that the full resources of the Internet and means to operate on it are easily accessible to all individuals and companies. This often includes ideas such as net neutrality, open standards, transparency, lack of Internet censorship, and low barriers to entry. The concept of the open Internet is sometimes expressed as an expectation of decentralized technological power, and is seen by some as closely related to open-source software.[43]
Proponents often see net neutrality as an important component of an open Internet, where policies such as equal treatment of data and open web standards allow those on the Internet to easily communicate and conduct business without interference from a third party.[44] A closed Internet refers to the opposite situation, in which established corporations or governments favor certain uses. A closed Internet may have restricted access to necessary web standards, artificially degrade some services, or explicitly filter out content.
The concept of a dumb network made up of dumb pipes has been around since at least the early 1990s. The idea of a dumb network is that the endpoints of a network are generally where the intelligence lies, and that the network itself generally leaves the management and operation of communication to the end users. In 2013 the software company MetroTech Net, Inc. (MTN) coined the term Dumb Wave which is the modern application of the Dumb Pipe concept to the ubiquitous wireless network. If wireless carriers do not provide unique and value added services, they will be relegated to the dumb pipe category where they can't charge a premium or retain customers.
The end-to-end principle is a principle of network design, first laid out explicitly in the 1981 conference paper End-to-end arguments in system design by Jerome H. Saltzer, David P. Reed, and David D. Clark. The principle states that, whenever possible, communications protocol operations should be defined to occur at the end-points of a communications system, or as close as possible to the resource being controlled. According to the end-to-end principle, protocol features are only justified in the lower layers of a system if they are a performance optimization, hence, TCP retransmission for reliability is still justified, but efforts to improve TCP reliability should stop after peak performance has been reached. They argued that reliable systems tend to require end-to-end processing to operate correctly, in addition to any processing in the intermediate system. They pointed out that most features in the lowest level of a communications system have costs for all higher-layer clients, even if those clients do not need the features, and are redundant if the clients have to re-implement the features on an end-to-end basis. This leads to the model of a minimal dumb network with smart terminals, a completely different model from the previous paradigm of the smart network with dumb terminals. Because the end-to-end principle is one of the central design principles of the Internet, and because the practical means for implementing data discrimination violate the end-to-end principle, the principle often enters discussions about net neutrality. The end-to-end principle is closely related, and sometimes seen as a direct precursor to the principle of net neutrality.[45]
Traffic shaping is the control of computer network traffic in order to optimize or guarantee performance, improve latency, and/or increase usable bandwidth by delaying packets that meet certain criteria.[46] More specifically, traffic shaping is any action on a set of packets (often called a stream or a flow) which imposes additional delay on those packets such that they conform to some predetermined constraint (a contract or traffic profile).[47] Traffic shaping provides a means to control the volume of traffic being sent into a network in a specified period (bandwidth throttling), or the maximum rate at which the traffic is sent (rate limiting), or more complex criteria such as GCRA.
If the core of a network has more bandwidth than is permitted to enter at the edges, then good QoS can be obtained without policing. For example the telephone network employs admission control to limit user demand on the network core by refusing to create a circuit for the requested connection. Over-provisioning is a form of statistical multiplexing that makes liberal estimates of peak user demand. Over-provisioning is used in private networks such as WebEx and the Internet 2 Abilene Network, an American university network. David Isenberg believes that continued over-provisioning will always provide more capacity for less expense than QoS and deep packet inspection technologies.[48][49]
On 1 August 2008, the FCC formally voted 3-to-2 to uphold a complaint against Comcast, the largest cable company in the United States, ruling that it had illegally inhibited users of its high-speed Internet service from using file-sharing software. FCC chairman Kevin J. Martin said that the order was meant to set a precedent that Internet providers, and indeed all communications companies, could not prevent customers from using their networks the way they see fit unless there is a good reason. In an interview, Martin said, "We are preserving the open character of the Internet". The legal complaint against Comcast related to BitTorrent, a transfer protocol that is especially apt at distributing large files such as video, music, and software on the Internet.[50] Comcast admitted no wrongdoing[51] in its proposed settlement of up to US$16 dollars per share in December 2009.[52]
During the early decades of the Internet, creating a non-neutral Internet was technically infeasible.[53] Originally developed to filter malware, the Internet security company NetScreen Technologies released network firewalls in 2003 with so called deep packet inspection. Deep inspection helped make real-time discrimination between different kinds of data possible,[54] and is often used for Internet censorship.
In a practice called zero-rating, companies will reimburse data use from certain addresses, favoring use of those services. Examples include Facebook Zero[55] and Google Free Zone, and are especially common in the developing world.[56]
Sometimes ISPs will charge some companies, but not others, for the traffic they cause on the ISP's network. French telecoms operator Orange, complaining that traffic from YouTube and other Google sites consists of roughly 50% of total traffic on the Orange network, reached a deal with Google, in which they charge Google for the traffic incurred on the Orange network.[57] Some also thought that Orange's rival ISP Free throttled YouTube traffic. However, an investigation done by the French telecommunications regulatory body revealed that the network was simply congested during peak hours.[58]
Favoring communications sent over the private networks run by individual organizations over information sent over the general Internet Protocol. Examples include Comcast's deal with Microsoft.[59]
There is some disagreement about whether peering is a net neutrality issue.[60]
In the first quarter of 2014, streaming website Netflix reached an arrangement with ISP Comcast to improve the quality of its service to Netflix clients.[61] This arrangement was made in response to increasingly slow connection speeds through Comcast over the course of the 2013, where average speeds dropped by over 25% of their values a year before to an all time low. After the deal was struck in January 2014, the Netflix speed index recorded a 66% increase in connection.
Netflix agreed to a similar deal with Verizon in 2014 after Verizon DSL customers connection speed dropped to less than 1 Mbit/s early in the year. Netflix spoke out against this deal with a controversial statement delivered to all Verizon customers experiencing low connection speeds using the Netflix client.[62] This sparked an internal debate between the two companies that led to Verizon obtaining a cease and desist order on June 5, 2014 that forced Netflix to stop displaying this message.
Legal enforcement of net neutrality principles takes a variety of forms, from provisions that outlaw anti-competitive blocking and throttling of Internet services, all the way to legal enforcement that prevents companies from subsidizing Internet use on particular sites.
Proponents of net neutrality include consumer advocates, human rights organizations such as Article 19,[63] online companies and some technology companies.[64] Many major Internet application companies are advocates of neutrality. Yahoo!, Vonage,[65] eBay, Amazon,[66] IAC/InterActiveCorp. Microsoft, Twitter, Tumblr, Etsy, ACLU, Daily Kos, Greenpeace, along with many other companies, have also taken a stance in support of neutrality regulation.[67][68] Cogent Communications, an international Internet service provider, has made an announcement in favor of certain net neutrality policies.[69] In 2008, Google published a statement speaking out against letting broadband providers abuse their market power to affect access to competing applications or content. They further equated the situation to that of the telephony market, where telephone companies are not allowed to control who their customers call or what those customers are allowed to say.[4] However, Google's support of net neutrality has recently been called into question.[70]
Individuals who support net neutrality include Tim Berners-Lee,[71] Vinton Cerf,[72][73] Lawrence Lessig, Robert W. McChesney,[8] Steve Wozniak, Susan P. Crawford, Ben Scott, David Reed,[74] and U.S. President Barack Obama.[75][76] On November 10, 2014, President Obama recommended the FCC reclassify broadband Internet service as a telecommunications service in order to preserve net neutrality.[77][78][79] On November 12, 2014, AT&T stopped build-out of their fiber network until it has "solid net neutrality rules to follow".[80] On 31 January 2015, AP News reported the FCC will present the notion of applying ("with some caveats") Title II (common carrier) of the Communications Act of 1934 to the Internet in a vote expected on 26 February 2015.[23][24][25][26][27]
Supporters of network neutrality want to designate cable companies as common carriers, which would require them to allow Internet service providers (ISPs) free access to cable lines, the model used for dial-up Internet. They want to ensure that cable companies cannot screen, interrupt or filter Internet content without court order.[81] Common carrier status would give the FCC the power to enforce net neutrality rules.[82]
SaveTheInternet.com accuses cable and telecommunications companies of wanting the role of gatekeepers, being able to control which websites load quickly, load slowly, or don't load at all. According to SaveTheInternet.com these companies want to charge content providers who require guaranteed speedy data delivery...to create advantages for their own search engines, Internet phone services, and streaming video services – and slowing access or blocking access to those of competitors.[83] Vinton Cerf, a co-inventor of the Internet Protocol and current vice president of Google argues that the Internet was designed without any authorities controlling access to new content or new services.[84] He concludes that the principles responsible for making the Internet such a success would be fundamentally undermined were broadband carriers given the ability to affect what people see and do online.[72]
Lawrence Lessig and Robert W. McChesney argue that net neutrality ensures that the Internet remains a free and open technology, fostering democratic communication. Lessig and McChesney go on to argue that the monopolization of the Internet would stifle the diversity of independent news sources and the generation of innovative and novel web content.[8]
Users with faster Internet connectivity (e.g., fiber) abandon a slow-loading video at a faster rate than users with slower Internet connectivity (e.g., cable or mobile).[85] A "fast lane" in the Internet can irrevocably decrease the user's tolerance to the relative slowness of the "slow lane".
Proponents of net neutrality invoke the human psychological process of adaptation where when people get used to something better, they would not ever want to go back to something worse. In the context of the Internet, the proponents argue that a user who gets used to the "fast lane" on the Internet would find the "slow lane" intolerable in comparison, greatly disadvantaging any provider who is unable to pay for the "fast lane". Video providers Netflix[86] and Vimeo[87] in their comments to FCC in favor of net neutrality use the research[85] of S.S. Krishnan and Ramesh Sitaraman that provides the first quantitative evidence of adaptation to speed among online video users. Their research studied the patience level of millions of Internet video users who waited for a slow-loading video to start playing. Users who had a faster Internet connectivity, such as fiber-to-the-home, demonstrated less patience and abandoned their videos sooner than similar users with slower Internet connectivity. The results demonstrate how users can get used to faster Internet connectivity, leading to higher expectation of Internet speed, and lower tolerance for any delay that occurs. Author Nicholas Carr[88] and other social commentators[89][90] have written about the habituation phenomenon by stating that a faster flow of information on the Internet can make people less patient.
Net neutrality advocates argue that allowing cable companies the right to demand a toll to guarantee quality or premium delivery would create an exploitative business model based on the ISPs position as gatekeepers.[91] Advocates warn that by charging websites for access, network owners may be able to block competitor Web sites and services, as well as refuse access to those unable to pay.[8] According to Tim Wu, cable companies plan to reserve bandwidth for their own television services, and charge companies a toll for priority service.[92]
Proponents of net neutrality argue that allowing for preferential treatment of Internet traffic, or tiered service, would put newer online companies at a disadvantage and slow innovation in online services.[64] Tim Wu argues that, without network neutrality, the Internet will undergo a transformation from a market ruled by innovation to one ruled by deal-making.[92] SaveTheInternet.com argues that net neutrality puts everyone on equal terms, which helps drive innovation. They claim it is a preservation of the way the internet has always operated, where the quality of websites and services determined whether they succeeded or failed, rather than deals with ISPs.[83] Lawrence Lessig and Robert W. McChesney argue that eliminating net neutrality would lead to the Internet resembling the world of cable TV, so that access to and distribution of content would be managed by a handful of massive companies. These companies would then control what is seen as well as how much it costs to see it. Speedy and secure Internet use for such industries as health care, finance, retailing, and gambling could be subject to large fees charged by these companies. They further explain that a majority of the great innovators in the history of the Internet started with little capital in their garages, inspired by great ideas. This was possible because the protections of net neutrality ensured limited control by owners of the networks, maximal competition in this space, and permitted innovators from outside access to the network. Internet content was guaranteed a free and highly competitive space by the existence of net neutrality.[8]
Network neutrality advocates have sponsored legislation claiming that authorizing incumbent network providers to override transport and application layer separation on the Internet would signal the decline of fundamental Internet standards and international consensus authority. Further, the legislation asserts that bit-shaping the transport of application data will undermine the transport layer's designed flexibility.[93]
Alok Bhardwaj, founder of Epic Privacy Browser, argues that any violations to network neutrality, realistically speaking, will not involve genuine investment but rather payoffs for unnecessary and dubious services. He believes that it is unlikely that new investment will be made to lay special networks for particular websites to reach end-users faster. Rather, he believes that non-net neutrality will involve leveraging quality of service to extract remuneration from websites that want to avoid being slowed down.[94][95]
Some advocates say network neutrality is needed in order to maintain the end-to-end principle. According to Lawrence Lessig and Robert W. McChesney, all content must be treated the same and must move at the same speed in order for net neutrality to be true. They say that it is this simple but brilliant end-to-end aspect that has allowed the Internet to act as a powerful force for economic and social good.[8] Under this principle, a neutral network is a dumb network, merely passing packets regardless of the applications they support. This point of view was expressed by David S. Isenberg in his paper, "The Rise of the Stupid Network". He states that the vision of an intelligent network is being replaced by a new network philosophy and architecture in which the network is designed for always-on use, not intermittence and scarcity. Rather than intelligence being designed into the network itself, the intelligence would be pushed out to the end-user's device; and the network would be designed simply to deliver bits without fancy network routing or smart number translation. The data would be in control, telling the network where it should be sent. End-user devices would then be allowed to behave flexibly, as bits would essentially be free and there would be no assumption that the data is of a single data rate or data type.[96]
Contrary to this idea, the research paper titled End-to-end arguments in system design by Saltzer, Reed, and Clark[97] argues that network intelligence doesn't relieve end systems of the requirement to check inbound data for errors and to rate-limit the sender, nor for a wholesale removal of intelligence from the network core.
Opponents of net neutrality regulations include IBM, Intel, Cisco, Qualcomm, Broadcom, Juniper, dLink, Wintel, Alcatel-Lucent, Corning, Panasonic, Ericsson, Cato Institute, the Competitive Enterprise Institute, the Goldwater Institute, Americans for Tax Reform, and the Ayn Rand Institute, as well as many others. Opponents of net neutrality comprise several internet hardware companies and members of the cable and telecommunications industries, including major telecommunications providers, such as AT&T and Verizon, as well as hundreds of small ISPs.[98][99][100] Notable technologists who oppose net neutrality regulations include Mark Cuban, Marc Andreessen, Scott McNealy, and Peter Thiel.[101][102][103][104] Network neutrality regulations are also opposed by internet engineer professor and former Chief Technologist of the FCC David Farber[105] and Internet Protocol co-inventor and Qualcomm Director[106] Bob Kahn.[15]
Nobel Prize economist Gary Becker's paper titled, "Net Neutrality and Consumer Welfare", published by the Journal of Competition Law & Economics, showed that claims by net neutrality proponents "do not provide a compelling rationale for regulation" because there is "significant and growing competition" among broadband access providers.[107]
Google Chairman Eric Schmidt, states that while Google views that similar data types shouldn't be discriminated against, it's okay to discriminate across different data types -- a position that both Google and Verizon generally agree on, according to Schmidt.[108][109] According to the Journal, when President Barack Obama announced his support for strong net neutrality rules late in 2014, Schmidt told a top White House official the president was making a mistake.[110]
A number of other opponents created Hands Off The Internet[111], a website created in 2006 to promote arguments against internet regulation. Principal financial support for the website came from AT&T, and members included BellSouth, Alcatel, Cingular, and Citizens Against Government Waste.[112][113][114][115][116]
Robert Pepper, a senior managing director, global advanced technology policy, at Cisco Systems, and is the former FCC chief of policy development, says: "The supporters of net neutrality regulation believe that more rules are necessary. In their view, without greater regulation, service providers might parcel out bandwidth or services, creating a bifurcated world in which the wealthy enjoy first-class Internet access, while everyone else is left with slow connections and degraded content. That scenario, however, is a false paradigm. Such an all-or-nothing world doesn't exist today, nor will it exist in the future. Without additional regulation, service providers are likely to continue doing what they are doing. They will continue to offer a variety of broadband service plans at a variety of price points to suit every type of consumer".[117] Computer scientist Bob Kahn [106] has said net neutrality is a slogan that would freeze innovation in the core of the Internet.[15]
Farber has written and spoken strongly in favor of continued research and development on core Internet protocols. He joined academic colleagues Michael Katz, Christopher Yoo, and Gerald Faulhaber in an op-ed for the Washington Post strongly critical of network neutrality, essentially stating that while the Internet is in need of remodeling, congressional action aimed at protecting the best parts of the current Internet could interfere with efforts to build a replacement.[118]
According to a letter to key Congressional and FCC leaders sent by 60 major technology companies including IBM, Intel, Qualcomm, and Cisco, Title II regulation of the internet "means that instead of billions of broadband investment driving other sectors of the economy forward, any reduction in this spending will stifle growth across the entire economy. This is not idle speculation or fear mongering...Title II is going to lead to a slowdown, if not a hold, in broadband build out, because if you don’t know that you can recover on your investment, you won’t make it."[119][120][121][122][123]
According to the Wall Street Journal, in one of Google’s few lobbying sessions with FCC officials, the company urged the agency to craft rules that encourage investment in broadband Internet networks -- a position that mirrors the argument made by opponents of strong net neutrality rules, such as AT&T and Comcast.[124]
Opponents of net neutrality argue that prioritization of bandwidth is necessary for future innovation on the Internet.[98] Telecommunications providers such as telephone and cable companies, and some technology companies that supply networking gear, argue telecom providers should have the ability to provide preferential treatment in the form of tiered services, for example by giving online companies willing to pay the ability to transfer their data packets faster than other Internet traffic. The added revenue from such services could be used to pay for the building of increased broadband access to more consumers.[64]
Opponents say that net neutrality regulation would make it more difficult for Internet service providers (ISPs) and other network operators to recoup their investments in broadband networks.[125] John Thorne, senior vice president and deputy general counsel of Verizon, a broadband and telecommunications company, has argued that they will have no incentive to make large investments to develop advanced fibre-optic networks if they are prohibited from charging higher preferred access fees to companies that wish to take advantage of the expanded capabilities of such networks. Thorne and other ISPs have accused Google and Skype of freeloading or free riding for using a network of lines and cables the phone company spent billions of dollars to build.[98][126][127]
Marc Andreessen states that "a pure net neutrality view is difficult to sustain if you also want to have continued investment in broadband networks. If you’re a large telco right now, you spend on the order of $20 billion a year on capex. You need to know how you’re going to get a return on that investment. If you have these pure net neutrality rules where you can never charge a company like Netflix anything, you’re not ever going to get a return on continued network investment — which means you’ll stop investing in the network. And I would not want to be sitting here 10 or 20 years from now with the same broadband speeds we’re getting today."[128]
Those in favor of forms of non-neutral tiered Internet access argue that the Internet is already not a level playing field: large companies achieve a performance advantage over smaller competitors by replicating servers and buying high-bandwidth services. Should prices drop for lower levels of access, or access to only certain protocols, for instance, a change of this type would make Internet usage more neutral, with respect to the needs of those individuals and corporations specifically seeking differentiated tiers of service. Network expert[citation needed] Richard Bennett has written, "A richly funded Web site, which delivers data faster than its competitors to the front porches of the Internet service providers, wants it delivered the rest of the way on an equal basis. This system, which Google calls broadband neutrality, actually preserves a more fundamental inequality."[129]
A paper on net neutrality by Nobel Prize economist Gary Becker and his colleagues state that "there is significant and growing competition among broadband access providers and that few significant competitive problems have been observed to date, suggesting that there is no compelling competitive rationale for such regulation."[130]
Becker and fellow economists Dennis Carlton and Hal Sidler found that "Between mid-2002 and mid-2008, the number of high-speed broadband access lines in the United States grew from 16 million to nearly 133 million, and the number of residential broadband lines grew from 14 million to nearly 80 million. Internet traffic roughly tripled between 2007 and 2009. At the same time, prices for broadband Internet access services have fallen sharply. For example, in 2002, Charter Communications was offering broadband service with 512 to 768 kbps speeds for $40 per month. Today, Charter offers a bandwidth of 10 mbps, roughly 13 to 20 times faster service, for the same $40 per month. Similarly, the price of Verizon DSL service with 768 kbps download bandwidth fell from $49.95 in 2001 to $19.99 in 2007."[131]
FCC commissioner Ajit Pai stated that the ruling issued by the FCC to impose Title II regulations explicitly opens the door to billions of dollars in new fees and taxes on broadband by subjecting them to the telephone-style taxes under the Universal Service Fund. Moreover, Pai states that the FCC completely brushes away the concerns of smaller competitors who are going to be subject to various taxes, such as state property taxes and general receipts taxes.[132] As a result, according to Pai, that does nothing to create more competition within the market.[133]
According to Pai, the FCC's ruling to impose Title II regulations is opposed by the country’s smallest private competitors and many municipal broadband providers.[134] In his dissent, Pai noted that 142 wireless ISPs (WISPs) said that FCC’s new “regulatory intrusion into our businesses...would likely force us to raise prices, delay deployment expansion, or both.” He also noted that 24 of the country’s smallest ISPs, each with fewer than 1,000 residential broadband customers, wrote to the FCC stating that Title II “will badly strain our limited resources” because they “have no in-house attorneys and no budget line items for outside counsel.” Further, another 43 municipal broadband providers told the FCC that Title II "will trigger consequences beyond the Commission’s control and risk serious harm to our ability to fund and deploy broadband without bringing any concrete benefit for consumers or edge providers that the market is not already proving today without the aid of any additional regulation."[135]
mudra wrote:"This Is Just The Beginning" - Strange Events Happening At Alternative News Sites - Kill Switch Being Tested?Anyone wonder why the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) refused to allow the general public to view their proposal on regulating the Internet, turning it into an official "utililty," in what they call "net neutrality?" Anyone wonder whY the public still has not been informed what changes are coming? Last, but not least, is what we have witnessed over the last few days since these new regulations have been passed, just the beginning of the US Government's control over what news the Internet users get to see and what they prevent them from seeing?
Over the last three days since the FCC voted for "net neutrality," some very strange events have occurred, including alternative news radio shows to simply go off air for minutes at a time, a popular website that conducted a hard hitting interview with the former Assistant Secretary of the Treasury in the Reagan Administration Paul Criag Roberts completely went down and the article could not be accessed throughout the day, just to come back up, then return an error again on reload, a site that linked to that piece also went "goopy," according to the Hawk video below, Facebook has had numerous reports over at DownDetector.com, just to name a few events that could be indicative of the US Government testing their ability to control what Internet users see and what they don't.
As was explained in a previous ANP article, on Thursday night Hawk was "completely knocked off the air for a substantial period of time, several times, before returning at the 19 minute 40 second mark to recap what he had been talking about including recent internet outages across America, Russia preparing to defend the Arctic region (where they will be building 10 additional bases within the next 2 years) as well as recent documented cases of what could be electronic warfare including Russian strategic bombers flying off of the west coast taking out the air traffic control systems in Los Angeles as well as the USS Donald Cook being totally disabled by a Russian bomber while on patrol in the Black Sea."
That was the same day the "Net Neutrality" proposal passed the FCC.
On Friday, King World News interviewed Paul Craig Roberts, yet when I followed the link from Steve Quayle's site to the article, I received the following error (screen shot shown below)
KWN.jpg
When I emailed Steve about the matter, he advised me to try again because some people were reporting it took two tries to access the piece. I tried again, got the same message, but was able to access it the third time around.
Hawk states in the Thrive To Survive show below that parts of Quayle's site were also "goopy," as he terms it, at times.
A look over at DownDetector.com archives shows that there were outage reports coming in for the social media site Facebook, on the 27th, the 28th and this morning.
Internet conspiracy and hoax site Before It's News returned the following error all morning on March 1, 2015, (it is back up as of writing this) when attempting to access their front page as can be seen in the address bar at the top of the screen shot below:
Read on:
http://www.allnewspipeline.com/Getting_Real_Serious_Now_Strange_Events.phpLove Always
mudra
PS: as a side note I was trying to post an answer to Seashore's thread today.
3 times when I hit the send button I was lead to a page telling me " your time is out " when it took me just a few seconds to write my post.
I changed from explorer to google chrome and their my message was successfully sent at last.
Never happened to me before.
Did anyone encounter any sort of unusual problems with internet today ?
B.B.Baghor wrote:mudra's question in former post: "Did anyone encounter any sort of unusual problems with internet today ?"
I've had no unusual things going on, but for 2 days I've had an intuitive nudge not to go online for long stretches of time.
Am I far off the right track, thinking of anomalies due to the last couple of days strong solar activity? Just a wild guess.
We might be wise to begin excersizing telepathic communications 
orthodoxymoron wrote:I recently suggested that the Internet and Infowar might be taking over -- making it impossible for anyone to rule (openly or secretly) without destroying humanity and/or civilization (as we know them to be). I asked how the internet might be regulated in Heaven -- and how the internet should be regulated on Earth?! "On Earth as it is in Heaven"?! I tend to think that civilization should be progressively refined in an evolutionary (rather than revolutionary) manner -- mostly through the positive-reinforcement of that which presently exists...
 when attempting to access their front page as can be seen in the address bar at the top of the screen shot below:)
