Institutional corruption leading to regulatory capture -- http://www.ethics.harvard.edu/lab/blog/309-institutional-corruption

Who deserves the blame for this wretched combination of monopolization and profiteering by ever-larger cable and phone companies? The FCC, that's who. The agency's dereliction dates back to 2002, when under Chairman Michael Powell it reclassified cable modem services as "information services" rather than "telecommunications services," eliminating its own authority to regulate them broadly. Powell, by the way, is now the chief lobbyist in Washington for the cable TV industry, so the payoff wasn't long in coming.

President Obama's FCC chairman, Julius Genachowski, moved to shore up the agency's regulatory defense of net neutrality in 2010. But faced with the implacable opposition of the cable and telecommunications industry, he stopped short of reclassifying cable modems as telecommunications services. The result was the tatterdemalion policy that the court killed today. It was so ineptly crafted that almost no one in the telecom bar seemed to think it would survive; the only question was how dead would it be? The answer, spelled out in the ruling, is: totally.

The court did leave it up to the FCC or Congress to refashion a net neutrality regime. The new FCC chairman, Tom Wheeler, has made noises favoring net neutrality, but he also sounds like someone who's not so committed to the principle.

In an important speech in December and a long essay released at the same time, he's seemed to play on both sides. But that won't work. The only way to defend net neutrality, which prioritizes the interests of the customer and user over the provider, is to do so uncompromisingly. Net neutrality can't be made subject to the "marketplace," as Wheeler suggests, because the cable and telephone firms control that marketplace and their interests will prevail. Congress? Don't make me laugh--it's owned by the industry even more than the FCC.

http://www.latimes.com/business/hiltzik/la-fi-mh-net-neutrality-20140114,0,522106.story#ixzz2qdaRo8C4

On Friday, January 17, 2014 2:28 AM, McTim <dogwallah@gmail.com> wrote:

Hi,

On Thu, Jan 16, 2014 at 11:22 AM, ICT Researcher
<ict.researcher@yahoo.com> wrote:
> Its the begining of Internet fragmentation and they started it, not rest of
> the world.

It is nowhere near the beginning of fragmentation. That started long ago.

And opportunity for (an)other powers to assume previous US
> internet leadership?

>

Why would any single nation state presume to be a leader. The
Internet has moved us well past the Westpahalian nation-state model.

What this decision means is still in doubt, the court’s decision
wasn’t based on a belief that net neutrality itself is a bad thing,
but a view that the FCC implemented its rules in a legally
questionable way.

It will be appealed and/or the FCC will re-classify ISPs so the rules
won't be legally questionable anymore...but as an ICT Researcher, you
probably know that.

--
Cheers,

McTim
"A name indicates what we seek. An address indicates where it is. A
route indicates how we get there." Jon Postel