Neutral Zoning

Scott Hardie | November 29, 2017
What are your thoughts about what seems like the imminent end of net neutrality?

Erik Bates | November 30, 2017
[hidden by request]

Steve West | November 30, 2017
As they say in crime solving circles, Cui Bono? There's potentially $millions to gain here. Follow the money and we'll see who got kickbacks and who's destined for long-term imprisonment.

Scott Hardie | December 1, 2017
Most of the public concern about the end of net neutrality is that ISPs will charge more for certain access, like asking you to fork over more money for high-bandwidth websites like Netflix. If that's all it ever amounts to, I won't mind, because a much bigger concern for me is losing my job. I work for a company that depends upon net neutrality for our Internet-based products to work. We've already had problems with ISPs blocking our traffic in certain markets because they want to push their own products, and filing complaints with the government is the only way that we've been able to stop them. Without those protections, I fear that my once rapidly-growing company will start rapidly shrinking.

And in a more general sense, this net neutrality change is just another thing making me feel dismayed and disenfranchised right now. Washington has always served the rich first and the rest of us a distant second, but lately I have felt especially hopeless, as if the scales are tipped even more in their favor than usual. It seems like every day brings more news of Congress and the President serving millionaires and billionaires and giant corporations, and abandoning the rest of us. The pressure is openly acknowledged. I can wallow helplessly in my resentment, or I can stop paying attention to the news entirely; it doesn't seem like I can be at all informed without my mood worsening. Every commute is a contest with myself to see how long I can bear listening to the news before I have to switch to music and pretend like everything is not getting worse.

Will Funeratic be affected by net neutrality changes? I somewhat doubt it, since we're very small potatoes, but I'll speak up if we are.

Erik, I'm with you: The Internet should have been regulated as a utility since long ago. It might yet someday, but obviously the forces of money that Steve mentioned have too much power right now for it to happen any time soon. I wish we had collectively not been so optimistic as to think this day wouldn't come, and had put protections in place when we had the poltiical chance.