AT&T will honor net neutrality for three years if regulators let it buy DirecTV "AT&T has announced it's buying DirecTV in a $49 billion deal — an enormous acquisition that could turn one of the nations top telecom companies into a formidable player in the pay-TV market. And the agreement is sure to be examined closely by federal regulators. To help win their approval, AT&T is offering to abide by net neutrality principles for three years: the company would not block Web sites; it would also not discriminate against certain Web content by slowing down or speeding up different lanes of Internet traffic to customers."
Because the rules are good for three years? And after three years they'll do anything they want?
Game of phones: how Verizon is playing the FCC and its customers "New York’s Public Utility Law Project (PULP) published a report, authored by New Networks, which contains previously unseen documents. It demonstrates how Verizon deliberately moves back and forth between regulatory regimes, classifying its infrastructure either like a heavily regulated telephone network or a deregulated information service depending on its needs. The chicanery has allowed Verizon to raise telephone rates, all the while missing commitments for high-speed internet deployment."
Congressman bankrolled by ISPs tries to halt Internet regulation "US Rep. Bob Latta (R-OH) on Wednesday filed legislation that would prevent the Federal Communications Commission from attempting to regulate broadband Internet service as a public utility. It probably won't surprise you that Internet service providers have enthusiastically given money to this congressman. As we reported in our May 16 story 'Bankrolled by broadband donors, lawmakers lobby FCC on net neutrality,' Latta received $51,000 from cable company interests in the two-year period ending December 2013. Latta was one of '28 House members who lobbied the Federal Communications Commission to drop net neutrality,' with those lawmakers having 'received more than twice the amount in campaign contributions from the broadband sector than the average for all House members,' our story noted."
Steve Wozniak to the FCC: Keep the Internet Free is a little rambling and with some odd analogies, but quite impassioned.
Timothy B. Lee gives the best description of the issues with the Netflix/Comcast battle I've read. Beyond net neutrality: The new battle for the future of the internet. It's long but worth a read (and since it's Vox, it has some pretty graphs). His follow up, comparing the Internet payment model to the long-distance phone payment model is equally worthwhile, Comcast is destroying the principle that makes a competitive internet possible. See also, Google is trying to shame Comcast into running its network better and Comcast and Time Warner are America's biggest cable companies — and the least popular.
Lee also wrote Five big US internet providers are slowing down Internet access until they get more cash. "Level 3 says the six bandwidth providers with congested links are all "large Broadband consumer networks with a dominant or exclusive market share in their local market." One of them is in Europe, and the other five are in the United States. Level 3 says its links to these customers suffer from "congestion that is permanent, has been in place for well over a year and where our peer refuses to augment capacity...The basic problem is those six broadband providers want Level 3 to pay them to deliver traffic. Level 3 believes that's unreasonable. After all, the ISPs' own customers have already paid these ISPs to deliver the traffic to them. And the long-standing norm on the internet is that endpoint ISPs pay intermediaries, not the other way around."
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