It’s so obvious what these schmucks are doing. They are losing the content wars big time. They lost it to Amazon, and Netflix, and videogames, and every other thing. They have always been distributors and their content is non-existent or sucks. So now instead of getting $100 or more from everyone their revenues are cut in half when people spend $50 for internet access and then stream everything.
So what do they do to make up that revenue? They want to charge extra for all these competitors. They buy the FCC chairman. They woo him, they lobby him, they make him into a great hero in his own mind. This plan only works if an incompetent boob who knows nothing about the marketplace or infrastructure is the FCC chairman. And they find their man. Now here we go, they destroy the internet and by proxy innovation and competition.
Who is going to be able to start a new innovative service if they are behind an artificial paywall where any new service is locked out if they don’t pay?
It will be insidious, too. They will not be so obvious as to charge the consumer $5 a month per subscriber to have the service. They will simply approach Netflix, et al, and make them pay that $5 per subscriber themselves. Imagine being a new streaming service or content provider like Sling.tv and having to raise an extra billion in capital investment to pay these fees. $1 each to Time Warner, Comcast, Verizon and whomever else to not throttle your service.
Hope you like the internet and content provider landscape now, because this is it. Innovation was just lobbied out of existence.
I cut my cable bill in half by dropping TV a couple years ago, but this month I started having to pay another $50 just to get ‘unlimited’ download. Land based data caps are the biggest scam, and it’s amazing they are getting away with it. It takes 7 hours at max speed to blow through my data cap, after that it would cost me $10 dollars every 20 minutes if I didn’t pay for their ‘overage protection’
So now I am paying again what I was before I dropped TV. Being able to squeeze netflix and all for even more money is just icing these days.
Presumably, there will be court challenges to the ruling, based on the idea that a decision supported by almost no citizens is arbitrary and capricious. That should end up in the DC Circuit Court. So, this still has to get through Merrick Garland.
Ajit is a perfect example of the bullshit people supposedly voted for Trump for.
He effectively still works for Verizon and is enacting a policy the vast majority doesn’t want at behest of his corporate masters. And yet… the Trumpsters are almost universally silent on it. He is a living embodiment of The Swamp.
At least Ajit had the decency to dress like a Sith Lord in his little parody video, mocking all of us while he laughs all the way to the bank. Fuck Ajit Pai and the Trump he rode in on.
On the optimistic side, I can’t see this lasting for too long. Public outcry will be swift and vehement once this starts affecting the prices of internet service, Netflix, Amazon, etc… Content providers like Netflix and social media companies like Facebook, all of whom have already petitioned the FCC not to do this, will come out in droves with legal challenges and messages to consumers about just who is responsible for their increased costs. Congress members will start to hear from constituents, big tech sector donors will be unhappy, and before too long there will be a serious push to simply make the internet a federally regulated utility like phone and electrical service, and net neutrality will be restored. How long that takes? Could be 2020 until we get a majority in Congress once more.
I am sure just like every other Republican they will just scan their social media feed see that normal decent people are outraged and think “ok then if normal people hate this then I am for it.”
That is probably the end of their thought process.
