How much are you paying now for your internet access? How much are you willing to pay? Well, get ready to pay more. The FCC has announced that it will start pursuing "net neutrality", a euphemism for internet egalitarianism.
FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski has issued a decision that states that the FCC will now start regulating broadband internet traffic under the same rules designed for traditional telephone networks. Under these rules he is ready to institute "Net Neutrality", which, on the surface, sounds good but when you dig deep down into it, has ominous consequences, the least of which will be internet access costs.
Simply put, net neutrality means that all platforms, all users, all applications, all sites, etc. have virtually equal access, no restrictions. It will require that video have the same access as voice, as fincancial data, as email. It requires that no application, no user, no device have any throttling or management that is not equally applied to all other users, applications, devices, etc.
But what will really be the end result of this? Higher costs, lower performance. ISP's will be required to spend $billions to increase the capacity of their distribution systems. And who will pay for it, the end users of course. We will have increased costs but most of us will get poorer throughput. VOIP calls will lose quality because the application cannot be prioritized higher than online gaming or video downloads.
There is finite capacity on our existing internet infrastructure, and, without the ability to manage traffic, to prioritize, it will become like rush hour freeway traffic without any HOV or express lanes. Everybody slows down, everybody stops.
And who will benefit? Well, the Googles, the Amazon's, the companies that want to provide bandwidth hogging applications. But again, they will not be paying for it, we will.
You think we had problems on Active Rain recently! Just wait until we have to contend with every high bandwidth application out there.
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