Yeah, nobody saw this coming...
The "Hook": "Hey sappy consumers! You can now watch sports or vids on You Tube on any device!! your smart phone! Laptop! tablet! TV! wrist phone! It's ALL Good!
The Catch: It will soon cost you, ohh, $2,800 per year to get the high speed connection you need to watch streaming vid on all your nifty devices! You don't mind, do you?
What? You "can't afford" that much? heyy, no worries, you can still get very affordable internet; but at turtle slow speed.. so you'll barely being able to up/down load photos... your fav websites (loaded with massive content) will take 15 minutes to load. Is that OK? we thought so... ;-)
Over at Naked Capitalism:
Brian Fung: The D.C. Circuit court has struck down net neutrality. What does that mean for consumers [citizens]?
Tim Wu: It leaves the Internet in completely uncharted territory. There’s never been a situation where providers can block whatever they want. For example, it means AT&T can block people from reaching T-Mobile’s customer service site if it wanted. They can do whatever they want.
one of the comments at the bottom of the piece:
Potentially, this represents a huge revenue source (on the order of SS) for the carriers and a giant political coup for TPTB so I very much doubt the FCC will put up anything more than a token struggle. Think!, this represents a fabulous opportunity for a stealth coup on freedom of speech. Obama and his merry crew of corporate {edit by Superpole} are drooling at the prospect of taking out or controlling sites like NC, Wikileaks, and people such as Snowden. Instead of the FCC doing anything constructive, Obama will give another speech. Yippee!!!. The MSM? HaHaHaHaHaHa…. Moreover, the carriers are not stupid; they won’t transform the spigot all at once into a bazaar of pay walls any more than they first did with cable t.v.. It will be slow and easy over about a ten year span which is the time it takes to get a new -up and coming- generation to assume it was always this way.
Does the fact that other countries provide it free or at very reasonable cost bother them? Hell no; ya love this place or ya leave it, pinko commie! And indeed, I wouldn’t be surprised to see the EU and then other countries falling all over themselves to do the exact same thing within five years. One, it’s gigantic profit. Two, it’s the power to make opposition absolutely invisible. Wikileaks would never have happened without it. Snowden? Never heard of him. It’s that simple.
I for one don't believe the carriers will take
ten years to cash in; the can't wait that long since they just invested Billions putting in the big phat pipes to serve their long term strategy. I'm thinking more like
two years.
http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/...