At the Code/Media conference at The Ritz-Carlton in Laguna Niguel, California, billionaire and Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban said that the Federal Communications Commission’s plan to fundamentally change how it oversees the open Internet will "will fuck everything up."
According to ReCode, Cuban said the FCC bid to significantly expand the agency’s authority to regulate broadband providers is nothing more than an attack on giant media companies like Comcast.
“Net neutrality is just a demonization of big companies,” Cuban said.
Cuban said there is no evidence (beyond an isolated 2008 case) that Internet providers have throttled access to certain websites.
The executive dismissed Netflix’s claims that subscribers endured slower speeds until the company paid Comcast for direct access to the Internet provider’s broadband network. Comcast claimed that Netflix had used an inferior middleman to deliver video to Comcast’s network.
“It’s a battle between two fairly large companies,” Cuban said. “[They] worked it out, just like happens in business every day.”
Cuban said he does not want a group of political appointees at the FCC regulating the Internet.
“Having them overseeing the Internet scares the shit out of me,” Cuban said.
My take on the absurdity of net neutrality laws is here.
--RW
“Having them overseeing the Internet scares the shit out of me,” Cuban said.
ReplyDeleteAaand, as everyone knows, billionaires are filled with an inordinate amount of shit.
[duck and cover...]
He's 100% right, if people are afraid of censorship, data caps, data throttling and other related scenarios, net neutrality no way fixes any of this. What would fix it is to end the government monopoly that ISPs (and other utilities) have.
ReplyDeleteMy view is that net neutrality is an example of congress passing a law in order to insert government control into an area where no government control is necessary or proper. The internet gives voice to opposing viewpoints in defiance of the pronunciations of the captive media and is therefore seen as dangerous to those who want to be an elite, controlling everything to the advantage of a tiny minority.
ReplyDeleteThe Fred Reed article on LRC the other day is right on the spot.
ReplyDeleteThe Internet is too dangerous to governments all over the globe. Uncle Sam(and other gov'ts) is going to squash it eventually, they'll do it because they have to. The days of intellectual freedom(and anonymity) on the internet are numbered unfortunately.
The one thing I hope is that another completely privately owned network can spring up to combat the censorship, regulating, tracking, etc. on the internet today.
This can be done a variety of ways technically, but the free market has to sort out which is the best. The days of BBSing were really fun when I was a kid, just like the early days of the internet, so hopefully the free market will provide a solution to gov't tyranny that would be equally exciting.