After years of talk about Network Neutrality it seems the cable and telco industries are poised to win the battle. The FCC will vote on December 21, to impose some very common sense, vanilla NN rules on cable ops and telcos.
What the cable ops and telcos got in exchange will have a far greater impact on the Internet and consumers than NN ever would have. Cable/telcos now get to implement "usage-based billing." UBB is a practice already in place in Canada and Comcast, at&t, TWC and others are itching to implement it here. So wave goodbye to unlimited web-surfing as you will now pay for every minute you spend looking at Gmail, Google Maps, Amazon, eBay, Facebook and more.
This is a disaster for those that keep talking about a digital divide. Low income consumers will now have even less incentive to get online since the more they go online-- the more it will cost them. Not a good move for those that have the least Internet access.
Cable telcos also dodged a bullet in terms of additional regulation of information services. There WAS considerable talk that cable / telcos provision of Internet access would be subject to the "intensive scrutiny" of Title II regulation but they dodged this as well.
So for all the talk about Google "owning" the Obama Administration-- they took quite a beating on NN. Given the public and media screaming that accompanies every story of Comcast or at&t trying to favor or hurt anyone on the Internet, it is doubtful the marketplace would have allowed ANY cable / telco to treat ANYONE unfairly even without rules on NN. So what did Google and low income consumers win here? Not much.
