Senior House Democrats told the Federal Communications Commission Thursday it should do more to stop Internet providers from playing favorites among content providers, brushing aside opposition from Republicans and some large telecom firms.
If politicians want to effect economic recovery, national competitiveness, good public health and high civic engagement, they have a duty to keep the internet free and open.
AOL was the top Internet service provider when it came to customer service in 2008, according to a Forrester Research report. The rub: AOL’s top rating based on Forrester’s “customer experience index” translates into a “just OK” mark.
As a group, ISPs grade out with a “poor” rating of 59 percent based on Forrester’s customer experience index.
At a digital music panel in Nashville this week, executives from AT&T and Comcast created a furor by saying they were passing along warnings to customers that the RIAA says are illegally uploading music files onto the Internet.
Later, the companies tried to calm the outrage erupting in the blogosphere by harrumphing they weren’t cutting off Internet access to those people–or in the case of Cox, hardly ever cutting it off.
It’s sometimes quite amusing to watch how various economic ecosystems grow, where multiple companies have symbiotic relationships, and then start to freak out when they think that other companies in the ecosystem are somehow earning “too much.” That, of course, is at the heart of many recent battles we’ve seen.
When the Communications Decency Act was enshrined into law with the passage of the historic Telecommunications Act of 1996, it contained a number of controversial provisions that covered “obscene or indecent” online content. But at the behest of ISPs and others concerned about the potentially stifling effects of possible obscenity suits on the still-young network, the CDA also included 47 U.S.C. Sec. 230, commonly known as Section 230, which shielded “interactive computer service providers” from liability for information posted or published by users of their systems.
The success of “graduated response” programs in the U.S., U.K., France, New Zealand and elsewhere around the world may depend, in large part, on just how quickly file sharers will buckle. If most will quit after a simple warning, the campaign to enlist ISPs (and back down on the mass legal threats) may be a huge success.
If there’s a candidate for the worst future violator of your privacy, look no further than the company you pay for broadband.
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