The Economist's recent article on net neutrality and common carriage is fascinating and related: <a href="http://www.economist.com/news/leaders/21641201-why-network-neutrality-such-intractable-problemand-how-solve-it-gordian-net" rel="nofollow">http://www.economist.com/news/leaders/21641201-why-network-n...</a><p>Part of the interesting piece is the history of "common carriage": "The idea that certain businesses are so essential that they must not discriminate between customers is as old as ferries. With only one vessel in town, a boatman was generally not allowed to charge a butcher more than a carpenter to move goods. This concept, called 'common carriage', has served the world well, most recently on the internet."<p>I've never doubted my support for net neutrality, and the legal history of "common carriage" makes this even more obvious.
Is AT&T trying to muddle the concept of an ISP as something that delivers content and an ISP as something that hosts content? That's all I can figure, here.<p>Especially when writing about the ability to decline service to customers. I'm not sure how net neutrality relates to AT&T having freedom to pick and choose its customers. (Surely the folks that just want their content delivered -- Hacker News, for example -- don't consider themselves AT&T customers.)
Instead of wasting money on courts AT&T should upgrade all their DSL lines to fiber optics, lower prices on their plans and increase bandwidth. But of course they'd rather just whine about how their monopoly is threatened by Title II. I hope they'll lose big deal.<p>Though it wouldn't help anything of the above anyway, since even with Title II AT&T won't be facing much competition. They'd be just more limited in ways they can abuse their monopoly.
AT&T's argument appears to be that since they are already shaping traffic and abusing their customer's trust, they aren't actually an Internet service provider anyway, so they can't be regulated as one.
I stopped having any sympathy for AT&T after the Auernheimer case. If they wanted to garner public support for any reason, a move like this is likely to kill it for a lot of people. Myself included.<p>(I know Auernheimer's not well-liked, and I don't agree with his politics, but he deserved to win that case on appeal.)
<i>"I have no illusions that any of this will change what happens on February 26," when the FCC is expected to vote, AT&T Federal Regulatory VP Hank Hultquist wrote in a blog post yesterday. "But when the FCC has to defend reclassification before an appellate court, it will have to grapple with these and other arguments. "</i><p>I might be misreading something, but is he not saying "We know this is useless but we want to waste the FCC's time and resources anyways" ?<p>I'm not familiar with how lawsuits for these kinds of cases work, but wouldn't this be enough for a judge to throw away any lawsuit they file? If they clearly state t hey have no intention other than to get in the way, it doesn't seem like a valid lawsuit to me.
While I don't like Internet providers creating different classes of traffic, the idea of the government getting involved should terrify anyone who values innovation and freedom.<p>Soon, we'll end up with a monopoly guided by regulations from lobbyists and using laws as a weapon against competition. That's hardly better than the problem we seek to resolve.