More Free market fundy BS
"It got us into this funny never-never land of ‘Oh, don’t worry, the market’s going to get all this done; we don’t need any public policy to get this infrastructure built,’ " Copps says.
People are tweeting about how Olbermann was trying to quit for a long time, as if that exonerates Comcast somehow. It doesn’t have to be an immediate effect. If anything, it throws up an even bigger red flag, because it is just this kind of meddling, justified by an appeal to the dogma of “Free Market†that FCC Commissioner Michael J. Copps mentions in the above quote , that endangers neutrality. We all know that sponsors have long exerted pressure on content providers. But now we have Service Providers who have the power and literally the means to privilege certain types of content over others. Comcast has already been at this, as mentioned in this article, in Philadelphia. They’ve also interfered with Netflix’s streaming provider.
Read more: http://www.philly.com/inquirer/business/20110123_Consumer_10_0__Media-merger_fallout.html#ixzz1BsBes9xp
YourVersion – Consumer 10.0: Media-merger fallout via @larryhol
Another important issue:
Instead, he sees the nation postponing crucial investment in infrastructure – old and new
Read more: http://www.philly.com/inquirer/business/20110123_Consumer_10_0__Media-merger_fallout.html#ixzz1BsET40Ts
Yeah, AT&T. They continually fail us at big events. Seems that just a few instances of massive audience complaints during big events would spur some exploration and implementation of solutions to handle spikes in usage in a concentrated area. CES has now been unable, for the second straight year, to support show participants, turning iPhones into bricks. At last year’s SEC Men’s Basketball Tournament, AT&T was the official sponsor, and yet calls were dropped regularly or not available at all, and data was non-existent. Same deal at the National Mall when I went to “The Rally to Restore Sanity on Oct 30. (We’ll see how Verizon does in supporting their new customer base of iPhone users, if there is a significant exodus from AT&T to Verizon).
With Verizon, and the Google talks, the worry there is the privileging of certain kinds of traffic; with Comcast, it’s apparently that AND now also, certain kinds of content. This should worry us.
