This article/ opinion piece from the NYT purports to offer a super-simple way to understand the internet regulatory policy being developed for US. His explanation is a nice try, but in reality, there isn’t a real precedent to point to for developing current policy towards the new communication tools.
The courts have a great deal of difficulty without precedent to work from. Saying “Electrical Utility” is a guide to what net policy should be… falls short imo of what a convincing precedent “should offer”, even if it’s the best one out there, which it may in fact be…so there will an ongoing court battle for years on this.
There’s the fight between the big content streamers like Netflix and Amazon and Google and maybe Apple on one side, and the big gatekeeping Telecoms like Comcast, ATT, and Verizon on the other. Which is one sort of regulatory fight.
But there’s an equally if not more important regulatory fight where smaller content and service providers, the local regional muni open access networks, and a lot of the new services such as Uber…. are struggling to “win the opportunity to compete” with forces arrayed against them.
The gatekeeping telecoms are busy creating their tollbooths, but there are plenty of other industries that want to push back against cloud enabled change. Will the AMA try to block health insurance support for DIY treatment using mobile healthcare devices which promise to diagnose, and test at home, and even perhaps indicate appropriate medication?
To say nothing of course about regulatory environment for online learning, and all the issues that brings up which we discuss here frequently. Can PSA offer courses online if the access is throttled, unavailable, or restricted to high paying customers, or in some other way made impractical by local regulations with demands that make business models implausible?
What if established educational institutions push back by creating “qualifiers and regulation” that form barriers to competition from “third party” educational endeavors as they are in working on in some parts of the country?
So, we at PSA have needs of “protection by” regulation, and “protection from” regulation. And this is true for the whole Internet too. Which is why it’s not going to be resolved anytime soon, though it’s obviously also essential to our economy going forward.
It’s all connected. =^)