Net Neutrality under Attack
The corporate forces opposing and supporting net neutrality have decided to fight it out in Europe, according to the New York Times. Read the article here.
The says that those ISPs who want to charge for bandwidth and to charge websites for higher priorities have concluded that, if they can establish those practices in Europe, they can more easily establish them in the United States.
The new buzzword for this assault on net neutrality is “traffic management.”
An excerpt:
“Net neutrality, which La Quadrature (an Internet advocacy group based in Paris) supports, is a proposal backed by some free-speech advocates and Internet businesses that would bar network operators from filtering Internet traffic. Internet service providers, however, say that basic traffic management is necessary to balance the soaring demand for bandwidth from video and popular sites.
“For consumers in Europe and the United States, the outcome of the debate could influence whether they will continue to be able to download unlimited data using their flat-rate broadband plans or be forced to pay higher rates related to the amount of data they download.
“The outcome could also legally empower operators to focus on users of file-sharing software that can be used for illegal downloading.”