That is, unfortunately, not the case, according to the Wall Street Journal article courtesy of Kotaku's sister site: Gizmodo
Initial reports about the FCC's hotly anticipated net neutrality rules are out, and they are foreboding. While they'll prevent broadband providers from blocking legal content on the internet, it does not explicitly ban companies from paying for better service. While that's bad for net neutrality, it's not entirely a surprise.
Net neutrality advocates have long hoped that the FCC would rise up to protect the free and open internet, after a U.S. Appeals Court came down on the side of big telecom
and threw out an earlier version of the FCC's rules. That version did
make it illegal for telecom companies to offer pay-to-play deals to
internet companies, but the FCC chose not to appeal. Not long after
that, FCC chairman Tom Wheeler said that the commission would write new
"Open internet" rules. On Wednesday, he said that he'd circulate a draft
of the new rules on Thursday and that the agency will meet on May 15 to
discuss everything.
Wheeler
has said in the past that the new net neutrality rules would not
address pay-to-play deals, also referred to as interconnection. And by
not addressing interconnection, the FCC is more or less opening the
floodgates for more backroom deals between service providers and
corporations that can afford to pay for preferential treatment. This,
many say, will create an uneven playing field for business on the
internet, since big companies can gain a competitive advantage over
start ups with the power of their checkbooks. It's already happening.
Basically, the internet is going to be tiered. The big companies will dominate the internet while start ups die out because of favored treatment. It is as bad as it sounds, maybe even worse.
But, there might be a bright light at the end of the tunnel.
There is hope. We don't know exactly what the FCC will propose, because they haven't proposed it. The Journal
could be wrong. Or the government could have something else up its
sleeve, some other way to protect net neutrality. After all, when the
last set of FCC rules were tossed out, the White House did say
that President Obama "remains committed to an open internet, where…
online innovators are allowed to compete on a level playing field based
on the quality of their products."
So dig in, folks. This is going to be a long fight. It already has been. [WSJ]
What we don't know is if these rules will be implemented. But one thing's for sure, the fight to restore Net Neutrality is going to be a hard one. If we lose, we can kiss the open internet good-bye
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