http://www.usatoday.com/story/money...rules/24053057/

I just saw this on my facebook feed, what does everyone think about this?

I'm not gonna lie, I've heard of net neutrality before this but never really paid much attention to it; after doing some research for the past 2 hours or so, it seems like something long overdue. Opinions?

Wait. Did they not ruin the Internet like that yellow sticky on Tumblr was saying will happen? If so then YES!

That's excellent news! And, as I am often clueless about the news, thanks for putting that up, TMBrandon!

Mozilla had a petition for people to sign for that. I added my siggy for sure & very glad it went through :-)

It's probably still rife with problems via the specific mechanism they chose to qualify their neutrality stance on, but I guess it's the only stance that makes sense given that Republicans were circling round with the notion of eventually spamming Murdoch and "suck it, poor people" legal positions in some of the states. I'd still rather everyone stfu and not legislate whatsoever, as I find the remaining dregs of my 20s libertarian notions still alive in the dream of a Wild West internet, but I can deal. I understand why it needs to be so, even if part of me is a little sad.

Yayyyy!!!! No slow internet!!!!!

So apparently Verizon and AT&T have responded and they really don't like it: http://www.rollingstone.com/culture...tement-20150227

breaking the monopoly, eh?

I'm not sure it is a good thing. I don't even know what they approved, 'cuz they won't let us read it. While we learn as children that the Christmas presents are hidden and a good thing, once you grow up, you realize that most of the time when someone is hiding something from you, it is because you're not going to like it.

But if net neutrality means that the ModTheSims.info website has to pay the internet carriers the same as NetFlicks on a per customer basis, I don't think that's good at all.

Net Neutrality is what we've had all along. Basically, it's the idea that a packet is a packet is a packet, whether it's from EA or MTS or an individual creator's free MediaFire account, and the carriers treat all packets alike.

Net neutrality is what we've had mostly, mostly because of a series of court rulings that kinda sorta maybe a little bit insinuated that things were that way. And, as luck has it, those rulings will be the basis of the carriers suing the government later on. As for complaining about "they're not letting us read it," that's a little disingenuous really. Regulatory agencies don't always say "here are all the rules," sometimes they tell the outline version of the rules they're going to perform and then they begin a laborious process of hammering out what those rules are exactly within their own committees and public hearings/debates. Regulatory bodies are weird, because in one sense they're places where everyone can get a say. Some guy off the street? If they recognize him during an open hearing and he says something relevant then he can sway the body politic in a way that's simply impossible with regular legislation. They're not based off of the rest of the federal government as I understand it, they're a lot more like a supercharged version of community authorities like non-legislative city councils and school boards. Yes, those are all places where things can get pretty damned tyrant-y, but they're also places where we sometimes sidestep the congestion of partisan politics and just do practical stuff. Since chairs of the FCC are only five years and chosen by the President they're unlikely to congeal into the sort of places that a nasty school board sometimes pops up as.

On the other hand, if they explicitly and directly reference Title II instead of using Title II as their framework updated to the explicitly different ways the internet is not a phone service, and allow the regulatory structures that come with Title II to stand for the internet, then what they've done is opened the door to a lot of potential new taxes via the states (and compelled some weird regulatory oversight that I just don't understand how is relevant.) Like I said, I think something had to be done because otherwise the big companies were going to cut up net neutrality in practical effect by bullying small regional governments like they've already shown themselves fully capable of doing, but in the end I think that if what they say they're going to do is what they do it's going to have problems - unless they do something "like" what they said they were going to do, but better. I always hope for better... it makes the pangs of disappointment ring clearer later on.