Net Neutrality: At least the Government "pretends" to care about my rights.

More happenings in this cold cyberpunk future that we live in. Apparently Net Neutrality is still alive, despite opposition from a few republicans (but no one really cares about them).

The Federal Communications Commission voted unanimously Thursday to get the ball rolling on creating regulation that will keep the Internet open.

All five commissioners voted in favor of advancing the rule-making process for a proposal that was put forth by FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski during the agency's open meeting Thursday...

...Despite their vote in favor of opening the rule-making process, the two Republican commissioners, Meredith Attwell Baker and Robert McDowell, also said they dissented on "facts" of the proposal. The commissioners said their votes are for the beginning of a data-gathering process, but they didn't say whether they would vote in favor of regulation that will ultimately be proposed.

In her comments, Baker said she didn't think there was a need for specific rules because she doesn't see a threat to Internet openness. McDowell said he doesn't think the FCC has the legal authority from Congress to impose such regulation.

Source: CNET News

When it's something like making Tony Soprano say "Go FLIP yourself" on A&E or making sure Janet Jackson's nipple doesn't excite teenagers everywhere, the FCC has the authority. Yet when they actually try to put a motion in place that intends to protect the freedom of information, suddenly they don't have the authority.

All semantics aside, I do like that the government is at least operating under the pretense that they care about our rights for a change. Even so, I do have some concerns. For one, are we just trading one Big Brother for another? True, a corporation has the power to throttle our bandwidth and potentially censor any material that is not in-line with their profit outlooks, but what guarantee do we have that our government will not do the same thing?

For example, Joe Biden, everyone's favorite socialist Vice President (not that I have anything against socialists) once urged for more policing of P2P networks. Under the old way, Biden would not have the legal authority to monitor a private network. However, if the internet becomes the government's jurisdiction then who is to say how much authority private government institutions have on the flow of information.

Simply put, all you folks downloading the movie "G-Force" will be out of luck.

This seems like an issue that will be fueling government debate for months, if not years. Either way, one sad truth remains: it is very unlikely we will be able to go back to a pre-web 2.0 model: back when the web was a wild-west shooting gallery for hackers, flame-wars and low quality ten second clips of porn.