I seem to watch a lot of movies that Mark Cuban’s Magnolia Films
and Magnet distribute. His company is a venue for movies that
would be playing art houses if they hadn’t disappeared from the
landscape. However I feel his is a little off in his concern about
the proposed FCC rules regardling Net Neutrality.
Wealth apparently has it’s priviledges as he apparently has been able
to review the 332 pages of rules the FCC wants to pass. Yeah, the ones
we the public aren’t allowed to see. Go to http://www.fcc.gov
and see if you can find those rules.
And I suspect Comcast pays Mark well to show his movies there. Cuban
says, “Net neutrality is just a demonization of big companies”. Not that big companies haven’t worked hard to earn being demonized.
I think most of us wanted the Internet to pretty much be kept the
way it is now which is “open”. We don’t want our telecoms to
throttle our streaming services or pick who is elite enough to be
displayed to us.
I would think the latter should wrankle many small businesses across
the US because if you had to pay extra so customers could view the
menu at your restaurant or what services your remodeling service
offers. And that would not be good.
We also don’t like to be nickel and dimed for every little service
offered. It’s like the wrong people run the telecoms and like they
are great grandsons of snake oil salesmen that hawked their wares
across the western frontier. So I can see regulating them like a
public utility. They’ve already displayed excessive arrogance. And
they will definitely spare no expense at trying to convince
the public that regulation will not be good. They’ll make PT Barnum very proud.
Maintaining a free and open Internet is going to be a tough
challenge, especially since many politicians and big business folks
don’t like our ability to criticize them via the venue.