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Advocates of a free and open Internet could see this coming, but today's ruling from a Washington appeals court striking down the FCC's rules protecting the open net was worse than the most dire forecasts. It was "even more emphatic and disastrous than anyone expected," in the words of one veteran advocate for network neutrality.
The Court of Appeals for the D.C. circuit thoroughly eviscerated the Federal Communications Commission's latest lame attempt to prevent Internet service providers from playing favorites among websites--awarding faster speeds to sites that pay a special fee, for example, or slowing or blocking sites and services that compete with favored affiliates.
Big cable operators like Comcast and telecommunications firms like Verizon, which brought the lawsuit on which the court ruled, will be free to pick winners and losers among websites and services. Their judgment will most likely be based on cold hard cash--Netflix wants to keep your Internet provider from slowing its data so its films look like hash? It will have to pay your provider the big bucks. But the governing factor need not be money. (Comcast remains committed to adhere to the net neutrality rules overturned today until January 2018, a condition placed on its 2011 merger with NBC Universal; after that, all bets are off.)
"AT&T, Verizon, and Comcast will be able to deliver some sites and services more quickly and reliably than others for any reason," telecommunications lawyer Marvin Ammori (he's the man quoted above) observed even before the ruling came down. "Whim. Envy. Ignorance. Competition. Vengeance. Whatever. Or, no reason at all."
I went to the download page, using FireFox 32 on a Win 7 64 bit system, and the file didn't download. I tried it in an IE tab and nothing at all happened.
Is the download broken?-HankFriedman (January 14, 2014, 11:53 AM)
Sorry but I am new to this and thought that active just meant registering. Thanks for the reply and I understand. At least it's help me find this site.-p_culhane (January 13, 2014, 06:41 PM)
I considered asking about this myself but not actively writing and dont see it happening in the near future...-tomos (January 14, 2014, 04:44 AM)
If you feel like you'll have need, at this point, I'd say quit being shy Having the tool might inspire the next great novel!
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I'm just shocked at the idea that so many of the visitors to any site are using adblockers.-mouser (January 12, 2014, 04:31 PM)
Seriously?
Whenever I install Firefox on a client machine, AdBlock Plus and NoScript are the only extensions I include by default. And my clients are glad to have them.-40hz (January 12, 2014, 08:03 PM)
For this purpose, I'd discount Windows unless you specifically require access to Windows programs. Too expensive, too heavy, unnecessary.-Dormouse (January 12, 2014, 07:07 PM)
