Oh hooray for having a Democratic majority at the FCC. Is it really always necessary to fold to corporate interests instead of providing the regulation that consumers need? Let's just call them Republican-Lite Another name might be "hardly a chance they're getting my vote in 2012."
This is a dramatic turnaround from the first round of Internet regulations proposed. The mere idea of regulating how Internet Providers transmit data was considered a negative for those carriers—regulation's a bad thing, right? And so-called "net neutrality" regulation was expected to be great for the likes of Netflix, Google's YouTube and Amazon, who stream content. The Open Internet Coalition, of which they're all members, praised efforts to ensure that their content wasn't discriminated against.
Yes, sure, they get reassurance that they won't face unfair discrimination, but they also could face new costs when Internet providers decide to charge more for certain, data-heavy content on the grounds that handling that traffic slows the network overall.
The group that gets off the easiest are wireless carriers like AT&T, Verizon Wireless and Sprint—the FCC regulates them far more loosely than hard line Internet providers. They are given permission to discriminate against particularly bandwidth heavy content because of their capacity constraints. This is good for the wireless carriers but not so good for streaming companies like Netflix and Google.
