Net Neutrality Keeps Carriers in their Place

December 22, 2015

2015 YEAR IN REVIEW —

By Ernest Worthman —

Perhaps the most memorable is the net neutrality debacle. I recall week after week, the TIA, and the Republican camp, in general, kept coming out with anti-act comments, most of them redundant and without any real substantiation. As an editor, it was my obligation to be the voice of the reason, with no allegiance to anything except the presentation of a fair and balanced positon, to call the TIA on the carpet.

That being said, the net neutrality act will have far reaching implications. Like other utilities, yes, I said utilities, the net is much too important to be a political or economic football. The act will help to keep the playing field level by not allowing the carriers to bully the smaller ISP and other service providers. It will ensure everybody has the same access to resources and keep competition open.

The big carriers don’t like it, especially the four, 900 pound gorillas (AT&T, Verizon, Sprint and T-Mobile), who will resort to just about anything to corner the marker; from unadmitted data throttling to out and out spectrum manipulation.

But the act stood. And that is a good thing. We’ll see how it progresses throughout 2016.

And that isn’t all. The big four just continue to prove to be out and out crooks. It happens over and over again. Just this month they have been accused of overcharging governmental customers in California. It has now become a lawsuit with more th 40 California government organizations joining, alleging these four major U.S. carriers overcharged governmental customers by more than $100 million.