"Given that the Commission has chosen to classify broadband providers in a manner that exempts them from treatment as common carriers, the Communications Act expressly prohibits the Commission from nonetheless regulating them as such. Because the Commission has failed to establish that the anti-discrimination and anti-blocking rules do not impose per se common carrier obligations, we vacate those portions of the Open Internet Order."
"In other words, the FCC didn't have the authority to impose its rules because it defined broadband internet as an information service rather than a common carrier service, like telephones."
"This is bad news. The ruling basically opens the door for companies like Verizon and Time Warner to cut special deals with websites to serve up their content faster. It also opens up the possibility of paid access to specific sites. Imagine the worst case scenario, where you literally have to pay an extra fee to get access to the websites you like. It's possible! At least the latest federal court ruling on Verizon's appeal to the FCC states that telecom companies have to tell subscribers which sites they're favoring."
I saw this was posted in the comments at giz as well, but it is a good illustration for what we are headed towards so I'll be completely unoriginal and post it here as well lol.
Ladies and gentlemen, this will only fly if you let it fly. Blacklist verizon's IP ranges from your web services and sites, start local ISPs if there's no 'good' alternatives available and spread the word about just how shady verizon is. It's all in your hands.
It's happened, the US is now just like China. In China, most people use commercial proxies to use the Internet. Soon, in the US, the same will happen, people will need an ISP for connectivity to the Internet, and a European Proxy for access to content on the Internet.
Great news for us EU server operators... thanks USFC!!!
Organize people in your area and have them all contact your representative and/or senator. Whether or not it will help, I can't tell you. But it couldn't hurt. After all:
Power does what power wants nothing we can do to stop it. Don't blame the telecoms its the govt that doesn't want net neutrality so they can force the telecoms to leave a back door open for the NSA or whomever access to our data. It sucks and only way to truly achieve net neutrality is for people to disconnect from the internet entirely then when the whole system crashes build it back from scratch, but that will never happen cause 99% of the population doesn't even know what net neutrality is.
