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bucc5062 writes:
"In a surprising twist, the EU is struggling with issues surrounding Net Neutrality. An ARS technica article reports on how the EU and its citizens seems to be walking down the same path US ISP customers have these days; ISPs and major carriers throttling content as well as attempting to extort more money from content providers. The Dutch seemed to understand the importance of having a level playing field. Sad that what was viewed as the example of how ISPs should compete and do business, now the EU body politic has caught the US version of the golden rule, he who has the gold, makes the rules."
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EU Grapples with Net Neutrality Issues
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(Score: 4, Insightful) by Common Joe on Wednesday March 19 2014, @01:28AM
And this is why I know all governments around the world are not interested in doing anything to fix real problems; they merely focus on their own greed. The problem is obvious, it's easy to talk about, and solutions can be implemented rather quickly. This affects not only ISPs but also car manufacturing, computer makers (hard drives, CPUs, motherboards, sellers, etc), retailers, food growth and production, school book producers, electricity providers, and nearly anything you can think of. Anything that stifles new companies are "vertically integrated" in some way. Monopolies should be actively destroyed except when it comes to basic infrastructure. (Good comment by AnythingGoes [dev.soylentnews.org].) The general problem is very hard to quantify and understand, but it is possible to fix some of these specific situations without too much effort.
Examples: Tesla's problems in New Jersey [dev.soylentnews.org], Monsanto's patents and crops that prevent farmers from growing food, having only 5 major hard driver manufacturers (or are we down to 4 yet?), Amazon, WalMart. I could go on and on.
Some will argue that I'm not talking about vertical integration, but I disagree. Let's take Walmart. Sure, it's basically only in the business of selling, but any company that can control prices what it buys before it even puts it out on the floor is vertically integrated. Amazon is another example. It is not good that competitors to Amazon must advertise on Amazon and compete with the very same place they go to to sell stuff. (That doesn't get into the near monopoly status that Amazon enjoys.) This is not rocket science and it is plain as day. As I said, writing a general law to fix all of this is difficult, but we could certainly start with the obvious stuff, define the problems (in a general way), and target what we can.
But the powers that be don't want that.