Cable Company CEOs Now Say Net Neutrality Is Not A Threat To Their Businessbo

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  (djgrafite)

  In the months leading up to the FCC’s vote on new net neutrality rules, the cable industry claimed that reclassifying broadband service to treat it more like a utility would harm investment and innovation (not to mention the outright lie that it would give control of the Internet to the government). Now that Neutrality is on the books (but still a few weeks away from being implemented), some of the biggest names in the cable industry are now shrugging their shoulders and saying it’s really not a big deal.

  DSLreports.com does a great job today of rounding up recent comments from some of these CEOs who are now trying to quell the very concerns that their companies and industry trade groups helped to raise in the first place.

  Like Comcast Cable CEO Neil Smit, who told a group of analysts that Title II reclassification “hasn’t affected the way we have been doing our business or will do our business.”

  That’s a very different take on the matter than the statement made by Comcast immediately after the neutrality rules were approved by the FCC, when the company said that “we remain deeply concerned that implementing [neutrality] principles through Title II will do more harm to the vibrant Internet ecosystem than good.”

  So Title II is harmful, but not to the largest Internet service provider in the country?

  Time Warner Cable CEO Rob Marcus — who now has to actually run the company and won’t receive $80 million for just standing around while Comcast acquires it — also said that as long as the FCC uses Title II reclassification just to guarantee the core tenets of neutrality (no blocking, throttling, or expediting of content), “I think you won’t see a change in the way we do business.”

  Thing is, that’s all the original 2010 neutrality rules tried to do. If Verizon hadn’t sued to gut them, the FCC wouldn’t have had to reclassify broadband.

  Of course, while these companies are trying to calm investors who might actually be worried that there will be less innovation and investment because neutrality, they are leaving it up to industry trade groups to file lawsuits seeking to block reclassification.

  
  
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by Chris Morran

via Consumerist