Net Neutrality

Network neutrality sounds pretty straight forward, right? You want the Internet to be neutral, as it has been. The opposition is mostly the phone/cable companies (and the politicians they support financially), who are pretty upset that we get all this information and generate all this business over their phone and cable lines. We pay them to access these lines as our service providers, but apparently that's not enough. They want to tier it so that if you want to go to SRP, it will only cost you a little bit -- but if you want to go to YouTube, it'll cost you much more.

Senator McCain, who has referred to himself in the past as "computer illiterate", introduced the Internet Freedom Act. Hey, the Internet should be free -- I'm down with that! Except this act would allow your provider to selectively block and/or slow down Internet content and applications.

Glenn Beck pretty much said that supporters of net neutrality were Marxist and Maoist. The opposition makes it sound like the big bad government is controlling your Internet and that it would be much better in the hands of the free market. Funny thing is that if the service providers also controlled the content, viewing Beck online would probably be much more expensive than viewing the Daily Show.

Anybody opposed to net neutrality here, and if so, why?

Information/sources:
Network neutrality - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Computerworld.com
DailyTech.com
DailyFinance.com
Media Matters

Its just a matter of time before we say good bye to the freedom we have on the net, between the money to be made and the power to be had. McCain also wrote the McCain -Fiengold Act / Campaign Finance Reform which existed solely to shut the NRA up, so John who had taken their money and reneged on them could have a clearer shot at the WH his next/last go round. John McCain has more than one face as do most politicians. Caveat Emptor.

This is a topical issue to say the least. The current issue of Foreign Affairs magazine, the magazine of the Council on Foreign Relations, has for its first article on page 2 "Securing the Information Highway". It's an eight page article that should be an easy read. I've only read the first page so far but will read the article.

Commiecat, I'm not insinuating anything about your views in this post personally; my feeling on this subject is however, that should anyone assume the control, filtering, blocking of internet information it will be at the hands of private commerce for private commerce, such an assumption would be IMO naive and misguided.

Make as many face to face contacts and friendships with your fellow local SRP members, at worst, free expression and exchange may not be possible via the net. I don't consider myself an alarmist or paranoiac. I do consider myself a realist that tries to envision the worst possible scenario on things and work backward from there.

Chris L

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Originally Posted by ChrisL

This is a topical issue to say the least. The current issue of Foreign Affairs magazine, the magazine of the Council on Foreign Relations, has for its first article on page 2 "Securing the Information Highway". It's an eight page article that should be an easy read. I've only read the first page so far but will read the article.

Commiecat, I'm not insinuating anything about your views in this post personally; my feeling on this subject is however, that should anyone assume the control, filtering, blocking of internet information it will be at the hands of private commerce for private commerce, such an assumption would be IMO naive and misguided.

Make as many face to face contacts and friendships with your fellow local SRP members, at worst, free expression and exchange may not be possible via the net. I don't consider myself an alarmist or paranoiac. I do consider myself a realist that tries to envision the worst possible scenario on things and work backward from there.

Chris L

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Well I rarely take the "ONOES THE SKY IS FALLING!" position on anything, and I certainly don't feel that way yet on this issue. There is so much documentation, debate and litigation that it would take years to implement if it came down to it.

I do have some fears that the companies pushing to abolish net neutrality have very deep pockets and are quite influential. When you pair that with the fact that the many politicians, like McCain cited in my initial post, are ignorant about the Internet, it makes this seem much more feasible.

It's troubling that McCain would (or rather, could) choose the name "Internet Freedom Act" when it's quite the opposite, IMHO. Although it would be interesting to witness, and partake in, the 'net backlash if such corporate tiering were to be implemented. :)

Whether or not "net neutrality" will be given up is, in my view, an academic discussion. It will be given up, and the "big evil companies" will get their way. I think the beautiful market concept will solve this too. The providers will push other content providers out of their network by making the data service just a bit less, in favour of their own services or close partners. Movie streaming, internet TV, you name it. And things like Skype will likely suffer, to push the own long distance and international phone services. At a not-free rate of course.

A new demand will rise. The market will respond.

So we'll see ISPs and backbone providers that give neutrality, at a cost of course. And under this pressure, the heavily shaping providers will loosen up a bit. A low cost provider that will let you speak with your aunt 10 states away at $.25 a minute will exist next to a more premium provider that doesn't hinder skype-traffic. Or something along these lines. ;)

Of course I cut a bunch of corners, but I expect the situation to solve itself. On the other hand, I nevertheless would like to express my support for net neutrality.

As we all know the internet is tubes not trucks.
So now whoever owns the tubes wants to be free and charge based on what the tubes carry.
I remember when i got charged depending on how many bits i sucked from the tubes and i quite liked when i got charged flat rate. Thus if the owners of the tubes didn't have a monopoly i would imagine that the market will decide in favor of the flat rate.
Now they want to charge me based on how the bits are arranged? I see no reason whatsoever for that. 100111010 costs exactly as much as 010110111 to transport to me.

Obama actually is a proponent of network neutrality. I have to admit, hes done some pretty damn cool things, like this and reversing the stem cell ban.

It was my understanding that the tiered structures would also try to get money from the sites themselves, like youtube and ebay would have to pay the ISPs for the amount of traffic they received from the customers. So, there's actually some money out there to fight anti neutrality regualtions, so I think its got a chance of staying around a while.

I'm not surprised the Beck and company propaganda machine is trying to get rid of net neutrality. Unfettered access of information is something his owners don't like people to have.

http://ipower.ning.com/extensions/gfx/netneutrality.jpg