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Net Neutrality Bill in Congress
hip2b2 writes "The US Congress is finally doing something to prevent large bandwidth providers and network operators from charging (or putting restrictions on) competing web and other Internet media content providers. According to this NetworkWorld article, the new bill sponsored by Democratic Representatives Ed Markey of Massachusetts, Jay Inslee of Washington state, Anna Eshoo of California and Rick Boucher of Virginia in the House and Senator Ron Wyden of Oregon in the Senate. I am not a big fan of legislation, but, I hope this bill keeps the Internet a freer place." Here is our coverage of the first round.
My prediction is that this bill will never even make it out of committee. Far too many telco lobbyists on K Street to let that happen.
Thalasar
I think the real problem is that some ISPs want to sell "Internet connections" while giving their customers old-style AOL gated network services. There's a word for taking someone's money for a service, and giving them something different in return: fraud.
When someone advertises Internet access, people expect just that. "Net neutrality" is just a fancy term for the way the Internet is supposed to work. Fraudulent "internet service providers" should be sued, civilly and/or criminally, and shut down.
at the end - the Senate bill would only require that net neutrality be "studied", not enforced. This is a tactic employed by both parties - introduce a bill for publicity in one branch of the legislature, introduce a version which is watered down into oblivion in the other, and kill it in committee during the process of "reconciling" the House and Senate versions.
This is particularly often seen with the House bill being the publicity seeker - Reps need to run for office every 2 years...
Using plain ol' text since 1968
I would like to point out that every sentence should have a verb. Except maybe this one.
Karma: Bad (mostly due to all those "In Soviet Russia" jokes)
Your statement is absolutely absurd, and it is an insult to centuries of struggle for democratic government.
In fact, it is the primary purpose of our government to keep us free, and the primary instrument our government has for that is legislation: legislation that keeps people from harming each other, legislation that keeps companies from distorting a free market, and legislation that establishes institutions that protect us from external threats.
Government legislated control of Internet traffic management is exactly what it means for our government to keep us free.
Now, I'll give you this much: our government sometimes does the wrong thing, either because of misguided people (like you!) or because of outright corruption. But the solution is not to get rid of democratic government and legislation (we had that for a few millennia and it wasn't pretty and certainly not free), the solution is to fix government and make sure the legislation is good legislation.
While I'd like to agree with you, that statement is essentially bullshit. There are a few Democrats who have signed on as sponsors, but I'm reasonably sure that less than half of congressional Democrats would vote for the bill. Telcos, like Hollywood, give generously to both sides of the aisle.
Evcer think about the possibility that not just content providers would have an advantage/disadvantage, but also the consumer's general access? Would it not be possible for Internet providers to give machines running a particular operating system (cough Windows), have a particular processor(ahem Intel), or come from a particular vendor (acch Dell) because these systems are "More capable of network operation" or some other lie like that. Something similar to the Skype/Intel thing a few weeks back (Slashdot) http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/03/04/143024 3