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Eric Schmidt on Net Neutrality
GillBates0 writes "Google's CEO Eric Schmidt has written an open letter to the Google user community asking them to speak out on the issue of net neutrality. The official Google Blog has a blurb on this as well. From the letter: 'In the next few days, the House of Representatives is going to vote on a bill that would fundamentally alter the Internet. That bill, and one that may come up for a key vote in the Senate in the next few weeks, would give the big phone and cable companies the power to pick and choose what you will be able to see and do on the Internet ... Creativity, innovation and a free and open marketplace are all at stake in this fight.'"
They lay their cables on public property, with the consent of the government, on the condition that they provide a public service to all people equally... and now they're being ALLOWED to violate that? How can Congress justify that? Obviously they're is getting some cheddar for it, but don't they usually PRETEND they aren't?
Either way, it's still a crap piece of legislation.
Creativity, innovation, a couple billion dollars in Google stock and a free and open marketplace are all at stake in this fight.
Now if only they linked this to the front page. Google should leverage its net presence to spread the word to the ignorant masses.
If this signature is witty enough, maybe somebody will like me.
Clearly only China/Google should have the power to dictate what people can and can't see on the internet.
It's short and contains links and phone numbers which can be used to speak out to congress which is going to be way more effective than bitching on Slashdot.
Behold the Power of Cheese!
... In Washingtonpost. To quote the first few lines Congress is about to cast a historic vote on the future of the Internet. It will decide whether the Internet remains a free and open technology fostering innovation, economic growth and democratic communication, or instead becomes the property of cable and phone companies that can put toll booths at every on-ramp and exit on the information superhighway.
At the center of the debate is the most important public policy you've probably never heard of: "network neutrality."
Speak out, they'll probably start tracking all my phone calls...
-- www.globaltics.net
Political discussion for a new world
I am not for breaking up net neutrality, but his statement "Creativity, innovation and a free and open marketplace are all at stake in this fight." is sort of hypocritical to what he is fighting for. If he were truely for a free market, then the cable companies could do whatever they wanted with their product. (But then again, local gov'ts have created monopolies for cable/internet providers by only leasing the public right away to certain groups, limiting competition).
"Net Neutrality" is used to describe the notion that the network should be neutral and unbiased to all all traffic. That is, an ISP should not be partial towards or throttle traffic just because it may not be in their best interests to forward it.
As usual, the Wikipedia entry on Net Neutrality is pretty informative. The opening line reads: "Network neutrality is the ideal that network designs and operators should not discriminate between network applications." which sums up the issue pretty neatly.
Hence "Net Neutrality" is a _good_ thing, but it is confusing when people refer to the "Net Neutrality Bill" because what the bill actually proposes is the opposite, which often seems to be the case nowadays...kinda like Doublespeak.
An Indian-American Hindu committed to non-violent thought/speech/action alarmed by the global explosion of radical Islam
I live in a 3rd world African country where 60% of the population has never owned a Telephone and never even heard of the Internet (our Minister of Communications being one of them). Laws are written at the whim of our monopoly telecoms provider and anything and everything that can be done to increase profit and decrease expense IS done. A law like this being passed in the US would almost certainly be copied here, which would be a bad thing for me. So I ask this of all Americans, with tears in my baby blue eyes, please dont let your government screw you over again. Stop them, before they stop me!
Slashdot is a friendly crowd in terms of google's view that NetNeutrality is important.
So lets say your the one of those friendlies reading this posting. You're sitting there thinking to yourself yeah I like this idea of Net Neutrality, and I think congress should support Net Neutrality. Now ask yourself this, did your write your congressman? .
If your answer is yes stop reading this post now.
So why haven't you? Sure it'd be best to write a real letter, and bravo if you decide to do that. But if, like me, you're just too damned lazy, submit and electronic carbon copy one that's linked from the article. It's really not that hard, and these things really do work if enough people submit them. Just ask the Parents Television Council, the nice people who convinced the FCC to fine any broadcaster who doesn't conform to their censorship standards. They did that by setting up a nice simple website to send electronic complaints to the FCC with a few clicks.
Write your damned congressman!
-Mark
HR 5273
Through intention or error technology companies, media pundits, and scholars have overly narrowed the recent public debate by misidentifying the potential points of origin of Internet bias. Rather than expressing opinions of public interest regarding the future of the Internet as a global network, the discussion battles back and forth between two markedly corporate perspectives on physical network infrastructure and ignores issues concerning the utilization and neutrality of the Internet as an emergent system and larger whole.
Incumbent upon any desire to protect the ideal of net neutrality is the assumption that we currently possess a neutral system we might care to protect. This is not a valid supposition. As a first measure, I suggest that the debate on net neutrality be widened to include not only the physical network questions as it has in the past, but also the related concerns of unfair influence over the Internet including the meta and virtual entities that are Cyberspace and the World Wide Web. The only way to responsibly execute reform or regulation in this arena must be preceded by a comprehensive understanding of the interconnectedness of the competing issues. Targeting the physical elements for legislation without examining the virtual or the broader context and consequences, could be far more disastrous than even a hands-off approach.
But how exactly is the Internet no longer neutral? Why is this expansion or redefinition of terms necessary? From the standpoint of Economic Theory, Metcalfe's Law tells us the value of a network is roughly equal to the square of the number of members of the system and Reed's Law parallels this statement for utility. When linked with network externalities (i.e. when you buy a fax machine, other fax owners benefit because they can now fax you) sites or services with many members can be transformed into powerful competitive (or anti-competitive) weapons. The vast networks of information, users, and sites, created by several web services providers are thus an in-ignorable source of inefficiencies of scale and conflicts of interest.
A capitalist, corporate driven Internet (such as we have now) cannot be as unbiased and democratic as trends such as the "blogosphere" and media representation would have it appear. Cyberspace, the meta-realm emergent from the physical "network," is highly polarized, highly prejudicial, and highly subject to the influence of powerful, unchecked, unregulated, and at times even legally protected corporations. These corporations are the very members of the "High Tech Broadband Coalition" that first advocated neutrality legislation in its current form: Amazon, Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, and other major application, content, platform, and services providers. Of course they favor these laws! However, the virtual realm of cyberspace is dependent upon, not separate from, the physical network and should not be treated as such.
Google, arguably the most powerful entity on the World Wide Web, provides clear evidence of the current presence of partiality. A first illustration is the company's regulation of "acceptable" content for their index. Google's practice of excluding sites that do not conform to their guidelines is without question inconsistent with their professed corporate culture of doing no evil and mission of indexing the world's information. If a site were merely black flagged and sent to the bottom of the listings Google's apologetic arguments suggesting a greater good to society by influencing the organization and presentation of information on a global scale might be worth discussion. However, they do not do this; they remove content entirely from their index. This is irresponsible and a behavior they may only practice because of their commanding corporate status and extremely high power level relative to those they effectually regulate. Ironically, Google gained this position of supremacy and authority because of the prior neutral democratic nature of the Internet they now repress and because of their reputation of integ
Riiight... and when your upstream ISP, which is ultimately a large telecom, decides to re-prioritize Google's traffic, or block VOIP because it cuts into their business, what will you do?