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Net Neutrality Act On the Agenda Again
blue234 writes "On January 9th, Republican Senator Olympia Snowe and Democrat Byron Dorgan reintroduced the bill popularly known as the Net Neutrality Act, and officially called the Internet Freedom Preservation Act. The bill was killed in the Senate last year in a vote split along party lines (Democrats yea, Republicans no), with the exception of Senator Snowe, who voted with the Democrats. Now that the Democrats have a slight majority in the Senate, the bill certainly has a better chance, but it still needs 60 votes to prevent a Republican filibuster.
but is this part of either party's official ideology or agenda?
Think about it this way. This bill is a proposal to regulate the internet itself. Specifically, to regulate how an ISP and network backbone company can allocate bandwidth.
Republicans: Regulation mostly bad.
Democrats: Regulation mostly good.
Capiche?
Fly me to the moon Let me sing among those stars Let me see what spring is like On jupiter and mars
My recollection differs from yours.
The bill came up after the head of ATT complained
about how "google was using his 'pipes' for free".
And how he wanted to correct that, so that google
was paying him.
Never mind that google paid their ISP, and their
ISP and ATT ( if they are not the same, I presume
not, or he would not have cause to complain
( course, I am stupid, he doesnt have cause to
complain then, but still he did ) ) have either
a peering arrangement or a cash arrangement to
carry each other's traffic ( you know, the
arrangements that make the interconnects between
each telco/isp's networks worth much of anything
in the first place... )
But, yes, the Democrats backed the bill.
emt 377 emt 4
This is my recollection as well. I also recall that after the bill was proposed, the big cable/telcos started running counter-factual advertisements in TV and newspapers, essentially saying "Google wants to raise your Internet bill! Stop them!" -- which even those who oppose net neutrality ought to agree is not really correct. But this widespread dishonest behavior does suggest that, even if the major bandwidth providers had not yet started the tiered bandwidth charges the bill was meant to prevent, they still had (have) an interest in doing so in the future. So this is something that will need to be dealt with sooner or later...
I am the man with no sig!
>Where's the US version of whirlpool?
Here
you let it get this bad. Now you're crying to the government for regulation.
Insightful? Maybe intuitive is a better word, because you're wrong. When you say "you", you are of course referring collectively to all consumers/citizens. But, "the body of citizens acting independently as consumers" is not a political entity, so you can't attribute blame to them. There IS a body who is supposed to represent the collective though, and it's called -you guessed it- the government.