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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.
If this suceeds, I think we basically win the internet freedom war against the telcoms and cable companies- it'll be a long time before they can do any more damage.
Care about privacy? Read this!
the bill survives committee intact. Do not contact your Representative or Senator to ask them to support the bill until after it makes it through committee! Otherwise you could be supporting a bill that's completely different from what you think it is.
Inventions have long since reached their limit, and I see no hope for further development.-- Frontinus, 1st cent. AD
"Internet Freedom Preservation Act"
It's funny. In this day and age I hear a bill title like that and I automatically assume it's some tyrannical euphemistic horror-show and that I should immediately call my representatives and insist they opppose it.
Incidentally this bill really is evil, because apparently all consumers and businesses currently use tremendous bandwidth without paying for it! I for one think it's about time the internet service providers were paid a monthly bill for the courtesies they provide!
here's how I see it...
My friend sends me a link to a clip on Google Video.
I go to the link, get my clip and laugh at the money drinkin' its own urine, or whatever.
Google gets a bill from my Internet service provider for bandwidth usage.
Google rips up the bill and tells my ISP to go fuck themselves.
My ISP reduces the available bandwidth to connections to Google's ip range.
Great, so then what happens?
My friend sends me another link to a clip on Google Video.
I go to the link and discover that the clip is too slow (or completely blocked).
I moan to my ISP that I can't play these important movie clips from Google Video.
My ISP tells me that I can't play them because Google hasn't paid their bandwidth charges.
I tell my ISP to go fuck themselves and switch to a provider that honours net neutrality.
Everyone else does this too because we really like Google Video.
And there goes the backhanded stupidity caused by ISPs temporarily forgetting that we, the consumers, control exactly how much money they make.
How we know is more important than what we know.
Obviously YouTube has a lot to lose if Net Neutrality is not preserved and if teclos start treating consumer's bandwidth in a fashion unfavorable towards the site. You can see videos of Senator Kennedy (D-Massachusetts) and Senator Dorgan (D-North Dakota) appealing to the YouTube community for support regarding Net Neutrality here:
Kennedy's video (3 min, 22 sec)
Dorgan's video (1 min, 48 sec)
You know, I am seeing this practice more and more often in many countries throughout the world. Some bill or act is shot down. A few years later when the balance of power shifts slightly, some trivial modifications are made to the content of the bill, and it is resubmitted.
I think this is a dangerous practice. Yes it is a reasonable strategy for a party or special interest group - because if they are persistent enough the bill might just pass. However it is dangerous for the rest of us - since once this bill passes - even if it is merely through insistance and momentum, we are stuck with it. It is much harder to get a law repealed than to get one approved. So we end up with laws that got approved through sheer bloody-mindedness, and are stuck with them because no one dares repeal it. I mean, if it is a law - it must be right, right? People must have agreed with it, right?
Sigh, another pebble is eroded off of the cliff of democracy...
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
I don't think you read very carefully:
From TFA:
"The prioritization of types of content, applications, or services would be allowed under the condition that it is done free of charge, and that it is done for all types of that particular content. For example, the prioritization of packets to insure Quality of Service for Voice over IP must be done for all VoIP providers free of charge to them."
Now since virtually every telco is also an IP carrier you can kiss skype goodby. Anything that competes with POTS is likely to be degraded to death.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
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
You are trusting that your cable IP service won't also have tiered access. Of course, both cable and telephone companies currently provide tiered services (DSL, DSL-Lite, voicemail, premium channels, VOIP, etc) why wouldn't they charge for access to third-party media providers.
It takes more than two sources of broadband to create a free market.
These comments are my own and do not necessarily reflect the views or opinions of my employer or colleagues...
The invisible hand of the free market has failed left and right. Standard Oil. Carnegie Steel. Ma Bell. Microsoft. No thanks- I'll take a regulated market that guarantees individual rights by taking some away from corporations.
Care about privacy? Read this!
I think this Network Neutrality debate is a bit misfocused. If we want to ensure the ability of people to speak their minds on the Internet we would do better to attack the near-universal practice of ISPs blocking ports and restricting the use of home servers.
THAT is where the free speech comes from: the people. The NN debate seems to be rather focused on the ability to choose between large companies that want to profit through our expression. Even though there may be more options it still represents a consolidation of content. If we want information we must get it from these providers; if we want to share it we must share it through the providers. As a group they become the gatekeepers.
It doesn't have to be this way. If more ISPs would let us use even our measly aDSL uplinks (that we pay for) to legally serve our own content, people would be able to self-publish in all sorts of new ways. Once we can participate directly in the internet without the middleman of some company with servers we'll unleash an amazing amount of potential and innovation.
Software would be created to deal with the technical challenges that would arise, perhaps with legitimate P2P providing interesting solutions to some of these problems. Network-centric computing would get a huge boost too. In any case, that small change in SOP has the potential to really change the way people view and use the Internet.
Network Neutrality proponents love to talk about a level playing field... lets level the playing field between the consumers and the providers as a whole.
Sounds like that says that if an ISP who's also dealing in VOIP wants to prioritize their VOIP packets above your bit-torrent and whatnot, they're free to do so provided that Skype, Vonage, etc get that same prioritization.
.iso downloads in order to have all of my VOIP calls not make that horrible "your upload sucks right now" screeching noise.
Although it sounds like you're coming from the other side of things - those ISPs who don't have VOIP services are going to send them to the bottom of the stack. Still, I take some comfort in knowing that they're going to have to either screw themselves or help their competitors (or, rather, not abuse their position of power and screw their competitors while helping themselves) whenever there's some new market that they want to enter. I see no reason to be racist towards bits, but then again I think I'd put up with slightly slower pira^H^H^H^H Linux
How are sites slashdotted when nobody reads TFAs?
Yeah, sorry, the market was ruined by the consumers, not the producers. If you don't demand competition, then don't be surprised when producers don't compete. Go ask an Indian how many monopoly products he bought last year. Shit, we don't even haggle in the western world anymore - it's considered rude. Where's the US version of whirlpool? Exactly how much effort have you put into finding the best price, on any product, in the last week? And don't go blaming the marketing and the slick advertising... you let it get this bad. Now you're crying to the government for regulation.
How we know is more important than what we know.
The thing is, it won't necessarily be your local cable company that is forcing the charge. What if it's your peering points? What if it's the local government that gets greedy? What if it's the FCC? Or a "tax" on pornographic websites to help cover "filtering costs"?
As well as the "entire Internet" will attract customers, you could have 100,000 local customers but if you can't get anyone to peer with you, you basically have a city-wide Intranet.
I'm not saying those would happen or even could happen, but a non-neutral net is a very dangerous tool in the hands of legislators. I'm happy to see legislators willing to legislate power away from themselves for once.
>Where's the US version of whirlpool?
Here
You know, I will blame the marketing and slick advertising. It was designed to play to people's weaknesses, much as propaganda shapes public opinion. Face it: almost all media is owned by a handful of corporations that want us to buy their crap. The only recourse is education --- an increasingly watered down, one-sided education provided by the public schools. And the corporate drivel has infiltrated there too. So, no, the consumers aren't at fault, they are behaving the way they were programmed to --- by market forces and a weak, greedy government.
Sorry, but I think you are confusing lies with abstractions. The 'free market' is a theorerical abstraction for economists like a black body is a theoretical abstraction for physicists. Calling economists liars because the free market doesn't match your day-to-day economic experiences is like calling a paint manufacturer a liar because his black paint does not emit perfect black body radiation.
In the real world, the free market is gummed up by many things, such as collusion, friction, well-meaning government interference, and bribery-motivated government interference. What is truly remarkable is how well it works in spite of such problems.
Yeah, sorry, the market was ruined by the consumers, not the producers.
Yeah, and when a scientific theory doesn't match experiment, it's not the theory that's failed, it's the universe's fault.
Look, what use is a theory if it doesn't match the real world? Free market capitalism's desirable results come from specific predictions about how consumers behave. And if those predictions doesn't match up with how consumers really behave, then the theory has little or no use. A good economic theory shouldn't make demands on how we spend out money, it should take that as a given and develop the rest accordingly.
After all, the economy exists to benefit US, not the corporations. Corporations are just a tool that are supposedly designed to maximize useful economic output.
I came here for a good argument