Musicians Demand the Internet Stay Neutral

eldavojohn writes "124 bands — including R.E.M., Sarah McLachlan, and Pearl Jam — and 24 music labels are sending a clear message to keep Net traffic neutral. The Rock the Net campaign wants all traffic to be equal instead of allowing providers to charge a fee for certain pages to load faster than others. These musicians are the latest to join the Save the Internet campaign, which has the chair of the House Subcommittee on Telecommunications and the Internet in its camp. Rep. Edward Markey, D-Mass., spoke at the campaign's kickoff. I think it's obvious that musicians (especially independents and small labels) will find themselves with the short end of the stick if they are asked to pay a fee to have their music streamed as fast as larger bands or even corporations."

Comments

Re:Yeah, because gov't regs will "save the interne

[lilomar]

Um, because it will? Just because the government is regulating something doesn't make it inherently worse off. Like how they regulate the roadways so you have to drive on a particular side (depending on which government is doing the regulating). Don't let your distrust of government regulation make you write off the matter. It isn't the regulation that is inherently bad, it is the misuse of the regulation.

Re:Because spam and viruses must be allowed...

[peragrin]

net neutrality isn't about an ISP blocking a spam bot, it's about ISP double billing their customers, and then taxing certian traffic at higher rates.

Google has to pay an ISP for service. now that ISP wants to not only charge google for data coming out of there services but also for giving that data premium bandwidth at the cost of something else.

Net neutrality is to prevent the AOL'ing of the Internet. the ISP's want to nickel and dime you to death to increase their revenue. Just like how when AOL, Prodigy and compuserv first came online you couldn't send email between them, unless you were a premium suscriber if at all. Now ISP's want to do that to IM's emails, videos, file transfers. If you want music from itunes but your ISP only supports Zune-live then your screwed and have to pay more per megabyte for a slower transfer.

That way only the rich companies could afford the bandwidth and premium charges to make them popular. Companies like Youtube wouldn't be able to even get started under such a situation.

Re:Because spam and viruses must be allowed...

[phoenixwade]

Not more Net Neutrality crap. I have to love /.'s double-stance on this. First they decry ISPs for not disconnecting clients that have been botted - then they demand that laws get passed to prevent that. No, Net neutrality means equal access to all services. Shutting down BOTS means removing a service that affects equal access. the difference is Quarantining the bots, as opposed to choosing say CNN over FOXNEWS by providing more bandwidth to one over the other.

Why shouldn't ISPs be allowed to implement QOS? Do I have to give up decent ping times on VOIP calls solely because the idiots next to me absolutely have to BitTorrent the latest episode of American Idol? Should someone sending spam be given equal priority to the 'net as someone trying to send emails to colleagues? Because you are misrepresenting the issue. Represent the issues AS IT IS, steering of a consumer to one or more services in favor of other services. Quality of service isn't the issue. Net neutrality is tuning down bit torrents so long as you tune down ALL bit torrents equally. It's eliminating VoIP entirely if you eliminate it at all. It's applying the ISPs rules of QoS equally for all users and for all services. It's not favoring one provider over another, and allowing the consumer to choose what provider of what service they want, rather than the ISP.

Net Neutrality means throwing up our hands in the air and allowing the Internet to become a useless mess of spam and viruses since the power to handle them would be stripped from ISPs. It means giving up on streaming video and audio. It means giving up on VOIP. Where did that load of crap come from? Where is the data to support this? Even if you were right (and you very much are not) it's not like the CONNECTION provider is doing all that much to stop either of these. the SERVICES provider is where the work is being done, at the Email server, for example.

I don't think it's worth it. Why the hell shouldn't I be allowed to pay more to get a better connection? You are misrepresenting again.... Anti-net neutrality (Your support of the Crappynet) doesn't allow you to pay more to get a better CONNECTION, it forces you to pay more to choose to use services that compete with the services that have not struck a deal with the ISP that YOU are paying.

You can choose to pay more for a faster connection right now. In our area, you can still buy dialup, multiple flavors of dsl, cable, t-1's, t-3's, fibre, WiFi.... and other choices that I have forgotten about. Each come with different prices and speeds. More remote situations are limited in connectivity choices, certainly. But in all cases, the contract between me and the provider involves connection speeds. I don't have to, and do not WANT to, have to pay more to use iTunes or BMG music, because it's not on the favored list.