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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."
Well, if REM says so, then it must be a good thing. That really helped me solidify my stance.
Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to think "profiling is worse than the slaughter of innocent people..."
I think one of the best things I noticed about this article is the news site it is taken from. Not Wired online, not the Register, not any of the usual, tech-oriented news sites. CNN is read by the technoelite and the public in general. The entire Net Neutrality issue needs to be in the public view-space.
The creator of this post (Jacob Smith) hereby releases it, and all of his other posts, into the public domain.
Whatever you do will be insignificant, but it is very important that you do it.
-Mohandas Gandhi
Probably not, but they might think other people believe their opinions matter and thus gather more support from the population. At the very least it will help bring the matter to a broader public so people actually know there's something to form an opinion on.
Remember; just because you're not stupid, doesn't mean the rest of the world isn't.
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Of course their opinions matter. They are well known people with large followings, they can help get the message out there. What matters more is that more and more people speak up.
Slashdot Burying Stories About Slashdot Media Owned
If this were really happening, what would you think?
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.
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?
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.
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 should make that your sig. Or put it on CafePress as a bumper sticker.
OK, there's a good argument that everyone's email or web traffic ought to be the same, but for some applications you really do want the net itself to not be totally neutral. For example telesurgery, where a surgeon conducts operations remotely through the use of a robot, and where you really don't want packets getting delayed and are willing to pay for the elevated service. Do we really want such applications blocked (or made unreasonably hazardous) just because of poorly written regulations that are attempting to prevent possible future abuse? Would it not be better to break up the big telco monopolies instead and so allow competition to work in customers' favour?
"Little does he know, but there is no 'I' in 'Idiot'!"
And in other news, Mice demand Cats stop chasing them.
Yawn.
Here will be an old abusing of God's patience and the king's English.
And somebody needs to come up with a better name for it than Net Neutrality.
Something like...
'Uncrippled Internet'
As in...
'Don't support a crippled internet!'
'Stop a crippled internet!'
'Verizon wants to cripple your internet!'
paintball
Do you do to your job just for the love of it figuring that if your employer pays you it's just "an extra"? Why is it that when people with day jobs go to work it's a given they will be paid but when an artist works and tries to get paid for it s/he is "crass", "commercial", "a sellout", etc.
Kinda stupid if you stop to think about it...
Caveat Utilitor
I'm afraid there's millions of brainless prats who hang on every word of these vapid, blithering corporate constructs. The prats then vote vapid, brainless political constructs into office, and we get government with the math, science and logic skills of a dead vole.
Please don't insult dead voles, at least they know how to decompose gracefully
I will not give in to the terrorists. I will not become fearful.
The bands are acting as the mouthpiece for the RIAA/Music companies.
The RIAA counts... which is really way too bad.
Good grief the RIAA is for Net neutrality... I feel like I need to take a long shower and scrub really hard now..
BTW the record companies want to sell you music with DRM and music videos with DRM. They don't want to pay Verizon and or AT&T the extra fees they want to charge the content providers for using their tubes.
It is all about the money.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
Dude, shut up, we need them! Musicians have already ended voter apathy, and I seem to remember a very successful "rock (or rockers) against drugs" campaign, and now they're turning their attention to our cause. Sweet! We're bound to win!
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
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.
The creator of this post (Jacob Smith) hereby releases it, and all of his other posts, into the public domain.
That's one opinion, but you don't have a way of knowing exactly what these bands are doing with their money either. Who says R.E.M. isn't spending a good bit of money on other charitable causes and interests? Maybe they are, and maybe they're not. But it's certainly possible.
Quite a few bands were hugely successful for years, only to become completely irrelevant if they stopped putting out material and decided to live off their past success. Maybe R.E.M. and others like them feel that they need to keep putting out new singles and albums, because they can do more good with a constant revenue stream coming in than if they call it quits?
I agree that it might be a nice gesture for successful major-label bands to all dump their labels and go independent. But in the grand scheme of things, that might not really mean a lot anyway. The really *critical* change happens when the new, up-and-coming bands succeed despite never signing with those big labels!
I think it's obvious that musicians (and too many other people) don't know how the Internet works.
Nobody "owns" the Internet. If some ISPs or backbone companies decide to limit bandwidth to certain sites, then they will simply lose business to the service providers who don't limit bandwidth.
And what would prevent musicians and their fans from using P2P techniques for distributed streaming?
The whole "threat" is nonsense.
Most of the people who want "net neutrality" probably don't want to ban QOS outright.
This is what I think ISPs should be prohibited from doing:
1.Discriminating or throttling or blocking based on source/destination addresses (and that includes forcing companies like google to pay more if they want full speed over the ISPs network)
2.Applying any kind of throttling based on port number. QOS is fine (that is, giving VoIP packets priority over BitTorrent packets) but throttling is NOT. If a network link is 1.5MBps and no-one wants to send traffic other than BitTorrent traffic over that link, the BitTorrent traffic should be able to use the entire 1.5MBps link (obviously if someone starts sending VoIP packets, then the network link wont accept as many BitTorrent packets and the BitTorrent download will slow down). This would specifically prevent the (increasingly common) practice where ISPs give you 1.5MBps or whatever speed but no matter how perfect the network conditions, BitTorrent or Emule or whatever else is limited so it can never go over 128KBps or 256KBps or whatever. Write in an exemption for cases where there is a direct threat to the network or to another network (e.g. someone spewing out packets as part of a DDOS attack)
These measures would still allow ISPs to completely block ports used by malware as well as measures like blocking port 25 to cut off spam zombies. And it would allow ISPs to apply QOS so that your VoIP packets have higher priority than the BitTorrent packets. But it would prevent ISPs from deciding that if you access CNN.com you can have the full 1.5MBps speed (assuming the rest of the network can handle that) but if you access YouTube.com or download something over BitTorrent, you cannot ever get more than 256KBps unless you pay extra for it (or google pays extra for it in the case of YouTube)
it won't make it better, it will keep it the same as it was, which i personally feel is a good idea, as it just works.
upon the advice of my lawyer, i have no sig at this time
I don't know about the others, but 10 years ago Pearl Jam boycotted TicketMaster on the grounds that their service fees were exorbitant. I've never been a huge fan of their music but I support that band 100% for their support of their fans.
You bring up a great point though. If your favourite band works for the RIAA then you are not their top priority, money is.
They're citizens with a stake in the outcome, like you and me. What exactly offends you? That each participant isn't ranting all alone on a street corner? Do they have any less right to get together than the folks who were astroturfing faux-neutrality with a blog ad blitz a few months ago?? Do you believe those guys should "Shut Up And " do whatever it is they do?
No, that's what it meant to you. What it meant to record labels was MONEY. If it didn't look like it would make money, they wouldn't put it out there.
The only musical movement I can think of that died before it was commercialized was hardcore punk. It was a creation of youth and came from a point of ignorance which frankly was one of its strengths - punk didn't involve acceptance of what people told you that you couldn't do. And no one ever really made much money on hardcore.
Rock, however, came straight out of the studio. It was a commercial creation from the beginning.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
The article references the Rock the Net campaign, which has an Online Petition you can sign.
Unfortunately, it appears to be down - I get this stacktrace when I try to sign it:
java.sql.SQLException: [Macromedia][SQLServer JDBC Driver][SQLServer]Arithmetic overflow error converting IDENTITY to data type tinyint.o n(Unknown Source)U nknown Source)r rorToken(Unknown Source)e plyToken(Unknown Source)
...
Can anyone else get through? Does this mean that the table is totally full?at macromedia.jdbc.base.BaseExceptions.createExcepti
at macromedia.jdbc.base.BaseExceptions.getException(
at macromedia.jdbc.sqlserver.tds.TDSRequest.processE
at macromedia.jdbc.sqlserver.tds.TDSRequest.processR
Please resubmit using an analogy based on a series of tubes.
"A great democracy must be progressive or it will soon cease to be a great democracy." --Theodore Roosevelt