Slashdot Mirror
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.
Slashdot social media options: AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, Jabber and Mobile Text. Why no MySpace?
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?
Apples and oranges. Botted systems represent a security risk to the ISP and to other customers and are not providing a commercial service. (Incidentally, it's also probably against their Terms of Serivce to run a botted system, but TOS is only pulled out when it benefits them...) Net neutrality is ISPs charging companies to use the faster lanes which ends up getting passed to the consumer and is nothing more than a money grab.
...like ISPs do anything about spam and viruses now to begin with. They'd claim common carrier and do nothing like usual.
Should someone sending spam be given equal priority to the 'net as someone trying to send emails to colleagues?
Oddly, if you QOS port 25 the spam goes through just as fast as the legit email. Incidentally, this is an argument for quarantining systems, not net neutrality.
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.
Plus it's not giving up on video/audio and VOIP...it's giving up on third party streaming video and audio and VOIP. Why should Verizon allow Vonage's VOIP (yea, i know the patent issues, bear with me) to travel as fast as Verizon's VOIP solution? Without competition, Verizon has no reason to improve their service either.
Net neutrality = competition allowed to exist = better for consumers.
The problem with that reasoning is that EVERYONE thinks their application is critical. And the arbiters of who gets the priority access are not neutral - they want to give it to whoever pays the most. So...
Situation #1: providers oversell "priority access", leaving the "critical" applications fighting it out for bandwidth just like they do now (and the "non-critical" apps wishing they had their 56k back)
Situation #2: Providers ration "priority access", which keeps speeds high for "critical" applications but drives up the price of that access via the laws of supply and demand. Providers realize that therey have no incentive to use those higher profit margins to invest in better infrastructure, as the poorer the infrastructure, the more they can charge for "priority access". (Think Enron pulling plants offline to make electricity rates spike and California brownouts)
Situation #3: Government, quasi-gov't (ICAAN), or NGO control of access. Does ANYONE think this is a good idea?
Here's another thought - maybe telesurgery isn't that good an idea.
"As God is my witness, I thought turkeys could fly." A. Carlson
And in other news, Mice demand Cats stop chasing them.
This is the most ridiculous thing I've ever read. Mice couldn't have made this statement as they don't have opposable thumbs to grip a pen with.
Summation 2
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.
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.
i thought once I was found, but it was only a dream.
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)
> 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 then you have the people that only have a "choice" of 1, maybe 2 ISPs. If that one ISP, or both ISPs do the throttling, then the user doesn't have the ability to change service providers. That theory might work if one realistically had a choice of a multitude of service providers. It doesn't work in a monopoly or near-monopoly.
> And what would prevent musicians and their fans from using P2P techniques for distributed streaming?
The ISP throttles traffic on anything that isn't going through their web proxies. Default traffic gets capped unless you are going to a "blessed" site that the ISP has obtained $$$ from to make them blessed. So much for your P2P traffic.
Because it is allowing companies to slow down service for those that don't pay. Under the current arrangement, everyone has equal access. With what the telcos and cable companies want to do, some company gets to pay them to be "high priority". This means that the higher-paying traffic bumps all the normal, non-paying, traffic, making everything else go slower.
To do a real-world analogy, let's say that you have an eight lane highway. Normally, any car can use any of the four lanes in either direction. Now, we're going to do the telco money-grab on the road. I'll pay for "high priority" service on the highway. If I'm traveling down a lane, you, as a non-payer, must get out of my way, no matter what the traffic congestion looks like. This will result in me getting to my destination faster, and it taking longer for you to get to yours. In other words, I would be effectively paying to slow down everyone else while allowing me to go faster.
I have a problem with this, since I pay for my Internet connection. I agreed that I wouldn't always get the full bandwidth I paid for, due to various circumstances beyond my ISP's control. I *did not* agree that the ISP could deliberately tamper with my traffic to make some things slow, and some things fast. I would imagine that my ISP did not agree to that with their upstream provider, and they with theirs. It is a radical change in the way the infrastructure works, and makes it a different beast.
If a company wants to charge more for a connection that tends towards lower latency (a T-3 instead of a cable modem), that's fine. If someone wants to charge more for 10Mb of upstream bandwidth than for 5Mb, then that's also fine. It is *not* fine to say "we're making other companies' traffic get precedence over your traffic, unless you pay us more".
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.
A positive attitude may not solve all your problems, but it will annoy enough people to make it worth the effort.