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Net Neutrality Comment Period Ends Friday
FatherBash writes "Friday marks the final day for citizens, corporations, and paid spinmeisters alike to file comments with government regulators on Net Neutrality. Wired has the story with a link to the FCC page where you too can throw in your two cents."
No matter how hard we want to fight against it, net neutrality will eventually fall. The big providers want it to happen and the big content providers are not making a big enough stink about it to really rally the people against it. One of these days legislation will simply slip in, and then everyone on will really regret not taking more action when we had the chance. Kind of like the situation with Global Warming is going to be :)
I still believe we'll all be better off the more we can keep government out of it. Corporations can be dealt with by voting with your wallet, but the more the government sticks its nose in, the more government will stick its nose in.
Just because energy is being focused in one area does not mean that all other areas are being ignored.
In fact, as we all know, neither Iraq nor Africa are being ignored.
I always hate these types of arguments. They rely on the assumption that any person, government, or whatever else can only do one thing at a time and that all energy and monies are poured into that one thing.
In truth, however, this particular issue is one of importance to many Americans, and therefore it seems appropriate that the government would take it up.
Could someone post a link to the place where we can submit a comment (I mean, other than Slashdot. I don't think the government takes official notice of Slashdot comments).
Airwaves belong to everyone. Although transmission is regulated,
reception is open and unrestricted. And the only purpose of the
regulation is to ensure that the openness of the medium is preserved
and the utility of the radio space is not compromised.
This is as it should be. Everybody benefits when the utility of a
common resource is preserved. Otherwise, the phenomenon of the
"Tragedy of the Commons" rears its ugly head. Here, overly agressive
private consumption of a public resource causes a compromise of the
utility of the common resource, to the detriment of all, including
the private individuals hogging the resource!
The Internet is, by definition, a shared resource. It's a peering
agreement based on communications protocols which enable all of its
parts to cooperate together, seamlessly, for the public benefit. Any
part can access any other part as though all parts were local. It's
the first, truly open, global communications system whose immense
potential for benefiting humankind has barely begun.
It is now up to you, here, to declare for our progeny, that this
shared, common resource shall remain open and free for the benefit of
all, to ensure its use, utility, and power so that everybody can benefit.
Balkanizing this public medium with an "unequal" internet, where the
common carriers of the traffic are free to degrade access to portions
of the network not in their personal interest, serves only to pillage
the utility of the common good. It provides enhanced short-term
profits for the pillager, but degrades the overall utility of the
network.
Please, please please, follow the forefathers before you who have
declared that this land be preserved for the common good, and those
who declared that the roads be preserved for the common good, and
those who have declared that the nation's power grid and telephone
grid be regulated to preserve their utility for the common good.
The utility of the Internet should be preserved. Please, please, keep it neutral.
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
I am against 100% all government economic intervention. It is unnecessary, unconstitutional, and economically bad. Read von Mises.
the Political Inquirer
I agree with your statement that more government regulation will only lead to more government regulation. But in this type of case, the ISPs are being granted limited monopolies, so regulations (Net Neutrality) must accompany those monopolies in order to prevent abuse.
Unless you are suggesting that the monopoly also be removed, taking the government all the way out, then you could actually "vote with you wallet" as you said, and rely on the marketplace.
I'm sure that will look really important next to the millions of dollars already in there...
I want to go on record as being very much in favor of Net neutrality. As a computer engineer/computer science graduate who makes my living programming web applications, I can say with certainty that allowing the ISPs to create tiered models of services would destroy the ability of myself and others to innovate.
Let me give an example. In the early days of the World Wide Web, the typical content we had was static pages with maybe an image or two. Network performance continued to be upgraded, however, and as that happened new innovators took advantage of the increase in bandwidth to begin making interactive and interesting web pages. These pages became richer and richer, and content became larger and continually more complex and interesting. You began to have web sites in which users could communicate with each other and participate in collaborative projects. As these new innovations occurred, peoples' expectations web applications rose, demand for Internet connectivity increased, more people subscribed to broadband, and this in turn caused ISPs to update their network architectures. Thus a virtuous cycle was created: more bandwidth increased what developers such as myself could create on the Internet, which interested more people, which caused more of them to subscribe to ISPs, which gave the ISPs money to add even more bandwidth, etc.
Now the situation we are looking at is different. Rather than add network capacity to increasingly allow richer content on the web, the ISPs will be able to charge based on different types of media. IPTV, for instance, will require an addition of considerable bandwidth to the Internet in order to have high quality transmissions. However, by abolishing net neutrality, the ISPs will be able to deliver that performance by giving most of the bandwidth to services like IPTV and throttling other forms of traffic. Rather than spend the money we pay as subscribers for things like bandwidth upgrades, they will just reduce some forms of service and pocket the money. That is NOT what we are paying for.
In addition, this will break the virtuous cycle I mentioned above. Because ISPs can throttle a lot of different kinds of web traffic, they will be able to avoid raising bandwidth. And without the extra bandwidth, we as developers won't be able to push new limits with our programs as we have in the past. Continuing to make richer content requires more bandwidth, and our efforts will be starved in that area. In addition, innovative start ups won't have the money to pay for the increased bandwidth they need to compete with big, established sites. Thus, while they may have good ideas, they probably won't catch on because their sites will be made artificially slower by the packet shapers. We need to keep the Internet a level playing field for everyone.
In closing, I would urge you to look at the history of the Internet. Though brief, it has in a short time profoundly changed the way we live our lives, and made possible advances in science only dreamed of in previous decades. During all this time of astounding development, the Internet was neutral. Given how well the Internet, commerce, science, and everything else are performing under the current system, why would we want to change it? Things don't get any better than they are now (unless you stand to profit by charging more for preferred services).
Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct, not tried it.