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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 :)
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).
Except when you have no other competing corporation to give your business. Oh well. Who needs the internet anyway?
Particularly this comment on the Wired blog
,WITH A PACK OF MORONS FOR SOME BIG TELECOM WITH BILLIONS OF DOLLARS AND VERY LARGE LEGAL STAFFS :; TELLING ME AND EVERY OTHER CONSUMER HOW TO READ, WRITE and SPEAK!
http://blog.wired.com/27bstroke6/2007/06/net_neutr ality_.html#comment-72777768
The Government and the FCC[Federal Communication Commission], Should stop the Tele-Communications, from selling bundles.
It Is the worst thing that could ever Happen. Especially since the consumers; Ability to complaint about service has been Thrown Out.
{ By the I agree / or Do not agree} Button that have to be clicked for Internet service.(ALSO: THIS IS ILLEGAL CONTRACT)!.
Currently The Tele-Com's Have Given themselves the "ABILITY" to "RATION"! out The First Amendment:
++Mainly Freedom Of Speech and Freedom Of Press.( By Their Agree or Do not Agree). Before the provide service!.
**THEY HAVE NO RIGHT TO DENY SPEECH OR PRESS TO ANYONE!!
The Telephone Lines and Cables are not Just for Large Corporations,They are for Public and Private use.
This is what they are Trying to achieve: Total Control and Dominance in: What you can see, hear, or speak and write!. By Offing the Consuming public: Apparently Low Prices on Many Peripherals. That The Consumer Believes that they are getting a good DEAL, "WHICH THEY ARE NOT!.
Regulatory, INTERVENTION IS NEEDED!.
Being pushed off a or "TERMINATED at the "DISCRETION OF SOME EMPLOYEE HAVING A BAD DAY, OR AN ATTITUDE ABOUT WHAT SOMEONE WRITES, THAT IS NOT TO HIS OR HER LIKING.
IS THE GOVERNMENT AND THE FCC GIVING TOTALITARIAN AND FASCIST AUTHORITY , TO A PACK OF GREEDY MONGRELS, {THE TELE-COM} INDUSTRY!.
THERE IS NO WAY TO GET SERVICE!.
THERE IS NO WAY TO GET MAINTENANCE!.
THERE IS NO ONE TO CALL ABOUT SERVICE DROP-OUT (OFF)!.
WHEN THERE IS A PROBLEM, THEY SAY IT'S YOUR COMPUTER OR EQUIPMENT,AND IN MANY CASES THIS IS AN OUT RIGHT LIE AND FRAUD(AGAINST CONSUMERS)
WHERE THERE IS NO PROTECTION BY THE GOVERNMENT ![Why FCC does not have a complaint for such activity is incomprehensible.]
AND THERE SHOULD BE PROTECTION OF BASIC SPEECH AND PRESS!.
AND NOT AT THE DISCRETION OF SOME LAME BRAIN OVER PAID OVER RATE(THEMSELVES) COMPANY AND EMPLOYEES'. {AND WAY OVER PRICED].
IN GENERAL THERE IS NO VENUE FOR THE CONSUMER, OR AVENUE FOR THEM TO PURSUE, IF THE DAMN THING STOPS WORKING!.(or If They are Denied ACCESS).
THAN THERE IS THE BOLD BLATANT CONSUMER FRAUD THAT THE TELE-COM'S PERPETRATED AGAINST THE GOVERNMENT BUSINESS AND CONSUMER:!
BY SAYING THAT THEY HAVE A MAIL SYSTEM THAT; IS YOURS(LEADING THE CONSUMER) TO BELIEVE, THAT THEY CAN WRITE AND CORRESPOND PERSONAL MESSAGES: WHEN THEY ARE NOT.
THEY ARE VENUES FOR THE TELE-COMS TO ADD [ADVERTISEMENTS] TOO. THIS IS NOT PERSONAL MAIL!}.[This is corporate selling] and I Want To know WHEN I AM GETTING PAID???.
THAN MOST OF ALL, AFTER A TELECOM COMPANY TELLS YOU THAT YOU {STATED} OR WROTE SOMETHING THEY DO NOT LIKE.
GO AND TAKE A GOOD LONG LOOK AT THE TRASH, OBSCENITY,PORNOGRAPHY THEY PUT AT THE : TOP BOTTOM, SIDES OF YOUR MAIL!.IF YOU COMPLAIN THEY SAY TO LEAVE.( The Telephone and Cable Line Are For the Use Of The Public and Private Use)!. These company have no legal ground to ask any consumer to agree or not to the use of Public access and they have no right to deny[access] , but they keep trying
THEY: {THE TELECOM] INDUSTRY WOULD, GIVEN HALF A CHANCE ; TURN THE PUBLIC AND CONSUMER INTO THEIR OWN PRIVATE WHORES!.
**YES: Intervention is very needed!.
+++HARMFUL BEHAVIOR.
YES IF TRYING TO DOMINATE AND CONTROL SPEECH AND PRESS IS NOT HARMFUL, WITH NO AVENUE OR VENUE FOR THE CONSUMER TO COMPLAIN AND NO CONSUMER PROTECTIONS;
***YES THIS IS A VERY HARMFUL THING!.
**WHAT IS EVEN MORE HARMFUL,, I AM SITTING IN MY HOUSE
IS THIS FASCISM? OR TOTALITARIAN
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
Except in monopolies when you have no choice to vote with your wallet.
I don't preview or spellcheck.
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
Fact 1. Telcos rely almost entirely on public easements to run their business.
Fact 2. Lack of public land would destroy almost all current Telcos.
Thus, putting Fact 1 and Fact 2 together, to me, means that the Telcos serve me first before they serve their shareholders. If they want everything deregulated so they can charge more for "premium delivered" bandwidth or whatever their current term-du-jour is, they can alter their business such that they do not rely on public funds or land to build their business.
- No tax breaks or other governemtn guaranteed incentives for telecom providers
- No government granting of exclusionary/preferential franchising of certain areas to telecom providers
- No government-enforced easements or right-of-way for telecom providers
When all of those government intrusions into the business of telecomm are remedied,then we can address the reduction of any net neutrality requirements.
Sound good to you?
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
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...
Ship you off to gitmo?
I have a proposal for a fair solution to this problem of net
neutrality, one that allows ISPs to offer enhanced services and also
gives people a good way to decide between service providers. Simply
require that, when they advertise bandwidth numbers, an ISP may not
throttle below that bandwidth for any service. They can offer
specialty services that exceed that bandwidth, but they may not
advertise it as "internet speed" or as an unspecified data rate.
For instance, if Time Warner advertises a 5000/384 connection, they
may not throttle ad hoc traffic below this rate, but they may also
offer other features beyond this rate, eg movie/music streaming or
download.
...and those ISPs will have to control every hop between end users and customers. At some point, an ISP will interface with another that charges extra, and those charges will have to be passed down the chain.
You could vote with your wallet and go use it.
This isn't neccesarily something you can "vote with your wallet".
The problem is that there isn't any competition because the government has granted these companies a monopoly on the infrastructure for a while. Imagine Ford being the only type of car that could be sold in Michigan or Ohio and all the roads leading in or out of those two states are owned by ford. Now imagine Deregulation and Ford saying well, your Saturn is outselling our fords so we will charge a toll to use the roads. Now the competition has to pay tom deliver something inside the states or you have to move to another state, buy the saturn and then move back.
That is butchered up but ti is more realistic to how the consumers vote is restricted. On the surface, it doesn't really mater who you ISP is, They only own a small portion of the lines servicing you. They lease the rest from one of the major telcos or Time Warner or whatever. So even the appearance of competition is only superficial. Except without net neutrality, they can charge more then the current mandated lease of what it costs to carry and maintain the lines to you ISP which means they would be making a profit if you were their customer or a competitors customer. And the competitor probably would have to raise their fees in order to pay the difference. You have to look at it on the deepest level. People PC or Juno, SBC DSL or Sprint DSL or AOL DSL all use other people's lines to deliver the internet to you. They are on the top, window dressing when you attempt to look at competition. A picture painted to make the room look bigger then it is.
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.