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Doctorow Tears Up ISP Contract Over Net Neutrality
Burz writes "As a reaction to Virgin Media CEO's promise to violate the concept of net neutrality, Cory Doctorow is declaring his ISP contract void, canceling the service, and calling on other Virgin customers to do the same. He isn't alone. Charlie Stross counts the ways the gang that became Virgin Media is trashing Sir Richard's brand. Myself, I am thinking of stopping my Virgin Mobile service in protest."
Meh. Can't hold a job. Can't get a degree. I may or may not be kidding about this.
That really is the issue here. You're never, ever going to get enough people to dump an individual ISP over this sort of thing to make their brass go, "Whoa! We'd better not do that!". The issue is simply too involved for the 'average' net user to really understand well enough to care about.
Some things require legislative solutions, and this is clearly one of those things. While I'm not saying that users of Virgin Media *shouldn't* change providers, it should be recognized that it's nothing but a symbolic step. If you really want to see this sort of nonsense avoided, contributing to the EFF might be a far better use of money.
Every year during my review, I just pray the words "slashdot.org" aren't mentioned.
Why do I care? Am I supposed to be impressed that submitter is "considering stopping [his] Virgin Mobile service in protest"? On my way to work today, I considered pushing a fisherman off the bridge so that I could giggle whilst watching him splash about in the water -- it's a far cry from doing it.
Pass.
Here's a solution for the legislation-hungry out there: pass some legislation to limit the efforts and effectiveness of professional lobbyist groups. Then maybe you and I would have a chance of getting heard when we wrote to our representatives.
I doubt you have a contract with Boing Boing agreeing that they will not censor reader comments, and I doubt that you are paying them all that much.
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
Is this a case of Wikipedia vandalism, or does his insatiable attention-whoring extend to ruining his poor daughter's life?
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
Think for a moment how incredibly inefficient what you are proposing is. Every single time a company does something stupid that's detrimental to the rest of us we have to organize a boycott and start educating everyone else? No thanks.
We have government to make this process easier. It makes laws and it enforces them. We elect people run it for us. It collects taxes to finance itself. Perfect? Hell no. But government is certainly a of a lot better and reliable than having everybody trying to police everybody else. I don't know about you, but I prefer living in an advanced modern society instead of a cave.
So, now, go out and educate your law maker as to why they need to pass a net neutrality law and we won't have to revisit this issue again.
---Technology will liberate us if it doesn't enslave us first.
Any financial issues Blockbuster have are most likely down to an evolving marketplace, and not getting rid of worthless customers.
Doctrow is a hack. A pretentious windbag who a certain element of people seem to think represents their beliefs.
I'm sure Virgin are quaking in their boots at this "threat" from someone who if there name was said to 99.999999% of people would say "Who?"
How about instead of ranting and talking about boycotts, he and his gang of tech-hippies start some sort of movement where they either flat out block requests from certain ISPs or at least throw up a "Here's our complaint about this ISP and why you should be using them" interstitial? That's the sort of thing that gets people to sit up and take notice.
"We shall grapple with the ineffable, and see if we may not eff it after all." - Douglas Adams
Err, no. Tiered pricing isn't like renting a better storefront. It's like having to pay the owners of the roads outside the houses of your customers so that they won't slow down your customers' cars whenever they try to drive to your store.
I can understand paying my ISP for a better connection for my server. But isn't it a bit perverse to have to then pay random other ISPs so that my customers are able to see the benefit of that better connection?
Allow me to continue with your storefront analogy.
You pay rent on your storefront, and I have to ride the bus to get there. We both pay depending on what we want.
You want more people in your store at a time, you pay more rent.
I want to be able to get there faster, I hire a taxi instead.
Where the problem lies is that now the bus/taxi companies want to charge you, the store owner, for the bus/taxi to stop at your shop.
If you don't pay, your customers will have to walk the last 1/2 mile, despite the fact that your shop is on the main road, and all traffic goes right past you.
In fact, it's not a far stretch to imagine the taxi driver suggesting alternate destinations.
Me: Take me to the local grocery store.
Driver: You're going shopping? Why don't I drop you at Walmart, It's 20 minutes faster.
Me: No it isn't, walmart is in the next town.
Driver: Yeah, But we have a contract with them, we drive everyone there first.
This isn't capitalism anymore, it's extortion.
Look, I don't want to piss you off or anything, and I'm sure Cory is smart, but... what exactly has he done to prove it? I'm really not trying to be facetious.
He dropped out of four universities. He's a blogger. He writes science fiction about as well as Alan Dean Foster. Which is to say, mediocre science fiction. He started Boing Boing. He occasionally writes non fiction articles.
Am I missing something? Cure for cancer, grand unified theory, anything?
I'm sure Cory is both nice and smart, but his importance to a certain set of geeks seems blown way out of proportion to his actual accomplishments.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
As an American who hasn't been extremely well-exposed to English pop culture, I cannot say with certainty what the term "wanker" means, but there's a feeling deep inside of me that Cory Doctorow is exactly the person the term was created to describe. He and several more or less pretentious bloggers run the Boing Boing blog, each with their own running obsession--Disney, Tibet, kitsch, Internet memes, etc. This is a spot-on parody of him.