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Net Neutrality vs. Technical Reality
penciling_in writes "CircleID has a post by Richard Bennett, one of the panelists in the recent Innovation forum on open access and net neutrality — where Google announced their upcoming throttling detector. From the article: 'My name is Richard Bennett and I'm a network engineer. I've built networking products for 30 years and contributed to a dozen networking standards, including Ethernet and Wi-Fi. I was one of the witnesses at the FCC hearing at Harvard, and I wrote one of the dueling Op-Ed's on net neutrality that ran in the Mercury News the day of the Stanford hearing. I'm opposed to net neutrality regulations because they foreclose some engineering options that we're going to need for the Internet to become the one true general-purpose network that links all of us to each other, connects all our devices to all our information, and makes the world a better place. Let me explain ...' This article is great insight for anyone for or against net neutrality."
How about Net Neutrality vs. MY BALLS IN YOUR MOUTH, you fucking nerd fags!
It's easy to forget (or if you aren't from the slashdot crowd, to not even realize) that the internet consists of nothing more than a big collection of computers and wires connecting them all together, and a few standards that are *fairly* widely agreed upon re how those computers communicate. ISPs are companies that provide individuals without the technical knowledge or the means to otherwise access the internet with a marketable, easy to use, idiot-proof way to plug into a network that happens to have a huge number of computers connected to it. ISPs have invested a ton of money, R&D, risk, time, etc., into developing the internet infrastructure that we have today in the U.S.
Net neutrality is a bunch of people deciding that the "internet" (remember, just computers and wiring) is public property, and asking the government to forcibly take control of the infrastructure in this country. Net neutrality legislation would create rules about what kind of traffic ISPs are required to transmit over their infrastructure.
Censorship is governmental dictation over what data can be shared. Net neutrality does not stop censorship: ISPs are private corporations (corporations being treated as individuals in this country, as I understand it). If you run a magazine, you're allowed to run whatever ads and articles you want. What would analogous legislation to net neutrality for magazine presses do?
If you don't like your ISP, stop patronizing it.
If you're of the mind that the "internet" should be regulated by the government to ensure that every person has equal access to it (whatever that means), then have the government actually take a primary role in internet maintenance and development: create a government organization to install fiber optic infrastructure, review and change if necessary the protocols and standards we use, etc.