Slashdot Mirror
UK Government Wants To Kill Net Neutrality In EU
Glyn Moody writes "Not content with snooping on all Internet activity, the UK government now wants to introduce changes to the contentious EU Telecoms Package, which will kill net neutrality in the EU: 'Amendments to the Telecoms Package circulated in Brussels by the UK government, seek to cross out users' rights to access and distribute Internet content and services. And they want to replace it with a "principle" that users can be told not only the conditions for access, but also the conditions for the use of applications and services. The amendments, if carried, would reverse the principle of end-to-end connectivity which has underpinned not only the Internet, but also European telecommunications policy, to date.' To add to the irony, an accompanying text cuts and pastes from Wikipedia, without attribution."
man, corporations oops, I mean politicians are really pushing this BS aren't they?
Sent from your iPad.
Why on earth does this continue?
I can't take how stupid the world is being, with this and New Zealand's "Guilty until proven innocent" thing, as well as the way net neutrality is coming under attack in my own country, Canada. It makes me want to throw up.
Just another brick in their wall they're building to further close them off from the rest of reality.
I've had this thought for a while now, but now's an appropriate time to say it: Will there be a day when a British tourist visits America and remarks that our cameras must be hidden really well, because they can't see them at all!
Job? I don't have time to get a job! Who will sit around and bitch about being broke and unemployed then?
This is the labour party exercising its left wing credentials. It wants total control of the populous. They don't like the internet as it is as it allows people to bypass the laws they set up to police it. They don't want to stop it being used, but they want to control what people use if for, and to have something in place that is sufficiently vague that they can use for any purpose.
The worst thing is that the general population is that ignorant to what the government is doing that as long as this is spun as a measure to counter terrorism, or catching paedophiles, there will be no objection. After all, how could any sane person object to such a thing.
We currently have a government that is ruled by conceit. They know what is best for people and if we ignore what they tell us to do then its because we haven't understood rather than us having understood and rejected the advice. Their next resort is to legislate to force us to do what they want us to do, for our own good of course. HMG has forgotten that they are there to serve the people, rather than the other way around.
You may think me a tired, old, cynic. I'd have to disagree about the tired bit.
Where did they learn it from? The neo-cons in America.
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Trying to install linux on my microwave, but keep getting a kernel panic...
Those against net neutrality represent the gravest threat the Internet has faced. The Internet routes around damage, yes. But if concerted, simultaneous attacks occur by various governments around the world, Internet freedom can be defeated.
Not to sound overly melodramatic, but our children's children will judge us based on how we react to these assaults, today. If we successfully defend the Internet from those who wish to corrupt it for political, religious or profit reasons, we will have provided the greatest gift humanity has ever received - a free, open, and entrenched global communication network. A step in the evolution of our species.
If we fail in our duty, and the Internet is globally subverted, becoming yet another one-way broadcasting network for advertisers and propagandists, we will have left our descendants to another hundred years of suffering and misery.
Consider some of the things the Internet threatens:
- War: The Internet connects people in warzones with people outside the warzone. This makes it difficult to perpetrate a war without upsetting the aggressor's citizenry, as they will be exposed to the consequences of the war. Youtube, blogging from Baghdad, and english.aljazeera.net are just the start. .. is far less effective when the citizenry can check the facts
- Police brutality: Videos can circle the globe within minutes. The watchers are now watched, and this has a powerful effect on their behavior.
- Propaganda:
- Financial scandals: Anonymous communications help whistleblowers uncover financial scandals-in-progress
Now consider some of the things the Internet enables
- Global scientific collaboration: For both amateur and university-scale scientists, the Internet permits the free exchange of ideas
- The liberation of "intellectual property": (not so good for the profit-seekers, but ultimately necessary for humanity)
- Force multiplication for sellers: individuals can sell their products with the same efficiency and legitimacy as a large corporation, enabling more competition and a true free market (ie. ebay)
All of this has a negative effect on entrenched players, explaining our current situation. And this is the reason we need to fight, and fight hard. Because if we don't, we, and our descendants, will lose.
A government is a body of people notably ungoverned - AC
From the 1960s, draconian British radio broadcasting restrictions forced would-be music broadcasters to park ships in the North Sea and transmit "pirate radio" stations to the UK.
Perhaps its time for pirate radio 2.0 : unlicensed digital packet radio mesh edition.
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
I am a proud EU citizen I am tired of the UK being an EU member. UK (both government and population) behaves like stubborn child, like the black sheep. It does not want to adopt Euro, fully implement Schengen Treaty, European Charter of Human Rights, etc.; UK doesnâ(TM)t respect the symbols of the Union (e.g. the flag). Yet they want to rip all the benefits of the common market. Eastern EU workers were good when their citizens did not want to fill in raw work positions. Same Eastern-EU workers are scapegoats now, while their own British born citizens from the former Empire population blow themselves up. And now they want to infect the rest of the Union with their Stalinist type of police state. Frankly, I want UK out of the EU, let them be spied on their island only, have all the raw jobs they hired cheap hard working foreigners they despite, ask them to have a visa to visit EU, be finger-printed, etc. Let's have them alone on their pathetic island, also known for many reason as "The Perfidious Albion". Many of their politicians still behave like 100 years ago when they were a global empire, now the empire is gone and they just pay the price of arrogance. We need the Union to evolve without the hand-brake on. Brits, keep your politicians, CCTV cameras, and KGB-style police at home! Let the European Union alone!
Mod parent up. I'd do it myself but I've already posted.
How are sites slashdotted when nobody reads TFAs?
Mmmmm, I'd love to get me some of that hot, wet, tight snorkel...
They do retain more of that old New-England-puritan hangup about alcohol, on which California's a bit more liberal. You can only buy liquor at state-run liquor stores in NH, and even licenses for on-premises consumption of beer and wine have more regulations---in California it's not uncommon to find coffee shops selling alcohol in the evenings, because the license is easy to get and cheap; good luck finding that in NH.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
UK government has done nothing but blindly follow and copy the worst of USA for the past 10 years, thereby turning itself into a 1984 puritanist state. It's time that they acknowledge tat they are not a part of EU, never will be, and act on it. UK should gtfo from EU and join USA or AU instead.
To add to the irony, an accompanying text cuts and pastes from Wikipedia, without attribution.
So, who does Gpl-violation file suit against? In fact, if a law quotes you unattributed, doesn't that mean the government is somehow liable for copyright infringement?
Disclaimer: The opinions and actions of the US Gov't are in no way representative of those held by this author or its ci
As a former Brit, now Canadian, I have developed some theories as to the wheres and whys of the British psyche. Being an Island has led to an isolation not found elsewhere in Europe. Historically this allowed the 'subjection' of the 'unwashed' masses by the entitled elites to evolve apace without too much interference from abroad. As luck would have it, even world domination as the British Empire. All sorts of nastiness was developed by us Brits - piracy, slavery, banking, to name a few. However us members of the untouchable class in England gradually picked up a thing or two over several thousands of years of killing, war and banking (as employees) and now have these royal PITA types under some form of control. Keep them in castles and luxury, let them run banks and insurance. We even have the Royals. One of the good things we untouchables started was the end to slavery (real - not todays corporate slavery). However one of the supposed 'great' things we exported was Democracy, as in the 'free' world, esp. the good ole US of A, which is a kind of democracy gone wild. My Canada is sort of a 'sleepy' democracy, less volatile. Note the similarity in Brit/American banking system problems today - a little out of hand. Canadian banks are boringly regulated and quite stable, thank you. This theory may be a lot of bunk, but it suits me just fine. Understanding the Zen of the entitled elites, one sees that they are again restless over in old Blighty, what with the banking/political crisis. It appears that Net neutrality may be tipping the balance of socio/economic power to the restless masses. Oh well. Now that we have them by the yoibles, its time for every free man woman and child to grab a hold and squeeze.
A man spends the first half of his life accumulating stuff, the second trying to get rid of it all.
Yet another definition of Net Neutrality.
Don't blame me, I didn't vote for either of them!
I really still don't get it, why are the ones who are supposed to be liberals doing such things? I could understand if a douchebag like Cameron wanted to turn the UK into what the Labour party is turning it into, but why does the Labour party do that? Since when is that sort of agenda anything like the liberal agenda? Socialists in France aren't pushing for anything even vaguely similar, neither are the Social Democrats in Germany or the centre-left coalition of Italy, or anywhere else I know of where the main liberal movements stick to a liberal agenda, which, while controversial, is certainly nothing oppressive.
So where on Earth did these guys get their agenda from? Why the fuck are they pushing for stuff like that? What's wrong with these people? That's not how being a liberal is supposed to be. Someone please explain, and please don't bother with the libertarian drivel about big evil governments who want to enslave mankind, I want a good explanation, not some bullshit feel-good "you see, we were right, they're all evil except us" crap.
You just got troll'd!
is all I needed to say.
"What in the name of Fats Waller is that?"
"A four-foot prune."
Can any UK person explain what's up with your government. Do you guys actually WANT to emulate some bizarre cross between 1984 and Brazil? There's almost no benefit to you guys from 90% of the policies your government is carrying out. At least in America a lot of people tried voting for the other team. Seriously, what gives?
Why is it that every time I read "UK" in a news headline I instantly think "what stupid nazi-like decision did these idiots make this time?"?
And why is this sense of forboding always correct?
The MAFIAA is a bunch of mindless jerks who will be the first up against the wall when the revolution comes
Don't be fooled, there is no way this ammendment will go through, and the UK government knows this. The only motviation for proposing such ridiculous changes is to be seen to be tackling piracy and copyright issues, which they can then blame on the EU when they refuse these new powers.
Fuck off you British tossers. Keep your fucking pound and get the fuck out of the Community.
Wrong, wrong, wrong. We don't care about any of that. What we do care about is how Britain constantly and selectively reaps only those parts of the EU that it likes as a government, while discarding all the actually important parts for the people and EU cohesion in general. Common law, Schengen, the Euro, human rights, snooping, ... The list goes on and on, it's like the UK doesn't even want to be part of the EU (or the civilised world for that matter). Why don't they just go and leave us alone? Well, maybe because the other member states are stupid enough to let Britain have it its way all the time, while still allowing it to reap the benefits and give it a foot in the door in European policy. Which is disastrous, because what the UK wants always stinks (see article).
Since I don't want to end this post as a rant, I'll end on a lighter touch. Maybe Sir Humphrey was right, England has prevailed for hundreds of years using the divide and conquer strategy. They tried to break up the EU from the outside, but that didn't work, so they became a member.
I suspect this is a flamebait. Check the original document rather than the IPTegrity piece. The fuss seems to be about the following amendment:
"there should be transparency of conditions under which services are provided, including information on the conditions of to access to and/or use of and distribute information or run applications and services, and of any traffic management policies"
This seems to propose transparency about existing access conditions, not imposing some new conditions or allowing ISP's to impose more conditions. They justify it in the text as:
"There is nothing in the Framework or elsewhere preventing a service provider from providing subscribers with access to predefined and differentiated set [sic] of services or applications .... Competition will only be effective if consumers are fully informed of the conditions under which the particular service is provided"
See http://www.laquadrature.net/files/UK_PROPOSED_AMENDMENTS_on_net_neutrality_DRAFT_20090223_print.pdf
"But they do it too" stopped being a defense to accusation in the infants school plyaground. It never rebutted the accusation, so never worked anyway unless you were an infant.
"...enabling more competition and a true free market (ie. ebay)"
bad example really. You try setting up an auction website. You'll be lucky to get anyone to use it, because Ebay has something close to a monopoly. Why post on your site to get 100 bidders when they can post on Ebay and get 100,000 bidders.
The monopolies are already coalescing on the internet; the wild west days are fading into the past. Sure anyone can set up a site, but you cannot compete with the big boys who have already established themselves... and before you say it, Google had £25,000,000 to set up. If you think that the average person is able to persuade the banks to cough that up then you are fooling yourself.
Finally someone taking a second to actually investigate. I thought I must have misunderstood, but apparently it's also a lot of people reading a misleading summary.
I read nothing that made me recoil in horror. At worst this would appear to be traffic management to reduce network congestion, hopefully stopping Joe Bloggs down the road causing contention by downlaoding movies and music all day, every day. I have nothing against people using the Internet for whatever purposes they wish (legally of course), but when it affects me then of course I want somethign done about it. Am I the only one who thinks traffic shaping can be a good thing as long as its done carefully? Joe Bloggs gets his torrents a little slower, or with higher latency, and i still get to play Left4Dead for an hour without lag.
Perhaps I'm just an idealist...
You can advertise in this sig from as little as £99.99 a month!
Honestly? I just don't have anything to hide.
Okay. Could you please run netcat -l -p 1234 < /dev/hda and post your IP address?
Government propaganda likewise, I'm increasingly disgusted by the pile of steaming ad hominem and blatant misrepresentation in politics these days. I'm also disgusted by the fact that most of the populus just gulp it down through their TV straw and don't even check to see how it tastes, but that's another story...
It's not just because it's propaganda. That's not far from how politicians really are.
On Danish TV, there's a live transmission from the parliament every day the parliament meets (last I checked). It's a fun watch, in a depressing kind of way.
The politicians present their pieces of legislation and other work (let's form a task force to set down a committee to ...). Then they debate it, then they vote (sometimes).
The debate consists mostly of calling each other "Mr. Fogh" and "Ms. Thorning-Schmidt" and then insulting one another using an impressive-sounding vocabulary. That is, throwing the gold-plated turds around.
I'd like them instead to discuss economic policies with arguments that sound like "This economic scientist dude says that based on historic facts and proven theory, we should expect the policy to benefit society due to ...".
To be fair, there is expert input to the political process, but apparently it's not discussed. How about you frigging politickers do that instead?
If you live in the UK, you can contact your MEPs by visiting http://www.writetothem.com/.
IMO the whole brittish parliament should be forced to see V for Vendetta
with the UK and net neutrality? Its like they want to make sure they know /every little thing/ you do online.
I went from loving the country, admiring the people and culture, to completely hating the damn place and its stupid people. I wish the country would just sink to the bottom of the ocean and drown the morons living there.
As the island of our knowledge grows, so does the shore of our ignorance.
There's a subtle difference between not hiding information and broadcasting it on an open channel.
Do you see what I did there?
and they try to infect others. that's the way with fascism. it never stays in its box. now, its trying to infect something that is far greater than any of the countries that ever been on earth in terms of its philosophy - Eu.
im turkish and seems that i am a future citizen of eu whether i like it or not. but there is one thing i dont like - that shit perpetrated by fascist uk government.
i am not going to oblige my country to a union that can be herded by neo fascists.
Read radical news here
I realize it is through slow creep and small incremental change, but when did George Orwell's '1984' become a frakking manual for governments to use?
http://www.laquadrature.net/files/UK_PROPOSED_AMENDMENTS_on_net_neutrality_DRAFT_20090223_print.pdf [laquadrature.net]
This seems like an excellent opportunity to setup a simple proxy service based somewhere outside of the EU. Switzerland looks pretty good for the moment. Now then:
anon@coward ~ $ whois FuckTheNannyState.ch
We do not have an entry in our database matching your query.
Okay, all good on that front...now we create a site walking users through the simple steps on how to configure their web browsers to proxy their traffic via our network over SSH. They get peace of mind and back to not worrying about who is spying on their browsing habits (oh no, we have a [insert_despised_political_group] leaning individual browsing [insert_alternate_view_online_publication], let's get an arrest warrant on the grounds of [something_covered_under_unrelated_terrorism_laws]. Two fingers up at the nanny state. Everyone (who matters, that is) is a winner.
Nice little earner here at say...1.99GBP per user per month.
Had to post AC...they're out there watching me...
and the fascist regime.
Love many, trust a few, do harm to none.
Who exactly proposed this motion, so that I may gather my friends and pitchforks? A revolution in this country is long overdue. Ironically, I quite like our system of government, just not the weak ignorants who find themselves in it...
My UID is prime. Is yours?
On the other hand the government is constrained by various laws that restrict the information they can gather and use. For example in Europe...
Not applicable to America, at least not when the Republicans are running things.
It is just a simple - and now historical - fact that a Republican straight-from-Business-to-President can and will negate every law that exists and every right that an American has with an Executive Order.
Orwell: "In a Time of Universal Deceit, telling the Truth is a Revolutionary Act"
Doesn't China already do something very similar to this?