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Cory Doctorow Draws the Line On Net Neutrality
Nerdposeur points out that Cory Doctorow has a compelling piece in The Guardian today, arguing that network neutrality is not only crucial for the future of the Internet, but is what the ISPs owe to the public. He asks, "Does anybody else feel like waving a flag after reading this?" "If the phone companies had to negotiate for every pole, every sewer, every punch-down, every junction box, every road they get to tear up, they'd go broke. All the money in the world couldn't pay for the access they get for free every day... If they don't like it, let them get into another line of work — give them 60 days to get their wires out of our dirt and then sell the franchise to provide network services to a competitor who will promise to give us a solid digital future in exchange for our generosity."
Yes, a black flag in my case.
No. I feel like marching in protest. That didn't make me feel more patriotic. It made me feel more willing to express my frustration with the telcos.
Unless he meant a white flag. In which case I have to say, definitely no. That did not make me want to surrender. Of course, I'm not a telco -- maybe reading that would make them want to surrender -- price-gouging surrender monkeys that they are.
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
As long as a competitive, free market is ensured, this won't happen.
If a ISP starts filtering, people will move to the next.
Of course, things may turn out very different if we allow dominant market positions to be built in the ISP market.
(But this won't happen, right? Just as we never let any dominant market position arise in the OS market, or in the microprocessor market. Now sorry, gotta rush back to my cave).
"Whenever people agree with me I always feel I must be wrong." (Oscar Wilde)
How about the opposite... how anout as municipalities, we band together and start charging them rent on our ditches and land that they are running the cable through. They want to screw us on the received end then we will screw then on the intake valve. If we stand firm enough, the fear of being charged billions to use their own lines will put the fear of some sort of ancient evil from beyond the stars into them.
This is my sig. There are many like it but this one is mine.
Ridiculously high upfront cost, is a waste of resources to make multiple sets of them for each competitor, internet cables, like roads, seem like the perfect thing to have under government control. We can have private companies competing for the services they can provide over these lines.
Right...because the Democrats aren't sold out to the telcos.
The only sucker around here is the one that thinks that either one is better than other.
The both have sold out. Blasting one and supporting the other is height of foolishness.
the ISP also needs to balance the needs of all the users against the needs of certain special users.
As youtube and hulu and other online distribution sites like itunes or steam or the playstation store get more and more popular, "all of the users" need more bandwidth. Either that, or more and more users become "special".
If I have been able to see further than others, it is because I bought a pair of binoculars.
That's not what net neutrality is about. That's QoS or usage tiers. What net neutrality is about is making sure that toll road owners are not charging more for trucks carrying company A's stuff than trucks driving company B's stuff. ISPs want to be able to degrade performance from certain internet services, such as Skype and Hulu, in order to "encourage" you to use their own services. That is, unless those services pay your ISP an extortion fee.
In other word, net neutrality is about not discriminating against the source of the traffic. It says nothing about discriminating based on the type of traffic and amount. Comcast should not arbitrarily degrade my Skype traffic because they prefer me to use their VOIP service and Skype refuses to pay them a kickback. I should be able to choose how I use my connection, so long as I am not infringing upon other users.
A few points to consider:
(1) If you treat Cory Doctorow like he's relevant, then he will believe he is.
(2) Yes, it is important to preserve NetNeutrality, but I'm surprised anyone is writing up an article so late in the game.
(3) "Finally, there's the question of metered billing for ISP customers." This has nothing to do with net neutrality. I don't see what the problem is. He's arguing that people don't know how much internet they're going to use. But, please don't try to fool us into thinking that we have *no idea* how much internet we use. The only way you're going to end up in the top 2% is if you're downloading massive quantities of information (not webpages!) Metered access to the internet isn't much different than cell-phone minutes. (Oh! We have NO IDEA if we're going to use 10,000 minutes a month, or 50 minutes a month - therefore telecoms can't charge us by the minute!) How absurd. I'd be pretty unhappy if they started changing a lot per MB, but in the real-world, I don't see this being much of a problem at all unless you're uploading/downloading Gigs of data. And, isn't this how companies pay for internet service anyway? A company's internet usage will vary significantly based on factors like "number of employees". So, they simply charge by bandwidth.
You're half right. If you had said "Fuck the Republicans AND Democrats" I could agree with you 100 percent.
Whereas today's hottest technologies are texting and Twitter. Stop. Which are very different from the telegraph in... some way. Stop.
"give them 60 days to get their wires out of our dirt and then sell the franchise to provide network services to a competitor who will promise to give us a solid digital future in exchange for our generosity."
What generosity? The city owns the land they're using, not you.
In exchange for the huge capital outlay of installing the infrastructure, the city gives them certain rights. It's a win-win.
Let's see if I can summarize the gist of most Slashdot articles recently:
- Screw any internet provider that wants to cap any users or charge a lot more for heavy users.
- Screw any internet provider that wants to give more weight to some traffic over others.
- Give me my P2P
Sorry, something has to give. It's basic economics.
Cheap internet. Open internet. No usage caps.
Pick 2.
Ironically, the word ironically is often used incorrectly.
In 1994 I worked for a company setting up an ISP. We called in the phone company to order 50 lines. (Dial up was all there was then ). The company was not happy, especially that we were ordering business lines, with a low cost, 15 cents for each outgoing call but no cost for incoming calls .
As an ISP we only had incoming calls. They had no choice, since phone systems had to sell lines to anyone ( oh the joys of regulation! ). Had the phone version of net neutrality not been in place, the phone companies would have throttled or taken over the internet - and we would not have the open net we have now.
Bookwormhole.net -- over 11,000 published book reviews.
I understand the sentiment, but the correct answer is "I will never vote for any politician who puts corporate interest ahead of the welfare of citizens and neither should you."
This covers many Democrats and all Republicans. Unfortunately, it also seems to cover most Libertarians.
Corporations are the enemy of Democracy. Not because it's a necessary part of doing business, but because they've have chosen that path.
The only solution is to take all private money out of the election process. There needs to be iron-clad, enforced limitations on campaign finance, with a Justice Department squad whose only job is to make sure that a brand new set of campaign finance laws are enforced without exception.
The notion (put forth by corporatist SCOTUS judges) that MONEY=SPEECH has been the single most destructive opinion put forth by the Supreme Court of the United States in our history. We will never again have fair elections, accountable office-holders or a strong middle class until we have reduced the influence of money in our political system.
Term limits aren't enough. Campaign finance "reform" isn't enough.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Because the government is terrible at managing things, has no competition, and little oversight.
Not true, no matter how much it's the cornerstone of libertarian thinking. It's just that the stuff that the government does manage really well hardly ever gets noticed. Examples include municipal water systems, fire fighting and prevention, traffic controls, and park systems. Municipal power companies also tend to do at least as well as their private competitors in the next town or city over in terms of providing cheap and efficient service to their customers.
I am officially gone from
Because the telcos are terrible at managing things, have no competition, and little oversight.
There, fixed that for you.
But even if that never happens, it's still better to choose the party of least corruption
That is generally going to be the party out of power. So it's actually not a bad idea.
How to solve most of our problems: 1.Lots of nuclear plants. 2.Cure aging.
Corporations are simply large businesses, structured that way for better profit and efficiency. While they can be powerful, they're no more an "enemy of democracy" than other large entities, including our own elected government. Furthermore, I'd like to see you live without corporate products for awhile. Come back and tell me what life is like for you when you can no longer buy cars from Toyota, computers from Apple, burgers from McDonalds, fly on planes from Boeing, or take antibiotics from Merck. You get back to us on what it was like to try and build your own cars, grow all your own food, and make your own clothing.
*Huge* corporations *are not* simply large businesses. They don't simply have just a bit more power, they are huge collections of money and huge collections of power, so huge as they change the gravity of the power of the country.
The governmental structure of the U.S. was just not intended to deal with huge pockets of power. U.S. society has a huge blind spot in regards to this, but the writers of the constitution did not. They saw the damage that was caused by the East India company and while they believed that corporations could be a positive force as long as they were limited. They believed in giving them *limited* charters (ones that actually expired!) and not allowing them to own other corporations or land that wasn't related directly to their businesses. That was all chucked in the mid-1800s because the rich wanted to get richer.
Corporations are useful for big tasks, but I don't think that any the tasks you listed here couldn't be done by a small or medium size businesses. With the Internet and the modern tech available to us there are damn few jobs that I know that couldn't be done by a small business, and just about anyone and be an international player. Sorry... I doubt the modern corporation is necessary to maintain life as we know it.
What, you're not big on Ayn Rand fanfic?
This is the voice of World Control. I bring you Peace.
In Canada, back in the good ol' socialist days of a Single Phone Company, if Bell did something greedy and stupid, all you had to do was call up the CRTC, (the Canadian Radio & Television Commission) and lodge a complaint. I'd done it a couple of time, and the problems magically vanished. That was back when I didn't mind paying taxes quite so much, because my government was actually doing something useful.
Then the Public Relations people for some greedy corporate start-up told everybody that a single phone system wasn't competitive and that we were in danger of all becoming communists or some stupid air-head shit, and the idiot masses were manipulated into pressing for Bell's system to be opened up to the glories of competition. And because people are fucking stupid in large numbers, easily swayed by emotional messages, I now have several awful phone services to choose from all of which charge too much and calling the CRTC no longer holds the kind of wonderful powers it once did.
Overarching governmental powers don't fit well for every situation, and in some cases they are downright bad. But when it comes to vital systems, like communications and medical care, I want a really big hammer to smash greedy, lazy, stupid assholes with. I USED to have that big hammer AND an efficient, affordable phone system, and now I don't. So thank-you very much for making my life that much more crappy with your stupid social experiment which I told you was going to fail back when you first jumped on the bandwagon in the heady, wide-eyed days of your first year at some ass-hat university where your young minds were molded. You know who you are.
-FL