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Cisco, Motorola, and Other Companies Take Aim At Net Neutrality Rules
angry tapir writes "FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski announced last month that he would seek to develop formal rules prohibiting Internet service providers from selectively blocking or slowing Web content and applications. However, 44 companies — including Cisco Systems, Alcatel-Lucent, Corning, Ericsson, Motorola and Nokia — have sent a letter to the FCC saying new regulations could hinder the development of the Internet. A group of 18 Republican US senators have also sent a letter to Genachowski raising concerns about net neutrality regulations."
Anything the government does is evil, restricts freedoms and is inefficient by definition.
So please, stop this evil FCC man in his tracks.
In other news, Google moves to Russia.
People replying to my sig annoy me. That's why I change it all the time.
I don't understand the position of the equipment makers in this objection
No, new regulations could hinder THEIR DEVELOPMENT of price per byte structure which they've been salivating about for a LONG TIME. Greedy pricks. Green-wash as you are able, we will see through it and hold you accountable.
Given how the Telcos are the largest customers of those companies, it's not particularly surprising which side they support.
Filtering, packet inspection, etc, requires newer and more powerful networking gear.
When there's little choice in what providers are available in your area, there's very little reason for ISPs to provide better service. Internet users need to be able to move to viable alternatives when Comcast and friends implement anti-net neutrality measures. If you don't like your p2p being throttled, there should be somewhere else to take your money. Get rid of those local monopolies; they are more trouble than they are worth. There are a lot of changes to the current system that would improve the situation that involve little more than discouraging monopolies and stronger enforcement of current laws.
Sigs are too short to say anything truly profound so read the above post instead.
Well if both the Corporations and the Republicans are against it it must be a good thing for the Public.
When government picks winners, groups that get called "lobbyists" and "special interests" exercise their Constitutional RIGHTS to petition the government and try to affect the outcome of the government rule making.
Don't like it?
Don't give the government the power that attracts those groups.
I cant wait until the only websites that an ISP will provide are the ones that bribe the ISP with enough money.
I see it now, the new internet, with 3 websites, facebook twitter and youtube!
Total lack of regulation, in the name of not "hindering development" is what got us into the banking crisis. Yeah, let's screw up the internet too, by allowing it to be the wet dream of corporate interests. Without regulations to help keep the playing field level, it becomes "might makes right."
It's the whole ISP-level QOS "google please pay us extra for people browsing YouTube for it not to suck" deal that's tricky and takes fancy hardware.
The World Wide Web is dying. Soon, we shall have only the Internet.
If a chunk of the GOP is against something from the start, it's probably the right thing to do.
Then let the "development" of the Internet it be "hindered". If IPTV takes another decade because new business models have be created to adapt to a neutral network, then so be it. I am happy to wait. If the capacity available to me grows more slowly because there are fewer deal making opportunities for ISPs and content producers then so be it. I've got enough bandwidth. Corrupting the relatively simple model of the existing network by letting Disney et al. carve it up into lucrative morsels to be passes among the elite is not appealing. Whichever content providers don't like it can just keep their stuff on cable until we drop our cable service as we've dropped our landlines. Their stuff just isn't that important to me.
The capitalist claims the market is agile. Adaptation is supposed to be swift. I believe this. I therefore believe we should permit the market to prove this by preventing the aforementioned companies from molding the Internet into models they are already comfortable with. Let them adapt to a neutral network. The Internet isn't broken and doesn't need to be fixed by Time Warner. The Internet will not fail if Ted Turner doesn't get a cut of my ISP's revenue.
There you go; an argument for Net Neutrality from the conservative perspective.
Lurking at the bottom of the gravity well, getting old
Right now they throttle people who actually use their connection to its fullest because there's little monetary incentive for the ISPs not to do this. They are for profit corporations, if it is profitable to throttle people, that is exactly what they will do. The system needs to be set up in such a way as to make it profitable for them not to throttle or otherwise restrict people's connections not just a simple legislative band-aid but actively attack the root causes of the throttling and general anti-net neutral policies.
Sigs are too short to say anything truly profound so read the above post instead.
The thing is, they can't price gouge on text with net neutrality legislation in place.
Furthermore, they want to make sure that they encourage the Republican party to draw the line in the sand and say that anything the FCC wants to do to encourage competition will cause the Internet to meltdown, so that the FCC has a partisan minefield to wade through if they want to get anything done.
As soon as the renublicans get behind it, you KNOW it smacks of evil world domination.
Yeah, new regulations would hinder the development of products and services that control and benefit from the control of the Internet. I.e. content control, throttling bandwidth I already bought, etc.
Fuck off, parasites.
bush and co lacked the good sense to put an end to this house of cards, and poured petrol on it while playing with matches.
And now we have hero Obama, plunging the USA into debt never seen before. what happens when china stops bailing you out?
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
We have already spent man hours developing... features that would cripp... smothe... smooth out traffic flow, and you're about to regulate the (perceived) market away.
ELOI, ELOI, LAMA SABACHTHANI!?
http://news.cnet.com/2100-1036_3-6075472.html
But he isn't a trusted expert on anything, right?
My rights don't need management.
Being able to extract more cash from the user base without adding anything of value by using artificial scarcity.
They've already stolen $300B in the fiber optic debacle.
Now they need to do bandwidth shaping on an antiquated US Internet trunk so they can charge for fast tracking the fat cats and slow tracking the peasants, but at higher prices, of course, because all that shaping requires new, EXPENSIVE equipment which will require higher access fees to get an ROI on that expensive equipment.
Running with Linux for over 20 years!
There is no way to make open, high speed connections more profitable than filtered slow connections. None what so ever. So while you may not want a band aid legislated onto the system, you probably do want a fast, unfiltered internet connection. I sure do, and I don't think I should have to pay hundreds of dollars a month to get it. I have no problem paying for my connection, even paying more than I currently do, upto roughly 100$ a month. As long it's fast and unfiltered. Anything else is a sham at best.
Net Neutrality rules could hinder development of the Internet in directions that are harmful to the public. Unlike the parties mentioned above, I feel that hindering harmful business practices is actually a Good Thing.
"In prison you just have to shut your eyes and take it. Here you have to shut your eyes and give it."
Wait, what is the problem with price per byte? It seems pretty fair to me, then I don't have to subsidize people who use more than me, and people who use less than me will not be subsidizing my bandwidth. As long as there is competition, then the prices will be fair.
Of course, if you live in a place where there is only one internet carrier, then the prices might not be fair, but that is a separate problem.
Qxe4
Don't be absurd. Sure, it is all kinds of fun to blame Clinton and his sinister army of welfare negroids for all that ails you; but that doesn't pass the laugh test.
At best, fetishization of homeownership raised the default rate among the poorest buyers, who should have been renting, by a modest amount. Are you seriously telling me that the mighty US financial industry lost hundreds of billions because of a modest, and highly predictable, increase in default rates of relatively small loans, often government backed, to known credit risks? Was that all it took?
And that same thing somehow drove banks to be so eager for mortgages that they pushed brokers to overlook obvious falsifications in loan applications, just so they'd have more mortgages to securitize? Or fueled a speculative real estate boom, massive building of high priced suburban housing developments, and a historic housing price/per capita wage ratio? All that, just a squalid bunch of poor people with mortgages made of government cheese?
The only reason that a modest bump in defaults(that, if it were actually a product of state action) should have been largely focused on known-bad credit risks, with smallish mortgages partially state backed, could have upset the whole system was that it was already a grotesque speculative casino. Any properly constructed financial system could have shrugged that off.
Where is a link to the original letter sent to the FCC that lists those 44 companies? I prefer to buy products from other companies whose pro net-neutrality companies.
It would be an imperative that companies explicitly state their position up-front from now on in order to help the buyers make their decisions.
A universal price-pet-byte structure a la the 56k days has little, if anything, to do with net neutrality.
This is one of the things of portions of the net neutrality crowd I don't get. "Net neutrality" is -sometimes- used as a buzzword to mean "ISPs doing anything I don't like" due to people sloppily mixing up their agendas. Truthfully, a price-per-byte structure may not be a bad thing. The people that are the biggest problems for ISPs are those that max their connections 24/7. While I agree that ISPs shouldn't advertise "unlimited" if they aren't or cannot provide "unlimited," as I understand it there are a often a minority of people use the greatest amount of bandwidth. A price-per-byte structure, if properly implemented, could result in reduced monthly payments for grandma and a higher portion for the guy with the strange habit of downloading "Linux ISOs" all the time. I don't think this is -necessarily- unfair, and I think most of the people that complain about this are likely the (like me) nerdier people that use their connection more. It would also give people an incentive to make sure their PCs weren't clogged with trojans that turn home PCs into spam servers or zombies.
Net neutrality only enters here when it is not universal, i.e., some content is not pay-per-byte depending upon its origin; perhaps content directly delivered by the ISP would fall under this category. But I don't see why that is -inherently- wrong. Desirable for us nerds? Probably not. But the fact that we are used to one pricing scheme doesn't give us the moral right to that pricing scheme.
You say "greedy pricks" here for a business trying to maximize its profits, yet you do not seem to think of yourself as a "greedy prick" for wanting to minimize your expenses. I am not fan of the monopoly status ISPs have been granted by the state governments and various laws in place, but you and I are not much different than they are.
"When the government picks winners and losers in the marketplace, the incentive to invest disappears,"
By granting monopolies government has already picked winner and losers. There is no competition in broadband and the lucky few who have a choice in broadband providers has the choice between the cable company and the phone company. A duopoly isn't competition.
I wish the letter with the name of those 18 Republican senators had been linked to if nothing else, I bet these politicians don't believe in competition or free markets either.
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
maybe you should learn the difference between to and too.
"A group of 18 Republican US senators have also sent a letter to Genachowski raising concerns about net neutrality regulations."
They make it too easy to figure out who's in the pocket of big business.
'Impossible' is a word that humans use far too often. -- Seven of Nine
Seriously? A Chinese spam? I'm heading off to sleep imagining your server [tntshoes.com] melting into a pile of slag from being hammered with thousands of wget scripts, while your ISP is bombarded with messages detailing the senders' gratitude for your personal support of the Falun Gong, the Free Tibet movement, bringing the Dalai Lama back from exile, the Tiananmen Square truth organization, the Roman Catholic church, and Taiwanese independence, along with your material contributions of arms and hard currency for the opposition of the illegitimate government of the People's Republic of China, the assassination of senior Communist Party officials, and the gunning down of PLA soldiers.
According to Motorola CEO Greg Brown, Net Neutrality is, in principle, a good thing.
So I was surprised to see them in the list of supporters of this letter. It makes no sense for Motorola to allow the carriers to arbitrarily exclude devices from their networks. For those who don't know, Motorola has a love-hate relationship with the carriers. We can't just sell phones to a given carrier's customers - we must first sell it to the carrier, who then decides key things:
As an employee of Motorola, it constantly frustrates me that the carriers have the ability to make or break a phone, regardless of it's technical merits or feature set. If the carrier doesn't want a compelling feature to work on their network, it doesn't. It makes no difference if we make the best camera phone in the business if the carrier decides the user has to pay for each picture taken with the phone. It makes no difference if we have the best phone games on the market if the carrier decides those games won't ship on phones bought by their customers. You get the point - the carriers get in the way of Motorola's business model.
I hate posting anonymously, but I'm paranoid about the repercussions this might cause at work.
Translation: Major infrastructure vendors don't like new regulations that'll hurt the development of their bottom line. Nothing to see here folks.
A group of 18 Republican US senators have also sent a letter to Genachowski raising concerns about net neutrality regulations.
That pretty much guarantees it's good for the public.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
I would like to see the 44 companies listed against net neutrality in order to not buy their products. I will only buy products from companies that are pro-net-neutrality.
It's obvious, the consumer needs to participate in structuring the future by speaking with his buying power. Buying power is a very important voice. I also intend on using my buying power when buying my next PC, TV, MP3 player ensuring the manufacturers are pro-digital-freedom and have clear ANTI-DRM(Digital Rights Management) positions. This implies that I won't be buying the "Kindle ebook reader"(built-in DRM), and the Sony TV(built-in DRM), and the Sony Playstation(built-in DRM).
Eh, the entire thing was clearly manufactured. All those ARMs just so happened to reset while interest rates were 4x the level they were made at. People who were quite happy making their payments suddenly had them skyrocket, so the bank took the home, then cried and sobbed to everyone who listened about how terrible those mortgage contracts they signed were and how they shouldn't have to be held to them and how if everyone didn't drop everything to shred the contracts they'd throw a temper tantrum and destroy America.
So they got the home AND our tax money.
The clearly part? The next wave of ARM resets are beginning. But the Fed rate is so low that the prime rate is down to 3.25% from 4.5% a year ago. Great for the ARM holders, bad for the banks who are already jonesing for the Fed to start pumping up rates in time for these resets so they can take the house and come back to us crying and threatening us until we give them even more tax money.
My finger slipped you insensitive cod!
I agree charging by the amount of bandwidth used may, just may, be better but for years broadband providers sold unlimited service. The contract I signed with Time Warner for my cable, now it's Comcast, did not have any sort of limits. Now it did say the speed would be up to, I think though I don't recall for sure, 1.5MB. There wasn't anything about traffic shaping, blocking, or redirecting though. If ISPs oversold capacity it's not the fault of the users, it's the ISPs own fault. When I go to an all-you-can-eat buffet I refuse to accept the restaurant from preventing me or anyone else from eating all we can.
A price-per-byte structure, if properly implemented, could result in reduced monthly payments for grandma and a higher portion for the guy with the strange habit of downloading "Linux ISOs" all the time.
The problem with this is that incumbent broadband providers try to prevent any competition that will offer more bandwidth. How many tymes has news articles been summarized and linked to on slashdot because some incumbent provider tried to stop competition whether cable, fiber, wireless, or any other broadband? An example was in northeastern Utah a few years back. A group of communities got together to build their own Broadband Utopia. Of course the incumbents did all they could to stop it and they were finally successful in having the state government pass a law barring local governments from selling access, instead they have to sell to other service providers. The 14 cities that make up the Utah Telecommunication Open Infrastructure Agency built an infrastructure that will provide "100 megabits per second" to start with. That infrastructure can be used to deliver cable TV, net access, phone services, or whatever a person could think of. Because of it Comcast was "forced" to bundle "broadband, digital cable, and VoIP service for $90 a month in all of Utopia's footprint" and I doubt they are losing money. I say "forced" because they only had to do it if they wanted to continue to provide services in the area otherwise people would not have been willing to pay the higher costs.
perhaps content directly delivered by the ISP would fall under this category. But I don't see why that is -inherently- wrong.
You don't see what's wrong? Try this, say only Company X provides broadband in your area, so you have no other choice for broadband, and you want to search the web. So you head over to Google and if you can connect it is slow because Google didn't pay your ISP. Or your ISP supports one political party and blocks traffic from all other parties? Do you still not see a problem?
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
Ok, then tell me where are you going to get your CPU? Neither AMD nor Intel have Anti-DRM stances (http://www.infoworld.com/t/hardware/content-in-lockdown-199) and (http://www.pcworld.com/article/121027/intels_pentium_d_equipped_with_drm_capability.html) and even if these plans weren't 100% realized, the fact that the company would invest R&D resources into it assures you that they are not anti-DRM.
If you don't buy products from companies with DRM chances are you won't have a game console (Ok, you might have the Pandora if it ever ships or the GP2x Wiz, but all the Wiz is good for is playing emulators), good luck finding an MP3 player that doesn't have some built-in DRM (even if it is only that the company paid MS, Apple, or another company to play DRM-d tracks) unless its a cheap Chinese clone with questionable build quality. Etc.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
Blocking or slowing Web content and applications (bandwidth throttling) is NOT innovation.
The concern I always have when we discuss the idea of government regulation designed to enforce "net neutrality" is how neutral will these regulations actually be? My experience with this type of government regulation is that it usually favors some group (usually a corporation or group of corporations) over some other group (often individuals and groups of individuals). The other thing these regulations almost always do is strengthen the government at the expense of the common man. I favor the idea of net neutrality that is most often supported on this board, but I have no confidence that that is what we will get from government regulation.
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
I had a nice ISP...
They were bought by EarthLink.
So I changed ISPs to another nice ISP.
They were bought by a different company.
That company was then bought by EarthLink.
I changed to a third ISP.
A while later, they were bought by EarthLink.
In any unregulated market, natural monopolies will arise as bigger players buy out the smaller players, and they will go after smaller and smaller players as their marginal ability to increase their business is eroded by their own success in controlling the market.
Unless you are suggesting regulating ownership of ISPs in a given area in the same way that newspaper and media ownership was regulated by market so that there was not a single monopoly news source, I don't see this changing in such a way that your "everyone should have a choice of providers" utopia will ever come about.
-- Terry
... the identities of the major campaign contributors for those 18 senators? And how much those contributors would really like to see net neutrality go away? I'm sure they've, you know, casually reminded those senators how many jobs they've got in their states that could disappear should net neutrality be allowed to be FCC policy.
CUR ALLOC 20195.....5804M
I said it has it's roots in Clintons push to give everyone a house, not that it caused it - this mess is just a continuation of that same piss poor policy, of relaxed credit checks and government backing of bad debt. clearly any criticism has you foaming at the mouth, but put that aside and try finish reading my post.
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
Each day the Republicans make themselves less and less relevant to the actual people of America. They are extremely relevant to the corporations though, and the have election power due to their rhetoric about conservatism. They are nothing of the sort. They helped usher in the Corporate Fascist America. Research Gerald Celente on youtube. We are being had by the corporations. Now they are working to remove our freedom of speech through non-network neutrality. Pony up those fees if you want anyone to hear you. Even then, they may just not like you and turn you off anyway. Network Neutrality is about access, information and thus democracy. It's kind of like corporations being able stop you at the voting booth on election day and asking: "Will you vote for Obama or McCain" Anyone voting for the non-corporate party would have to pay an access fee to place their votes. The problem is that they both are the corporate party.
How about the Republicrats actually respect the constitution and it's implied democracy.
Single Payer
Citation needed.
Then citation is needed for where the Constitution of the USA authorizes federal government interference in medicine.
I asked for citations, so here's my own. Western PA Coalition for Single-Payer Healthcare lists 5 polls taken this year. Of them the Kaiser Health Tracking Poll says 58% favor and 38% oppose single payer health care. A Time Magazine poll says 49% favor and 46% oppose single payer insurance. None of the 5 polls say 60% of the people polled prefer single payer health care.
What is needed to reduce the cost of medicine is not socialized medicine but competition. While normal or average health care costs have gone up in markets where there is competition cost have declined. Look at Lasik eye surgery, in "1999 the average price of LASIK was well over $2,000 per eye." By 2001 1 in 5 surgeons were offering Lasik for under $1000 per eye. Costs have also dropped for cosmetic surgery. Costs were driven down too because of Medical tourism.
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
Funny how most public officials blather on about competition and free markets -- as long as their pimps^H^H^H^H^Hcorporate campaign donors are exempt from having to compete.
'He who has to break a thing to find out what it is, has left the path of wisdom.' -- Gandalf to Saruman
it was the Clinton administrations wet dream that everyone no matter how poor should own their own house that is the root cause of the current situation
And Bush's ownership society had nothing to do with it? When Clinton left office the budget was almost balance but under Bush it ballooned into the largest deficit ever. Though I hate to admit it Clinton cut government and Bush expanded it.
Republican presidents expanded government and a democrat shrank it.
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
fetishization of homeownership raised the default rate among the poorest buyers, who should have been renting
The poor should be renting and paying someone else's mortgage as well as paying them profits instead of paying their own mortgage? I can see renting when home prices are skyrocketing or if the renter is only going to be there a short period, but that's it. If you rent someone else is profiting off of you.
Are you seriously telling me that the mighty US financial industry lost hundreds of billions because of a modest, and highly predictable, increase in default rates of relatively small loans, often government backed, to known credit risks? Was that all it took?
Too many lenders made mortgages for more than borrowers could reasonable afford, I don't expect borrowers to know how much they can afford any more than the bank that lends them money, banks are supposed to be the experts. It didn't help that government encouraged mortgage companies to make those mortgages. Building regulations don't help keep cost down either, and may drive costs up.
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
I generally support a more libertarian (small 'l') view of government intervention - less is more. But the ideas of 'Net Neutrality, when it was being proposed, seemed to me to be one of those "necessary evil" things that government needs to do.
We all support less government intervention, except in the matters that are important to us. Upholding order (making murders illegal, etc.) and some sort of contract laws falls into that category for nearly all of us but aside from that, the priorities differ. You find net neutrality a necessary evil, I also do but find it a lot less necessary evil than, for example, providing food and shelter to those who aren't able to earn it themselves.
And somewhere between us is the line between left and right wing. And everyone on the other side of it is evil, ignorant, hasn't thought things through, is certain to ruin our country and will lead it to destruction if they win the next elections.
Wait, what is the problem with price per byte? It seems pretty fair to me, then I don't have to subsidize people who use more than me, and people who use less than me will not be subsidizing my bandwidth. As long as there is competition, then the prices will be fair.
Do you have any idea how much it actually costs AT&T to transfer a byte? It's zero dollars. They don't pay for peering. The only time it costs them money for you to transfer anything is when the total traffic volume gets so high that they have to install more fiber.
So here we are and most people have ~8Mbit connections and say 5% of users are heavy users. Let's compare the two models. In model #1 everybody pays the same amount (say $50/month), the heavy users use a lot and AT&T has to pay out some money to install more fiber, with the result that everybody (including the light users) ends up with 100Mbit connections. In model #2 the light users don't pay as much, but they still have to pay $40/month because really the ISP applies that much of your monthly fee to network maintenance and profit. Meanwhile, since the upgrades still cost the same but the light users aren't contributing to them at all, the 5% of heavy users have to pay $240/month in order for everybody to get 100Mbit connections. And, of course, they probably won't do that. Instead they'll cut back their usage. And then nobody gets 100Mbit connections.
This is the problem with metering. When everybody contributes equally to the upgrade costs, nobody has to pay an excessively large premium. If only the heavy users pay then either the heavy users are unfairly subsidizing faster connections for the light users, or the faster connections never arrive.
Part of the problem is ISPs advertising false promises of "unlimited use" plans for flat monthly rates in conjunction with eye-popping speeds and then hiding what "unlimited use" really means in pages of contract fine print which states that speeds are not guaranteed, throttling or packet shaping may be used, etc. Perhaps it is time to start regulating some basic statistics of the data plan being offered; as for example with credit cards contracts where the annual percentage rates are printed front and center in larger fonts and conspicuous boxes. That way everyone will better understand what is being bought and at what price. At the very least, they should not be allowed to use the word "unlimited" in combination with any sort of advertised speeds unless they can get within some acceptable margin (i.e. 90%+) of that speed all of the time.
Caps work pretty well. I've said it before and I'll say it again.
I live in Australia now, and I've got a 10 GB monthly cap on a 24mb connection. It costs me about $AU50, I could get substantially more for not much more, though I don't need it so I don't. If I go over my cap I get shaped(down to 256k as I recall), but not charged extra, but I don't generally do that.
I know this idea sounds scary, but unlike nearly every ISP in the US, I get what I pay for. I get as much as my connection is capable of giving(obviously there's some attenuation with distance from the exchange and latency to US sites and all that).
It works for me, and it works for the ISP because they get more money if they sell more capacity, and they're up front and neutral about it for the most part(there are occasional deals with certain providers that their traffic doesn't count towards your cap, but it doesn't affect service delivery in any way).
The current system in the US does not work, and cannot work, because the only way to ISPs to increase revenue is to increase the number of subscribers on their current infrastructure which leads to the problems you currently have. If they increase capacity their subscribers will just use it all up and they won't make any more money. It's hard to give up totally uncapped bandwidth, but simple economics should show you that no for profit company can ever deliver on that promise in the long term. In the old days no one really used much so they could sell things they didn't think you'd use, but everyone uses it now.
Net neutrality _means_ internet access to the whole internet, unfiltered, uncensored, ungoverned, including all ports, protocols, and pr0n therein. Amen. We pay the local connection fee to the ISP. The content handling is mostly paid for by advertising and click-thru-purchases, as I understand it. Shouldn't they be mandated to explain EXACTLY how they are throttling the service we are paying for, instead of obfuscating that information? What, exactly, is the difference between throttling something to the edge of usability and flat-out denying access? Please, tell me. Money trickles down, or companies go out of business. That's how it works currently, and you can see LOTS of revenue being made as-is. The internet is not going bankrupt under the current management. Mind you, 18 Republicans support deregulation. REPUBLICANS! When you begin to charge a fee for any larger segment of the internet, you are sliding headlong down the slippery slope towards information control. When you begin to throttle the connection of those deemed 'undesirable' where EXACTLY do you, sir, draw the line of desirability? Aha. Are the corporations and lobbyist groups the guarantors of online rights and privileges? Or is the internet a greater entity, a medium, which must be protected as speech is? We are deciding these tenets of our future society now. I would prefer a world of equals to a world of powerful tyrants, but perhaps you'll sell me something shiny instead. These corporate lobbyist groups and their Republican handlers don't have a great track record when it comes to honesty or altruism. "you and I are not much different than they are" - MindlessAutomata indeed! You are an apologist for the corporate excesses that have bankrupted our world economy. I'm not damning ALL corporations, I'm damning the IDEA that corporate rights are synonymous with human dignities and that they are granted the rights in our constitution. They are not living beings. They are not citizens. They are profit motivated collections of groupthink consumerist elites hell bent on world domination. Spin it as you like. A corporation cannot vote, cannot be drafted, cannot own a firearm or be shot dead by one. They do not require, and should not be granted, such inalienable rights as we are. Our only hope is in rallying behind organizations like the EFF to fight for our future rights online and the very shape of our future society. They are our champions. Not congress. NOT Comcast! They are willing conspirators of control, if for different motives. They cannot be trusted to act benevolently, now or in the future. As for the mindless automata, willing to trade freedom for convenience, may your simple dreams be the nightmares of those who went before. Repeat history as you will.
I don't work for the big N anymore but used to be a project engineer there.
The situation you describe is certainly Nokia's main problem in getting to USA markets. In most of the world Nokia is the largest cellphone manufacturer but the business model is different. Here in Finland you buy phone and the contract with network provider separately from each other and can later change one without changing the other. In this system, manufacturers don't need to negotiate with network providers and I personally think it is preferrable for the reasons stated by the parent.
So far, the net has been neutral. And it's worked pretty damn well.
Probably moves more data and generates more revenue than phone, television, movies, newspaper, and radio combined.
If companies like Cisco, AT&T, an Motorola can't compete and aren't money in the internet business the way it is now (i.e.: neutral), they should go do something else. Because thousands of companies will step up and make money on the neutral net.
Oh, they *are* making money. They just want to make more. Here's a suggestion: get a different business plan, ya friggin' idiots. When you need the government to create a captive market through regulation, YOU HAVE NOTHING. Man up, ya pansies. You're just just looking for a government handout. Maybe hire a friggin' Engineer as CEO, at least they're not such whiny bitches looking for the government to make a lame-ass business plan work.
What if you paid by the Byte, but had a guaranteed access to 100Mbps up and down? There would be a discount on Bytes D/loaded when the bandwidth was lower, if it perchance happened. Would that be worse than suffering from node saturation on the average cable TV/DSL plant with a guaranteed "Bandwidth"?
I'd rather buy by the Mbps on a true 100Mbps pipe than get "unlimited bandwidth for all" on a shared node.
Residential Ethernet FTW.
Check out http:http://www.dccn.net/...
Eastern Washington rocks...
So Nokia's press release about being more open was just a feint and we need to look under the hood to see what kind of shit they are really trying to get away with. Wasn't Nokia the one that had a 'Microsoft Friend' on the inside be its representative to the W3C's HTML5 committee. Needless to say, the 'Microsoft Friend' helped make sure that open video standards got cut out of the specification.
Nonsense. The push to relax requirements for mortgages may not have been the wisest policy, but it was a minor part of the problem. The root of the problem was on Wall Street, not Main Street.
Scenario 1: Marginal borrowers default. Banks foreclose. Either qualified buyers purchase the property and the housing market shrugs it off, or the bank takes a hit and decides to reduce their risk or raise the rate to compensate for the risk.
Scenario 2: Wall Street packages mortgages into complex derivatives that no one can possibly evaluate, gets the Fed to allow extreme leveraging, and no one on Wall Street cares whether the mortgages will be paid because they expect to sell the derivatives before the first payment is due. Banks are happy to look the other way and ignore the risk because, like Wall Street, they don't intend to own the loans more than a few days; no one intends to make money the old fashioned way by collecting payments on loans, they go for the quick buck by packaging and selling mortgages to some other sucker. Who plans on selling to an even bigger sucker, and so on, in the largest Ponzi scheme the world has ever seen.
If the lending banks had been limited to a leverage of 10, and held the loans, the bad loans would have been handled with little effect on the economy. If commercial banking had remained separate from investment banking, the bad loans would not have effected the economy. If the investment banks had gambled with their own private money, the economy would not have collapsed. But the investment banks went public, and took much greater gambles with shareholder's money than they ever took with their own money. Congress, and Republicans and Democrats deserve blame, removed the firewalls between types of banks that limited the spread of damage from bad investments.
The economy could handle the bad loans. It couldn't handle those loans leveraged 30x. That leverage turned a twitch into a landslide. Multiply that leverage at one step by the number of steps in the Ponzi scheme, and it's huge. Gamblers are smarter than Wall Street; they have an old saying: "Don't bet more than you can afford to lose." Wall Street made HUGE bets, because if housing prices went up, the bankers got the bonuses. If housing prices went down, the shareholders lost their money, not the bankers. And no matter what happens, Wall Street gets bonuses.
makes it easy to figure out which side is working for the man on the street, and which is serving commercial interests. Thanks, Republicans! Without your involvement, I may not have had a clue what to think about this here "Net Neutrality".
and they were finally successful in having the state government pass a law barring local governments from selling access, instead they have to sell to other service providers.
It is no wonder the USians consider the government inefficient. It is so corrupt that it convicts its uncorrupted parts for the crime of performing a public service.
Unless you are paying for every byte you sent in that message, you are a hypocrite.
Just as the insurance companies are quaking in their boots at the thought of Public Health care; the cable/telco duopoly needs government competition. The government created the problem, by limiting access to the last mile, and offer Public Internet to its citizens. Unrestricted Internet access should be the mission of the US, because it enables free speech. If corporate America has to suffer, so what? This is the same corporate America that has a steady stream of jobs leaving to other nations. Why should we as citizens continue to prop them up?
Of COURSE the people who make packet sniffing and filtering technology, backhaul switches, and high bandwidth components compatible with it are going to be against ANYTHING the prevents them from selling their rediculously expensive sniffing and filtering gear.
NATURALLY these companies are going to be ALL FOR letting firms be able to buy their kit and use it. If filtering was made illegal, then Cisco, Alcatel, Lucent, etc would have a hard time justifying their highly profitable expensive switches vs the competitors systems which are simpler, streamlined for high bandwidth, and cost a fraction to deploy, and for which their own similar switches still cost more to subsidize the development and sale of the big gear.
There is no contest in life for which the unprepared have the advantage.
Instead of all the hundreds of posts on whinging on Slashdot, we should probably be writing Mr. Genachowski ourselves and let him know that he has our support.
I support the Slashcott and will not be reading or commenting from 2/10/14 to 2/17/14. Beta is steaming pile of dog shit
The GP is just using the standard "CRA caused the economic meltdown" argument, shown repeatedly to be completely untrue but raised again and again for two reasons:
1. It allows conservatives to blame the recession on poor (and often implied to be black) people who lost a couple generations worth of savings on homes they couldn't afford rather than white Republican bankers who sold bad loans first to homeowners and then to investors and made millions of dollars.
2. It allows libertarians to blame the recession on government regulation, so they can continue believing their theory that government regulation is the source of all economic ills.
So to repeat the standard refutations of this:
* The companies who had issued the most subprime loans weren't CRA-regulated banks, but mortgage brokers that weren't subject to most banking regulations.
* The CRA specifically stipulated that CRA loans had to use the same lending standards as non-CRA loans. People who got CRA loans were just as qualified as any other borrower. The default / foreclosure rates on CRA loans are comparable to those of non-CRA loans issued by the banks subject to the CRA, suggesting that the lending standards were effective at screening unqualified borrowers.
* The real purpose of the CRA was to eliminate redlining, and in that it appears to have been at least partially successful. The upside is that a lot more loans are being made in predominantly black neighborhoods. The downside is that a lot of banks decided to shut down their operations in those neighborhoods instead, and check cashing and payday loan companies have set themselves up in their place.
I am officially gone from
Net neutrality is Marxist, Socialist garbage!
Government needs to stop restricting business and let business expand and create jobs. Net Neutrlity restricts business!
Impeach ALL democrats!!!! Impeach b.o.!!
remove the czars!!!
NO amnesty for illegal aliens - they are criminals by entering and / staying illegally!!!!
NO taxpayer funded health care expansion!!!!
Pay down the deficit! By using all of the salaries of the democrats, independants, socialists, marxiosts, communists!!!!
\\
Stop spending money!!!! Stop monitizing our debt!!!! It erodes the value of the dollar!!!!!
Less government intervention in our lives and businesses!!!!
Lower taxes!!!
If you rent someone else is profiting off of you
Not sure about the US, but in the UK there still exists council housing (despite the best efforts of the last Conservative government to sell it off), which is available to the poorer people and is partially subsidised by the government. And, just because someone else is profiting, doesn't mean that it's not a good idea. If you rent then you have no liabilities like a mortgage, you aren't responsible for maintenance, and typically have more freedom to move on short notice if you get a good job offer elsewhere.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
I download much more than 10 GB a month. Still, I think I could live with a cap if it were reasonably generous or if there were designated off-peak times that didn't count against the cap.
For example, I signed up for capped service from a usenet provider. They provided (depending on the plan, this could vary) a day per week when my downloads don't count against my cap. So, every Wednesday at about 1 in the morning, I had my usenet client set to fire up and start sucking down every task I had queued up over the previous week. It would saturate my connection for the next 22 hours before I had it set to shut down.
If my ISP capped me except for, say, 1AM to 6AM daily, I could live with that. I'd have to automate quite a few things but that would be no big deal.
In fact, if better tools were available for scheduling such tasks, I could imagine that it would be possible to substantially "even out" network traffic over time. People could get used to a Firefox add-on, for example, that popped up a window saying "The download you have requested is large. Do you want to proceed now or schedule the download for a period when your internet access is not metered by your ISP?"
But I can't live without at least 4 uncapped hours a day. If I were asked to restrict myself more than that, I'd just have to pony up big bucks for a business account.
"It is no wonder the USians consider the government inefficient. It is so corrupt that it convicts its uncorrupted parts for the crime of performing a public service."
Very well said. The government, especially the feds, can't even be trusted to do the things that a government should, in principle, be doing. I'm in favor of net neutrality from a conceptual standpoint. However, I don't trust Washington D.C. to pass any legislation that actually benefits the average U.S. citizen . . . especially if it might hurt corporate profits. These days, no legislation is good legislation.
An explanation of net neutrality for engineers.
Here's how an engineer thinks:
"This part costs 10 cents. My manager wants to make a 50% profit. Therefore, we will sell this part for 15 cents."
Here's how a sales manager thinks.
"Hmm, let's take a peek into this guy's wallet. If he's broke then we'll give it to him for free and release a press statement about how nice we are. If he's rich then we'll try to take every last penny he owns."
Note that price, cost and value have no impact on the sales manager's thought process. Opponents of net neutrality want a sales driven world where they can freely charge any outrageous price (both overly high and overly low).
Well said TopSpin!
Without net neutrality laws, content providers, and network operators both have economic incentive to keep bandwidth scarce.
Network operators, thanks to monopoly or duopoly status, can keep their network capacity scarce, and still charge high prices, while deferring costly upgrades.
Content providers can lock out smaller competitors by purchasing "prioritized network capacity" at prices smaller content providers can not afford.
It's a lose-lose for consumers and the internet as a whole.
Look at the progress in industries where "capacity" was abundant - like silicon transistors in chip manufacturing. Chip designers paid little attention to transistor count knowing that future process technologies would allow their designs to be made in a cost-effective manner. This allowed the industry to produce very powerful chips at very low cost.
Similar progress will be made in network capacity and speeds to meet the demands of the network users, but this can only occur if the network treats all traffic/content equally.
-ted
By this logic, government regulation of the telephone networks should have prevented the internet, yes?
I think the statement "could hinder the development of the Internet" should be changed into
"could make us compete for business we already have and force us to serve many more customers than just the top 10 broadband providers.
I'd be shocked if Comcast and AT&T and Verizon **didn't** ask these other companies to send the letters.
" However, 44 companies — including Cisco Systems, Alcatel-Lucent, Corning, Ericsson, Motorola and Nokia — have sent a letter to the FCC saying new regulations could hinder the development of the Internet."
Don't these companies have a Traffic Shaping solution?
I suggest it more about the Hindering of there Pocket Books not the Internet.
You can get a whole lot more(I think 80 gig plans are around $70 and you can get hundred gig or more for around $100), I just have a really basic plan because I don't download much, some plans will include an off peak time(still usually capped but with a separate and larger cap).
The point of it all though is that it's the only way it works. In the US if an ISP adds 10% more capacity, its existing users instantly gobble up that capacity, they've spent money and incurred an additional cost, for no additional revenue. Only mentally defective business people make decisions like that.
On the other hand with a cap, you pay for what you use, which means that if an ISP increases capacity, they can generate more revenue(presuming they have the demand of course). This makes financial sense.
I used to live in the states, and I've had uncapped broadband(at substantially lower speeds for what, at the currency exchange rate at the time was about the same cost). I've also had capped broadband, because that's all they've got over here. It took some getting used to, and I had to change my downloading habits a bit, but in the end it's been good.
I get about a hundred times more download speed, and barring the occasional outage or problem with peering partners which every ISP suffers from, I actually get what I pay for. I can download at that speed up until I hit my cap, no shaping, no throttling, no nothing. I get what I pay for and my ISP can survive.
I know we'd all like to get as much as we want of everything, and it was stupid of the US ISPs to have started selling those plans when they knew they could never actually manage it if everyone used it, but none of that changes the simple economics which mean that US ISPs cannot continue to offer unlimited internet and still survive. Personally I'd rather have to pay for my use and get what I paid for as opposed to having them throttle my use anyway and not even give me the option of getting what I want.
You very clearly have a weird, unusual, juvenile understanding of the word hypocrite.
Qxe4
In other words, actually only sell what they realistically can support. Not some trumped up "unlimited" broadband per month. They say this but if you actually hit that capacity and hold it for a straight week or so they silently slow you down. That is BS. Then they say its not BS since its in the ToS. EVERY company has this in their ToS. There is ALWAYS legalize to keep consumers from EVER using the products they buy any way they wish; this in turn is what kills innovation.
One of the issues of "innovation" is that companies seem to think that only large corporations with unlimited finances can innovate and this just isn't the case at all in the world of PCs.
im running a small business offering it services, web development, hosting to individuals and businesses and i am one of the direct customers of these fuckers. not to mention that im also a web developer, leaving aside being an end customer of some of the devices a few of those companies make, like cellular phones.
from now on i will put each one of those bastards into my blacklist and will avoid them like the plague. serves them only right for working against the very thing that made internet possible and made me able to make a living and offer services to people. not only i will avoid them, but also i will advise my colleagues, my family and my close circle to avoid them too.
do the same. its 2009. the time to tolerate those who work against online freedoms is long past by.
Read radical news here
Have a look at Gemei / Dingoo.
Have a look at smartdevices.com.cn.
These devices are made in China, but they are quality goods. I'll be honest. I don't know if The above devices have DRM stuff somewhere in it, but these devices run Linux and have forums to modify them to a degree which possibly makes the devices DRM-free.
you are one of those morons who mods people down just because they express VALID points in their own style.
morons like you are causing a lot of good comments getting modded down because you spot a few 'foul' or 'hard' words among a whole bunch of text and then downmod it as 'troll'.
well, i have two words for that kind of attitide :
fuck that.
enjoy.
Read radical news here
its about progress.
violating net neutrality may be good for a number of companies and their shareholders. but it harms internet a lot in the long run and in general. you can not count the number of businesses, individuals, sectors that could be harmed if we dont have solid net neutrality.
the mere proposition of an anti net neutrality concept is beyond STUPID itself :
imagine a world that private companies, not the government builds and maintains roads and collect tolls from those who use the roads. imagine that those companies are allowed to decide 'what happens on their road'. imagine they ban some routes, some cargo, or some people from their roads, as their profits require. what kind of world would it be ?
there is NO difference in between what these morons are proposing and this. its basically this in plainspeak : "we have built infrastructure on PUBLIC land, we are running the main communication lines for entire nation/world, we monopolize entire regions/states/countries through our licenses granted, but we want to decide what happens in 'our' networks".
the number of fallacies, amount of foolery and bastardiness in this proposition are innumerable and endless :
- first, it is NOT your fucking network. all your infrastructure was built on land that was leased to you by the nation, the public. the land STILL belongs to them, its on lease, and its still public's property.
- second, most of you have MONOPOLY licenses that cover entire regions, states, even countries. you basically are the sole controllers of the flow of information and business over those region/state/countries' networks. you can NOT freehandedly decide whatever you want to do in those monopolies, because it will directly affect the freedoms of people living on those areas. and no, moronic statements like 'hey, there are competitors providing dialup' doesnt count - having to go with a 128 kbit dialup provider because they are the only competitor to a big 4 mbit connection provider that cornered the market, or has a competitor license does NOT count as 'freedom of choice'.
- third, internet is a strategic resource now. its no small scale operation, in some european countries and some countries around the world most of the government functions are conducted in between the ministries' sites and citizens' computers in their homes or businesses. because it is very effective to do as such, saves hoards of cash and time for both government and the citizen, and increases efficiency. a lot of private companies are even using that method of conducting business. so, internet is no hobbyists' or enthusiasts' pastime anymore. it IS an important tool for the running of daily life. you can NOT decide what happens on your network, because it would mean leaving people's freedoms in the hands of a private decisionmaker in a goddamn company. we didnt fight independence wars and mounted revolutions and established democracies for that.
so, its not about business or profits. its about progress. just like the roads, just like the american revolution and french revolution, just like a democracy, its about freedoms sometimes.
and dont excuse me - the freedoms of people and public are ABOVE profits or interests of any private interest group or company. companies are there to better the lives of people, not people to better the companies' profits.
Read radical news here
Julius.Genachowski@fcc.gov
Please consider emailing the FCC chair with your concerns and questions. Don't let the evil bastards be the only ones who have a say in this.
Steve O.
I am really, really exhausted.
So... The real problem is that they have a local monopoly then.
Currently cities make exclusive deals with ISP's over an area, if they were allowed to compete freely they would have much less incentive to "abuse" since competition would wipe them out.
Second, net neutrality regulation is a solution searching for a problem. We do not currently have any issue with this, we have not had it for decades. So why fix something that so obviously isn't broken?
Third, give credit to free market, which pretty much killed DRM (in spite of government's DMCA). It was not government that forced apple and other online music vendors to kill DRM, it was simple competition. Even Comcast's torrent problem (the closest thing to violating any net neutrality regulation), was completely killed by free market. People did not liked it, and they backed out after public's outrage and potential customer loss.
Forth, there could be legitimate reasons to have non neutral networks. For example, if google decided to give away free internet access that would happen to give their services a boost. Why not?? I would "buy" it. Who are you or the government to tell me (or google) that we are doing something wrong? isn't it a matter that only concerns Google and me?
Not sure about the US, but in the UK there still exists council housing (despite the best efforts of the last Conservative government to sell it off)
The US has some public housing projects, where do you think all the gangs are in Chicago? There are problems with them though, other than crime. With low income housing projects the area gets blighted and run down, which leads to crime. They concentrate whats bad into one place.
just because someone else is profiting, doesn't mean that it's not a good idea.
I agree but why pay someone else's mortgage and profits when you can be building up your own equity? And unlike mortgage payments, unless the mortgage is an adjustable mortgage, rent goes up year after year after year. After 5, 10, and 20 years while rent has continued to go up the mortgage payment has stayed the same. You pay more in rent than in mortgage payments, and what do you have to show for it?
If you rent then you have no liabilities like a mortgage, you aren't responsible for maintenance, and typically have more freedom to move on short notice if you get a good job offer elsewhere.
Sure moving can be easier if you rent but if you own you can still move. Then you can hire a property management business, many real estate agents in the US can do it, to rent out and maintain your old home. Property management companies charge around 5% of the rent, depending on how much the rent is. You can have renters pay your mortgage on the old home building up equity on it then buy a home where you move to. If you move again just do the same thing each tyme.
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
No surprise Motorola's part of the group that wants to strangle the open internet. In Canada they have a near monopoly on the Cable "DVR" box, and it's the worst bit of crud I've ever had to use.
Motorola should be legally forbidden from ever writing software again. Can't have torrents competing with their crud, can we? (Actually the hardware bites too, standard definition recording looks worse than VHS)..
Bah!
Bavarian Purity Law of Rice Krispie Squares: Rice Krispies, Marshmallows, Butter, Vanilla.
It pleases me that "throttle" is a synonym for "strangle"
And the arguments are the same old "if we can't have it our way, then it's going to cost you more" nonsense that they trot out every time things look like they won't be going their way. I strongly suspect that if the corporations had it their way, the internet would be just like television - 200 "channels" of crap that some corporate group decided that you wanted to view - without your input, of course.
The internet was built out at public expense, remember? The explosion of internet sites and small businesses was only possible because it was a level playing field. Now that some things have matured into real profit generating businesses, the corporations want to take over and lock everyone else out. Regardless of what stories they tell to get their way now, if they can they'll use every possible way to increase their profits - and blocking or throttling competing businesses would be the first but not the worst of what they'd do. The "piracy" or "counterfeiting" problems are what they use to give their arguments legitimacy.
The media corporations have distorted their areas of operation so badly already - if you think about what they've done to their own businesses you'd see that letting them run the internet would be a disaster. Think about it; let's take music as an example: There's the RIAA stomping around but they don't write or record any music and not one penny of what they "recover" goes to the people who do. The RIAA is just the record company's sock puppet - and those record companies don't write or perform any music either. The people who actually write and perform the music will be stuck paying back contracted expenses for the rest of their careers and thanks to some relatively new "work product" laws they don't have a voice anymore.
So let's just do independent productions and bypass that nonsense, right - nope, now we're talking about the specialty of the recording industry - distribution. They've enjoyed having this locked up tightly for years and now that this control is slipping they're fighting back in every and any way they can. Here's how it "works": suppose you and your friends wrote and recorded the perfect album and you want to take your place in the spotlight - if you want to avoid the RIAA members, you'll need to pay to have your album recorded, mastered, and duplicated. Now let's sell them - your local "record store" won't touch your album because they depend on having access to the catalog of music distributed by their distributor(s). If they put your disk on the shelf they might find that they can't get any stock on the next big hit from Hollywood. So let's see if we can get a distributor to handle it - nope. They depend on handling the output of the RIAA companies and if they handle your album they'd risk running into low or no stock problems on the RIAA products. It's not worth it, so they won't handle your album either. You might be able to sell your album at the local crafts fair but it won't be in the record store or on the radio - those distribution and promotional venues are closed to you.
There's quite a few "media moguls" who live very well on the fees they collect from their member companies and artists. If these artists or independent artists were able to promote and sell their albums independently, the media mogul's gravy train would jump the tracks. So here's this internet thing and it works great at getting music from the artist to the fan directly - this doesn't line their pocket at all so it MUST BE STOPPED.
The "sue everyone" plan isn't working out too well so they're going to move on to filtering and controlling the internet. What the media moguls want is simple - they want the same control and profit from music distribution as they've always had and the internet needs to pay its share, too. So will we let this happen - are you going to sit back and watch while it does, or are you going to get off your tail and get involved?
"new regulations could hinder the development of the Internet" ...I wonder what has hindered it up until now?
Since you are writing in English, you should be aware that the term used by U.S. inhabitants to refer to themselves in this language is "americans" not "USians".
If I were to write in your language, I would use whatever name your people use to call themselves rather than something us foreigners made up for you.
The Lasik is an elective procedure, in that the person can choose if, when and how is going to be done.
Not many things are that way in medicine, and that's where the market doesn't work. No one can make such decisions with a broken leg for example. I guarantee you that if Lasik were used in repairing an eye injury, it would never have dropped in price.
I don't appear to have any mod points today, else I would have attempted to mod your comment up.
It would appear that Business overthrew our government one day when we were sleeping, and democracy was replaced with corporatism - except under this version of corporatism, Business has displaced almost all other interests.
Orwell: "In a Time of Universal Deceit, telling the Truth is a Revolutionary Act"
they are the ones that are in a position to pick winners and losers.
Government pout them in that position, and can take their advantage away.
If this behavior is allowed, we will see the ISPs picking winners and losers amongs websites as well.
Which is why under the current circumstances I support net neutrality. Under a free market thought it would not be needed.
We can see this starting to happen already with ESPN360.
Isn't ESPN360 a content provider and not an ISP? I don't know, I don't watch sports and would rather be active instead of passive, but if ESPN charges for access to some content that is no different than any other content provider that charges for some content. The "Wall Street Journal" charges for some content as does "The Economist" and I have no problem with ESPN doing it. Heck Slashdot has subscribers paying.
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
This means that only the subscribers the ISPs that agree to pay ESPN360 get to view the content.
Okay, but when ESPN360's audience drops it's only their own fault. They shouldn't be stopped from only allowing visitors from ISPs who pay. At the same tyme ESPN shouldn't be bailed out when their business model fails. Equality of outcome has never worked and never will.
I would hate to be unable to read Slashdot because only customers on certain ISPs were allowed access without an option to pay directly for the content.
I would hate it too but if Slashdot's owner wanted to try it they should be allowed to. Then when Slashdot goes down the tube while competitors' offerings grow it'll be their own fault. And I'll clap for the lesson in economics some people will have. After all why do you think online services AOL, CompuServe, GEnie, and Prodigy are no longer around? They could not compeat with the internet. The WELL however is still online because it offers what people are willing to pay for. Actually The WELL could be one of those competitors of Slashdot. Though technically not strictly for nerds The WELL was founded by and has as members computer pioneers.
Falcon
Should there be a Law?