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Chile First To Approve Net Neutrality Law
Sir Mal Fet writes "Chile has become the first country in the world to approve, by 100 votes in favor and one abstention, a law guaranteeing net neutrality (Google translation; Spanish original). The law states [submitter's translation]: 'No [ISP] can block, interfere with, discriminate, hinder, nor restrict the right of any Internet user of using, send, receive or offer any content, application, or legitimate service through the Internet, as well as any activity or legitimate use conducted through the Internet.' The law also has articles that force ISPs to provide parental control tools, clarify contracts, guarantee users' privacy and safety when surfing, and forbids them to restrict any liberty whatsoever. This is a major advance in the legislation of the country regarding the Web, when until last year almost anything that was performed online was considered illegal."
Residential customers don't need a web server, though.
And coming from places you would hardly expect, considering their history. US influence on the wane, and look how freedom really blossoms.
For justice, we must go to Don Corleone
I'm sorry, I don't believe a word you said. I don't believe you are from Chile. I don't believe your mother is from Venezuela.
You gave away your game when you said "excuse my poor english" since clearly you thought by writing like an poorly educated American would fool people into thinking you are from a Latin American country.
Even Chileans with "bad english" (as you say) know how to write English properly. You didn't make a single mistake that I'd expect to see from a native Spanish-speaker writing English.
Good try, though.
You are welcome on my lawn.
One thing that many people don't understand is that you have a VERY different Internet situation based on the country you are dealing with. Here in the USA, the Internet STARTED as a government project linking military and research universities together. Since it was government, the idea that it is paid for by the PEOPLE of the country implies that citizens should have equal access to it.
What changed is that once you start adding private companies to the network, you start to get into the area of who should have control over those private networks, even when they are connected into the primary Internet backbone. At this point, the section of the Internet that is run and controlled by the Internet is actually very small. So, we go back to the original definition of what the Internet itself is: A network of networks. From that perspective, each private ISP SHOULD have the right to set policy for that private network. Customers can choose their ISP in many markets, with the choice of cable or DSL service, or even fiber optic, and this SHOULD allow for a freedom from "monopoly" laws. If you don't like the policies of one ISP, you go to another, the same way proper competition SHOULD be.
Now, things get a bit tricky in other countries, where the government actually has paid for the majority of the network deployment. People constantly point to how low the installed broadband percentage is in the USA compared to other countries, but if you look at why this is the case, you see the US Government has done very little when it comes to getting the Internet out to the public, and how much money has been spent in the private sector to get the Internet to where it is today. So, in those other countries, if the government deployed the cables for Internet access, it makes more sense that the government has the right to set the policy for that network. The more the government does, the more of an accepted right it is for the government to set policy for that service.
Net Neutrality is a nice idea, but it requires that those who spent millions or billions of dollars to deploy an infrastructure give up their rights to control what they have put in place. In most cases, companies here in the USA have been pretty fair, where IF they have the bandwidth to allow fully unlimited use, they provide it, but those who are capacity restrained have been trying to keep people from using so much so heavy users do not limit those who use less.