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Al Franken's Warning On Net Neutrality
An anonymous reader writes "Democratic Sen. Al Franken weighed in on Net Neutrality over the weekend at the Netroots Nation conference of liberal activists in Las Vegas, calling it 'the First Amendment issue of our time,' and warning against Republican plans for less regulation. More from a blog post on CBSNews.com: 'Speculating on what the Internet could morph into under the Republicans' preferred lack of regulation, Franken asked the audience of bloggers how long it would take before the Fox News website loads significantly more quickly than the Daily Kos website. "If you want to protect the free flow of information in this country, you have to help me fight this," he said.'"
What about someone like me? I run a little website because I enjoy it and because there is a small cadre of people out there that enjoy reading what I have to say.
Now let's say Comcast says that unless I pay them $10 a month, they will slow down people browsing my site through their ISP. Then say Verizon tells me the same thing. And Cox. And Time Warner. Suddenly, my little $120 investment per year in my hobby is an order of magnitude bigger, and I can no longer afford it.
THAT is why net neutrality is important. It isn't to protect the big guys, it's to protect the little guys. ::generalization time:: I find it funny that republicans say they are always "for" the little guy, yet net neutrality is some kind of boogyman amongst them, waiting to come and murder their children.
It's really weird. And hypocritical.
Living With a Nerd
Nobody is talking about crippling anyone. Please stop spreading lies about what net neutrality means. Net neutrality only means that ISPs will provide nondiscriminatory service. Fox News has significantly more money than The Daily Kos, and would therefore benefit far more from a non-neutral net (as they could pay for faster service from ISPs across the board) than The Daily Kos would.
Palm trees and 8
how does more government control mean more freedom of information?
How did government control of the postal service mean more freedom of information (getting a letter from A to B in less than several months!)? How did government control of highways mean more freedom of movement (Fewer highway robbers and turnpike toll bandits)? How did government control/regulation of telegraph, radio, television, telephones mean more freedom of information? NN is not about "make content fair", it's about "make queuing/lining up for service fair"
Literally, one with as few rules as possible. A market scenario in which whatever happens in the market must be good, because the "invisible guiding hand" ensures that the market always makes the best decision.
In practice, nobody has ever had a free market. There's always some degree of regulation.
And, when the greedy bastards manipulate the system to get as much money for themselves and screw everybody else over, you get to see all sorts of reasons why the free market isn't such a good system. The entire banking fiasco of the last few years is what happens when the financial industry has as close to a free market as they can get.
According to strict, laissez fair capitalism, the BP spill happened because that was the optimal market outcome, and in the long term if it is good business to prevent such things, and if not, it will keep happening. I would argue letting oil companies self regulate gives them no incentive to actually fix things if it might impact their bottom line.
It's about as brutally Darwinistic as you can get, and its proponents like to think that any form of regulation and rules placed on industry is an impediment to their proper role of making as much money as they can. Effects on society be damned since in the long term, society will vote with their dollars and get the optimal outcome.
In short, it's something people hold up as in ideal, which never actually produces the results and good things that people like to ascribe to it.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
If this were really such a cut & dry partisan issue, why have 70+ democrat members of congress also asked the FCC to drop it's plans to impose net neutrality rules?
http://arstechnica.com/telecom/news/2010/05/73-democrats-tell-fcc-to-drop-net-neutrality-rules.ars
I'm not a big fan of the FCC having this power, and not because "I'm a republican," (I'm actually not, in point of fact), but because I see what moronic regulations the FCC has imposed on television & radio. If you look at the "content controls" they've enacted on those formats, is it all that hard to imagine that they'll soon be tasked with "content regulation" on the internet as well, in the form of mandatory parental controls & staggering fines on sites deemed to violate some obscure and arbitrary FCC ruling?
They do it with TV and radio today. If you give them the same control over the internet, I won't be surprised to see them attempting the same regulations there within a few years. I'm all for the concept of net neutrality, but I'm not convinced the FCC is the body best suited for 'regulating' a 'free and open' internet. I'd like to see a dramatic limitation of their powers to impose anything more than "thou shalt not filter or shape traffic," at the very least.
This reminds me of something that really bugged me about this story on CNN. When CNN reported basically this same story yesterday, the link from their front page read "Former SNL Alum talks Net Neutrality" or something like that. Then you click, and it turns out they're talking about Senator Franken. It struck me as really disrespectful to refer to him that way. It would be like referring to the governor of California as "Former Body Builder Schwarzenegger" or our 40th president as "Former Actor Reagan".
Yes, Franken started out as a comedian, but he's now an elected United States Senator and should be afforded the same respect as any other Senator. Of course, the amount of respect we give to our senators tends to be vanishingly small (in most cases deservedly so), but we at least give them the dignity of referring to them by their proper title.
I'm probably overreacting, but I was surprised to see a supposedly serious news organization do something like that.
Oh I agree 100% (was just joking above). I always think the best example though, for explaining net neutrality to people unfamiliar with it is to talk about video on demand services. When I'm trying to teach them why a neutral net is important, I point to the fact that, for example, both Netflix and Comcast offer video on demand. But only one company is an ISP and in a position to affect the quality of the other's business by capping or slowing bandwidth. This tends to help people grok net neutrality faster than aligning it with the interests of facebook and flickr.
meep
Right, my point is that painting it as some sort of partisan issue is kind of misleading when elements of both parties are actively fighting it. Franken is doing this, and your commentary on the "republicans say..." does this too. It distracts from the real issue at hand, which is that the telcos are throwing money at everybody they can to make sure this goes away.
Once again, I like the notion of net neutrality, but am reluctant to believe that the FCC won't abuse its regulatory power down the line as soon as some well-intentioned PAC says "but think of the children, there's boobies on the internet!" And suddenly, rather than shaped traffic, we have websites being fined out of existence for "harming innocent children." I would prefer that - if FCC gets control of this - that Congress explicitly limit the FCC's charter in this space to simply be "imposing net neutrality, with no extra authority to impose future regulations or restrictions not authorized by Congress."
You've got it wrong. Comcast controls everything because they enter into contracts with local governments that forbid other cable providers from coming in.
Effectively in this example, Comcast controls everything because the government can't keep it's hands off.
"linux is just DOS with a UNIX like syntax" -- Galactic Dominator (944134)