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Al Franken Makes a Case For Net Neutrality
jomama717 writes "In a post titled 'The Most Important Free Speech Issue of Our Time' this morning on The Huffington Post, Senator Al Franken lays down a powerful case for net neutrality, as well as a grim scenario if the current draft regulations being considered by the FCC are accepted. Quoting: 'The good news is that the Federal Communications Commission has the power to issue regulations that protect net neutrality. The bad news is that draft regulations written by FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski don't do that at all. They're worse than nothing. That's why Tuesday is such an important day. The FCC will be meeting to discuss those regulations, and we must make sure that its members understand that allowing corporations to control the Internet is simply unacceptable. Although Chairman Genachowski's draft Order has not been made public, early reports make clear that it falls far short of protecting net neutrality.'"
The only technology they understand is which side of a TV camera to stand in front of.
Al Franken standing in front of a TV Camera? You don't say.
The guy can make a good arguments without resorting to shouting or out right ignoring the public. I wish my Senator would come around to the county fair and talk to his constituents like that.
TFA makes some good points and breaks down "Net Neutrality" to the lay person who just wants to use the internet. You should try reading it.
Well, technically you can at least adjust the government if you don't like it.
There's no such chance with companies, unless you happen to have enough money to control them.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Stop spreading FUD. Net Neutrality is about preventing corporate control, not granting government control.
Living With a Nerd
Don't be a tool. This isn't an either-or situation where we get either oppressive government control or oppressive corporate control. Ground rules simply need to be laid that the corporations can operate in which bar them from abusing consumers.
Simply declaring them Title II carriers would help, since they'd be blinded as to the content and unable to bill piecemeal or throttle abusively. As it is Verizon, AT&T et. al. will get their way and we'll be left with a broken wireless internet that serves entirely the desires of the corporations providing access and not the people who actually use it.
So you've never heard of "voting with your wallet"?
Perhaps many people could do so in the form of choosing a different one of the total one broadband provider in their area.
As oppposed to an FCC "run by conservatives for conservatives" where we get, what, exactly?
So you think the only options are "Government Abuse" and "Corporate Abuse"? Perhaps you shouldn't sit idly by while corporations take over the government, like you're so willing to let them do.
Man, you're just an irrational idiot. I don't know why I'm responding to you.
He is the only politician I don't hate. I don't hate too many things but lawyers and politicians [normally one and the same] are my 2. I think because Franken was not a lawyer before becoming a politician is why he seems to actually care about what is going on. The rest? Just there for a way too big paycheck [and not always from uncle sam]. I nice quote of his from a while back Sen. Al Franken: "I May Not Be A Lawyer, But Neither Are The Majority Of Americans" Gotta love this man.
Net neutrality is an issue because Internet access has become a near-monopoly service. Few people today buy residential Internet connectivity from someone other than their monopoly telco or monopoly cable provider. For both of those monopolies, Internet access is a tie-in sale - both want to sell customers a "bundle" with telephony, video, and Internet connectivity. In some areas, there's only one provider.
We've already lost one deregulation battle - the right to use any ISP you want over the monopoly telco wires. The FCC changed the rules on that back in 2003. Until then, telcos had to provide raw DSL connections from an ISP to a customer at prices no higher than they charged their own internal ISP. Once the FCC dropped that, the ISP business became a monopoly.
Further back, telcos used to be regulated common carriers. We lost that back in the 1990s.
"Net neutrality" is the last stop before total monopoly control.
Wireless doesn't help. "Deregulation" also allowed wire-line and wireless carriers to merge, which is why AT&T is back in the cellular business. Nor does cable/telco competition. Mergers in that area are coming. In the end, you'll have one connection to the outside world, with a boot ready to step on your tube if you get out of line.
http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20101118/10291211924/the-19-senators-who-voted-to-censor-the-internet.shtml
What are you talking about? Everyone (except California) LOVED Enron. Enron fell apart because they were corrupt and eventually their losses didn't match their earnings. They were raking in tons of dough. They just happened to be spending it too quickly.
There are very few industries where people can vote with their wallets. I live in an area with LOTS of internet options*. I can vote with my wallet between AT&T and Time Warner. Who happen to provide roughly equivalent non-service and old products. Their main competitor is Netflix, who SUPRISE, SUPRISE, they would like to run out of business by providing "tiered service". I'd say that Netflix's success shows that customers HAVE voted with their wallets FOR net neutrality.
Unfortunately, AT&T et. al have massive lobbying power and a massive anti-competitive political and legal framework on their side.
* as compared to areas that only have one
I don't think he's a buffoon, but, you're right, it is a shame that people tune him out. Maybe those who tune him out should take this opportunity to rethink their position on the guy. So few politicians are willing to defend net neutrality it's really nice to see someone buck that trend.
meep
Excuse me, but who do you think controls government? Over the last 30 years, there has been a steady erosion of checks and balances, middle class earning power and quality of life, and civil rights and freedom. At the heart of all of this has been the wholesale purchase of our government by commercial interests. At this point in the game, big business writes law, polices itself (or doesn't as the case may be), and has the vast majority of our representatives in it's pocket (in fact, forcing the need of multi-million dollar political campaigns for offices from Dog Catcher on up, ensures that only candidates who've been vetted by the money interests even get a chance to play in the political arena.) If government sucks, its because big business bought it, and now we're being governed by self obsessed, greedy capitalists who put personal profit ahead of justice, dignity, or the future of human advance.
If you're at all interested in government that isn't a brazen travesty, let's declare business a religion, and separate it from government so that the two might function apart as designed and immeasurably improve the human condition. While we're at it, we might also consider teaching ethics and social responsibility in our business schools... just a thought.
If you want to "prevent corporate control," there are better ways like forcefully divesting the telecoms of their ISP businesses. Make Verizon sell off FiOS as a new company that has to license Verizon's infrastructure like any other business.
[sigh] I'm going to explain this as simply as possible.
There are people who want to censor the internet. Some of them are in government, some of them are in industry. There are also people who want to keep the internet free. Some of them are in government, some of them are in industry. Those of us who want the internet to remain a medium for free speech should oppose the actions of the first group, wherever they appear, and support the actions of the second group, wherever they appear. The choice is not "government control vs. industry control" but "censorhip vs. freedom," and net neutrality serves the "freedom" side.
If you oppose net neutrality, you are on the side of the censors. If you support net neutrality, you are on the side of freedom.
That's it. That's all there is.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
Conservatives are superficially lumping network neutrality in with the rest of the anti-Obama/government/socialism rhetoric, but the issue is far too complex to capture in partisan soundbites. This Bill Moyers broadcast from a few years ago (well before Obama arrived on the scene) explains the network neutrality issue extremely well, representing multiple viewpoints, including business, politics, consumers etc. The broadcast is about an hour long, but I have yet to come across a better way to get the complete picture of what network neutrality is all about (each of these videos gives a useful illustration of a key tradeoff): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DmlpfXzSfhg>Part 1 Part 2 Part 3 Part 4 Part 4 Part 6 Part 7 Part 8 Part 9
I suppose the one thing we can expect a comedian-by-trade to understand is....
On the contrary, I have always found a strong correlation between a sense of humor and intelligence.
If Slashdot were chemistry it would look like this:Cadaverine
The problem is that by allowing corporations to grow into monopolies and mega-corporations who have diversified and subsumed entire markets, the only way to vote with your wallet is to move into a cave and start knocking out stone axes. Take any major industry... food for example. If you do a little research you find that it all boils down to half a dozen super corporations, that control everything from the seed that's planted to the packaging that arrives at your grocery store. What are you going to do? How are you going to vote? Do you honestly plan to stop eating at restaurants or buying the 95% percent of the food on the shelves that contains the wheat, soy, or corn products produced by those mega-corporations? You know the ones, that are receiving billions of dollars of your tax dollars in subsidies for the privilege of better controlling your life. Go a little further. Those same companies are also producing the ethanol that is mixed with the gas you drive your car with, or the soy oil that is used in everything from fried food to industrial solvents, or even the chemicals derived from wheat and corn that find their way into everything from textiles to plastic bottles to computers.
WAKE UP! If you spend a dollar anywhere, any more, you voted for them. Voting with your wallet is now a quaint and sadly naive concept. The time for sleep walking is over, if you want a vote you'd better get real clear where your votes are currently going.
The guy can make a good arguments without resorting to shouting or out right ignoring the public.
You have to consider that the people asked a question and let him respond without shouting or interrupting. On one hand this shows a dialogue with some actual interest in hearing what the other person has to say. On the other hand this is a key capability every politician needs: to be able to talk for a very lengthy amount of time and identify with anyone. What he did was good, he achieved some common ground with some very passionate opponents. But that's what politicians do. He's good but he's not accomplishing some impossible feat -- merely exhibiting good politeness and genuine interest in his constituents (opponents included). Franken had the attention of people that wanted to talk to him and what you saw were two parties genuinely interested in what the others had to say. Franken can lose his cool and act just like other politicians.
I wish my Senator would come around to the county fair and talk to his constituents like that.
Okay, I must correct you here. That was at the state fair which is a very huge thing in Minnesota and still a three to six hour drive from some of the more remote parts of Minnesota (like where I grew up). I don't think Al Franken makes it out to county fairs.
Now, I'm not disagreeing with you here and just to put some more positive spin on Franken, when I last went home my grandfather started rambling about all the times he had called up Franken and spoke with him on the phone. Thinking that my grandfather had finally lost it and was entering some sort of dementia, I asked my grandmother what he was talking about. She said he would wait on hold for thirty minutes and get about ten minutes of the senator's time every now and then (my grandfather is a retired dirt farmer living between Porter and Taunton). I was still skeptical but he showed me follow up letters from Franken's staff, hand signed by Franken explaining why Franken had voted on some bills that my grandfather had phoned him about. I was pretty impressed.
TFA makes some good points and breaks down "Net Neutrality" to the lay person who just wants to use the internet. You should try reading it.
On this point, I agree. I think Franken's on the right track here although I think he could have added another two sentence paragraph about limiting what specifically the FCC would be doing to address the obvious government control rebuttal a little more thoroughly. I am glad to see Franken writing this letter, though a little sad to see it in the Huffington Post and not a more mainstream publication.
It's odd but my favorite moments of Franken are often very different than most people's.
My work here is dung.
Net Neutrality isn't going to stop QoS, it is stopping the ISPs from double dipping... going to netflix and saying "hey if you don't pay us 100k a month, we are going to bandwidth limit _your service_ to all our customers tomorrow" The ISP then limits netflix traffic in their customer pool, and pushes their video on demand service....
This IS the issue at hand.
If we don't get some type of net neutrality, what happens when Joe the Plumber who runs Plumbers-For-Hire.com starts getting strong armed by their ISP? Hey Joe, we noticed that you are getting kinda big in your city... if you don't pay us an extra 1,000 bucks a month, we are going to block our customers in your city from viewing your site...
QoS on the other hand, is saying that _any_ type of VoIP packet traversing our network gets tagged priority 1, urgent and important (IE low latency and error free), and any bittorrent traffic will get tagged priority 7. This way VoIP on their network doesn't start experiencing latency if their network becomes saturated by torrent traffic.
BAD QoS is when the company says ComcastVoIPService gets priority 1 while Skype gets priority 6... now they are unfairly limiting a competitors product, of course they won't have problems giving skype a priority 1 tag for you if you want to pay an extra $5 per month... and as long as Skype is paying them handsomely for the no latency privilege.
No surprise. There's a strong correlation between being funny and being intelligent. You have to be both intelligent and observant to come up with jokes that people find funny.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
Of course, when *all* ISPs do this (and it will happen) how exactly do you vote with your wallet?
I normally don't reply to trolls, but in case anybody takes your comment seriously, consider this.
How about this, I'm trying to have a skype video call with aunt Betty, but keep getting video and audio packet loss cause people like you keep hogging up all the neighborhood bandwidth by watching your netflix, youtube, and other media streaming services when you all could just go out and get DirecTV or something. And little Johnny down the street says you're killing him in online gaming cause his ping is so high he's unable to snipe the enemy sniper in the battles on 2fort in Team Fortress 2. That's not all. Dave next door says you're causing him to get up very early in the morning, say 3 AM-ish so he can get decent VPN connection speeds to the work VPN server in order to get work files uploaded and synced on time.
It's so easy to blame everybody else for your connection issues, when in fact what you and countless others have been doing is causing grief with everybody else. And who's at fault? Not you, Betty, me, Dave, or little Johnny. The people at fault are the ones managing our connections, the ISP. They're the ones that are suppose to be managing this shit correctly by keeping their networks maintained, upgraded when necessary, using something like a round-ribbon load balancer to keep neighborhood bandwidth usage per peer fair (basically evenly distributed), and not deliberately cripple services in order to justify their yearly price increases.
And look at it this way. The ISP sold me a up to 1.5mbps / 256kps DSL connection. So, who are you to say what I can and cannot use it for, and when and when not I can use it? I paid $53/month for this connection and I'm going to use it how I please. Just as you want to use it how you please. You want to watch your netflix and I want to watch a web cam of a christmas light setup from somebody in Boulder, Colorado.
Net Neutrality is an idea to prevent ISPs from deciding that netflix and youtube traffic to their customers isn't cost effective, so they either throttle it way down, basically giving them the lowest QoS priority, unless they get paid extra by charging you additional fees to be able to use said services, and also billing netflix and youtube for the traffic going to their customers. Doesn't make sense since we the ISP customers pay the ISP already for said internet service, and netflix and youtube, etc... pay their ISPs for internet service. So, everything is already paid for. But its the greed of the ISPs that want to change the rules.
This space is not for rent.
It does not necessarily follow that he actually has a developed sense of humor
No, but it does necessarily follow that a writer and comedian for SNL in the 1970s would not only have had to have a sense of humor, but some intelligence as well.
A joke about s0204 and dihydrogen oxide isn't exectly a Jeff Foxworthy joke. If you think a joke about s0204 and dihydrogen oxide is like a Jeff Foxworthy joke, you just might be a redneck!
Free Martian Whores!
My apologies, I assumed /.ers would be relatively familiar with this idea. Sources should have been provided and I'll also retract 'studies' for articles. Also note that knock-off is different than counterfeit; I'm not saying the latter is helpful, just the former.
http://www.techdirt.com/ for general stuff on this topic.
http://www.csmonitor.com/2003/0909/p09s01-coop.html
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/05/business/05scene.html?ex=1333425600&en=bfb7593c76d8b819&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=faking-it This one is interesting as it provides a guilty conscience aspect that eventually would have people buying the brand names to feel better about themselves.
I think the basic point is that people who knowingly buy knock-offs were never going to be initial purchasers of the brand name goods. But they would buy them once the price became palatable to them. No sale was 'lost' by
People in cars cause accidents....accidents in cars cause people
No one has yet given me a technical definition of network neutrality that allows me to block or filter spam.
Spam is already illegal. Enacting rules or legislation that explicitly allows for filtering of traffic deemed illegal based on pre-existing law would be trivial enough.
If your words do not mean EXACTLY what you want, and have all the exceptions clearly encoded, you have probably made things worse rather than better.
While I believe your example is poor, in this, you are absolutely correct.
The problem is, there really are legitimate uses of QoS, and defining regulation that enforces net neutrality while *also* allowing for legitimate use of QoS is extremely challenging. For example, a rule stating "source/destination-based QoS is illegal" is too simplistic, as it still allows protocol-level discrimination (Skype is the obvious example here). If you then say "well, then make protocol-level QoS illegal" means you've made *all* QoS illegal, and that's bad, too (deprioritizing bulk transfers behind real-time traffic is the primary need QoS fills).
Fundamentally, I'll bet net neutrality regulation would have to go the way of obscenity laws... ie, the "I know it when I see it" approach. Which, obviously, has massive problems of its own.
IPv6 provides a way for applications to request handling without delay throughout the WAN.
Packets have priority levels. Applications not needing top priority, e.g. email, can voluntarily downgrade their priority.
Video and audio applications could upgrade their packet priority.
The key word here is applications, not ISPs.
Both content sources and recipients are already paying ISPs differentially for bandwidth capability differences and or data transferred
amounts, so why is anything other than application-volunteered packet prioritizing needed?
If various applications (e.g. someone's web server implementation) are cheating and saying all their traffic is video, there is a rather large
and sometimes effective tech community shunning mechanism in place.
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
Somebody mark this down. I think we may have the most idiotic statement made on Slashdot in calendar year 2010.
I don't know how much you know about Jerry Lewis' films, but when it comes to mise-en-scène, his films make Woody Allen's movies look like radio. The Ladies Man is studied in graduate level film courses along side the films of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger as examples of director as auteur, where one man controls everything about a films artistic vision. Being a right-wing "libertarian" douche, you probably think he's highly regarded by the French just to piss you off.
As far as the Marx Bros, those scripts by George S Kaufmann were much more about verbal gymnastics than "slapstick". In fact, except for the brilliant pantomime of Harpo Marx, there's very little slapstick in the more important Marx Brothers films.
You Ayn Rand types aren't really known for your sense of humor, but to be fair, you provide plenty of comedy for the rest of us.
You are welcome on my lawn.
There is no evidence. The "he hates the Constitution" and "he's a socialist" retorts are boilerplate right wing labels for liberal and moderate politicians and candidates, or knee jerk dog-whistle political responses to legislation they dislike. I wish I had a dollar for every time I've heard it uttered that Obama has "shredded the Constitution". These same people didn't say a word when Bush called the Constitution a piece of paper. Ironically, most of these "Constitution protectors" hate the 14th Amendment. But you're labeled a patriot if you propose repealing it, not a Constitution hater.
Tired of being "punished" by the Slashdot $rtbl since 2002. I'm now over at http://soylentnews.org/ .
Sure, I'm a socialist. I believe that public education, health care, and infrastructure are good things to have. Capitalism is a nice theory, but taken to its extreme, you get crap like the latest wall street meltdown.
"We returned the General to El Salvador, or maybe Guatemala, it's difficult to tell from 10,000 feet"