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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.
Stop spreading FUD. Net Neutrality is about preventing corporate control, not granting government control.
Living With a Nerd
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.
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.
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
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.
[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.
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.
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.
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You know who I want to run for Senate? Jon Stewart.