Do You Know About "Net Neutrality?"
It is very disheartening to think that the Internet as we know it now will be taken from us without much fanfare.
So, I ask: Should cable and telephone companies be allowed to charge add-on fees to others for access to their networks?As Mr. Birnbaum says, "Put another way, if net neutrality passes, the AT&Ts of the world will be forced to pay for all of their equipment upgrades themselves and could not subsidize that effort by imposing premium fees for premium services. If net neutrality fails, they will be able to recoup more of those costs than they can now from the likes of Google Inc., Microsoft Corp. and other major users of the World Wide Web."
Do we want this?
This argument all boils down to who pays what for what and when?
If you like things the way they are then let your legislators know. We came very close to NET Armageddon in 2006, and it can happen again to an ill-informed Congress.
A wonderful (long) tutorial about this subject is the book, "The Future of Ideas" by Lawrence Lessig. This is for the serious readers.
But if you want to peruse some websites on "Net Neutrality, you can try these out:
You can start off with Wiki's definition of it Net Neutrality.
Or, you can try some of these websites:
SavetheNet.
Google's Version.
PBS' version.
and,
Common Cause's version.
Become informed and happy reading and let me know what you think?
Comments
Unfortunately it's nearly impossible to "boycott" companies that
practice these methods. If you're lucky you have a choice of maybe two
ISPs, unfortunately, most of the country, in more rural areas don't have
a choice. That's part of the reason why the US's average internet speed
pales in comparisons to other parts of the world, where countries are
smaller and building an infrastructure isn't nearly as daunting as it
can be in the states.
I think I would argue that these ISPs would very well be able too limit
what their customers can and cannot do, but disagree with the ISPs actions for a different reason. There is simply no competition, this creates a problem. If there was more
competition, and ISPs took the route of slowing down particular traffic,
and speeding up others, customers would be spending their dollar on the
company that is the most open and the market would shift it self to openness on its own.
The ISPs I think are in the right to choose who to serve so to speak, just the same as any resturant or night club can turn you away from their business because you're not up to dress code. It's private, and really they can do as they wish. However, there's other places I can go to to eat dinner and can wear sneakers, shorts, and a t-shirt any time of the year. It comes down to choice.
Just a simple Net Neutrality law I don't feel is enough protection. These companies will gut the law and hang onto every letter and game the laws just like the TelCos have done over the last 60 years. Instead, we should see that ISPs don't have any vested interest in the CONTENT that goes over their "pipes." Otherwise, they're "optimizing" their network for say Yahoo to come through because Yahoo has put up protection money like the mafia. They'd prefer Yahoo content over Google content. If you strip them out of the content realm, it doesn't make a difference who's doing what. I've seen this idea referred to as Structural Separation. This way, the company can still manage their own network and systems rather than the government (because no one wants the government running all this) and they can really put limitations and caps innocently.
Example of that, is that pretty much all consumer ISPs don't allow you to host a website. Other than possibly their bundled service with your email of a few megabytes of storage and a little bit of traffic. There's a perfect reason why you cannot host a site, is because they don't want you hosting your very own Ebay at home. Comcast's systems are not designed to support that kind of traffic loads, and because of the way cable broadband works, it that it slows down that end of the grid. It's not so obvious anymore, but earlier days of high speed cable broadband, you could see slow-downs at peak usage time, like 8PM during the week.
-Dan Kraus