net neutrality being decided by morons
For the dozen of you that don’t know what “net neutrality” is or the ridiculous debate currently going on in Congress, let me sum it up for you. Big telecoms and cable companies want the ability to charge more money to big companies to provide more bandwidth for them to deliver bigger and bigger files to you, faster. Everyone else, and everyone who knows anything about anything, wants “net neutrality” which would mean universal bandwidth simply shared by everyone and everything on the internet on a first-come first-served. It’s the only way to prevent the big corporations of eventually controlling your access to content, favoring or restricting your access to those companies that pay the most, crushing the little guys, and disabling your ability to do things like share videos on YouTube.
You can get a VERY thorough explanation of all the issues on Wikipedia, if you’re interested. You SHOULD be interested. The FAQ on SaveTheInternet.com is also very informative, though a little biased. If you still don’t understand, The Ninja explains it using a great analogy, a bid wall “made out of the shredded 1st amendment.” (By the way, I LOVE askaninja.com.)
So, there have been all these bills going through the House and most of them are ill-informed, trying to establish some better guidelines for how telecom should work in this new era. The committee is made of 22 Representatives, mixed D’s and R’s. Some of them have tried to make net neutrality into law. On June 8th, the House passed the COPE Act(Communications Opportunity, Promotion and Enhancement Act of 2006) but it doesn’t have any provisions for net neutrality. Originally it did, apparently, but then was revised to have it removed. It’s all a big cluster fuck. So the Snowe(R)-Dorgan(D) bill was introduced as an amendment the Telecom Act adding very basic net neutrality provisions. Of course, the committee split down the middle on the vote, 11-11. Idiots.
Sen. John Kerry actually opened his mouth and said something meaningful and useful after this vote, and then Sen. Ted Stevens (R-Alaska)(Actually the longest serving Republican currently in the Senate = OLD) opened his mouth to explain why he voted against it, and well…
There’s one company now you can sign up and you can get a movie delivered to your house daily by delivery service. Okay. And currently it comes to your house, it gets put in the mail box when you get home and you change your order but you pay for that, right.
But this service isn’t going to go through the internet and what you do is you just go to a place on the internet and you order your movie and guess what you can order ten of them delivered to you and the delivery charge is free.
Ten of them streaming across that internet and what happens to your own personal internet?
I just the other day got, an internet was sent by my staff at 10 o’clock in the morning on Friday and I just got it yesterday. Why?
Because it got tangled up with all these things going on the internet commercially.”
You can find the whole text here, and the audio to prove he actually said this shit here.
We live in a country run by idiots. Republicans and Democrats, all corrupt, greedy, power hungry men, in the pockets of the big corporations, and without the knowledge and experience necessary to make informed decisions. The fact that people like this are writing laws to govern how things that they don’t understand work, is the reason why our system is broken. Whether it’s net neutrality, video games, copyright law, patent law, anything to do with changing technology and information, these people are simply NOT qualified.
I don’t feel like going off on a whole tangent about politics in general, but I will say the that I am now officially “politically atheist,” and am taking myself out of the game. I am happy to write to Senators and tell them to vote for net neutrality, but I am never going to vote again until somebody stands up and tells this system to go fuck itself. I don’t care who you are or what you believe in - we are fucked unless something BIG changes very soon. Fucked.
As for net neutrality, if there is not provision in the law, AT&T will start controlling what you have access to based on how much money they get paid, as well as handing over everything you say or do to the government without a hint of resistance (and, oh snap, BEFORE 9/11!!??). This is pretty important. Please pay attention. Please sign the petition and have it sent to your congresspeople.
UPDATE: I just signed the petition and sent the following message to my congresspeople and senators:
Please act immediately to save the Internet.
Big corporations like AT&T and Time Warner cannot be trusted to do the right thing on their own. The “honor system” of self-policing cannot apply to them. If you don’t add provisions for net neutrality to telecom law, the free and open Internet that we know and love (and that has enabled the economy to boom) will cease to exist. The second Time Warner thinks it can extort millions from Google, it will. And the second it realizes YouTube is using all the bandwidth and paying none of the fees, youtube.com will be gone. We love YouTube, and askaninja.com, and www.chrisdiclerico.com.
You have screwed up so many other things, like copyright law, the DMCA, patent law, taxes, video game legislation, the FCC, the War on Terror, religion in our schools, “In God We Trust” on our money, and the list goes on and on. Please don’t let net neutrality get added to the list.
Also, please try to find competent people to put on the committees for this kind of thing. It would be a good start.
Thanks for listening, even though you’ll probably let me down, again.
Chris DiClerico
I agree with you in principle; but remember, who is it that gets to regulate these carriers to make sure they are complying with the law? Which federal agency do you think they will pick?
There’s only one agency out there with this mandate: the FCC. The agency most egregiously in the telco’s pocket. The agency that has explicitly called for censorship on the internet. They are responsible for at least three of the fuckups you list above.
How long before senator brownback starts levying a sin tax on internet speech that he disagrees with?
I think your intent is correct; the internet must be neutral to be useful. But relying on the jackasses in the government to enforce it just ain’t gonna work. I think there are two things that will help:
1) Mesh networking in major metros: there are enough wifi devices in manhattan that (if they were interlocking), you could pretty much generate a damn fine internet without relying on external links. This only works in town centers with today’s tech- but tomorrow’s tech is WiMax, and it has a footprint of a mile or so. Just fixing the major metro areas would starve the telcos of an enormous amount of cash.
2) the market: The telcos can do this only as long as there are no other providers. Once they hold google for ransom, google will simply buy them out, roll out an alternative, or otherwise destroy them. Time Warner tried walled gardens before, (remember prodigy? aol?) and the market bitchslapped them hard. One more fuckup like that, and we won’t have time warner to kick around any more.
These assholes exist on our sufferance, because it’s too expensive to fix the last mile. We’ll fix this problem in a hurry as soon as it becomes economically worthwhile.
We paid the Telecoms, in tax break and out right, to create the network for the world wide web. These telecom turn around and sell business and users DSL or Fiber connections. The business then pay for access speed to the telecom if they get fiber. ALL OF THIS IS GETTING PAID FOR
Now they’re simply trying to extort more money.
Simple.
I own a business. The business has a web presence. Thusly the business pays webhosting fees. Say they get a T1 ran to their office for $400 dollars from the local cable company. That cable company collects their cut then pays Qwest for DS3’s. and so on.
The person that connects to the business website is paying a monthly fee for high speed internet access to connect to the internet @ a certain speed.
The business and the user are both paying for access, the people running the hops get paid money for having the hops or connections on the web.
EVERYONE IS GETTING PAID!!
This is insane, truely insane, if these telecoms get their way it’s the end. Prepare for for evil USA.