Maybe you already know about net neutrality or have heard of it. If you haven't, American Independence Day seems a particularly apt time to bring you the message, since it's all about the independence of the internet. If you read this and other blogs, you probably already value the freedom of the internet. I don't like a lot of the stuff but I do appreciate that whatever my interests or concerns or politics I can find a place on the internet that caters to it. I certainly don't want my ISP, the much and justly hated Comcast Company, or Verizon or Time Warner or any of the other corporate giants, to decide what I should or can be interested in or be able to say to you. So like most bloggers I am a proponent of net neutrality, as are a wide variety of politicians, both Democrat and Republican. Some politicians, though, are in the pockets of the telecom companies, who oppose net neutrality with all their might and guile. So it's a battle of epic proportions.
While we're on the topic, net neutrality is not the only battle that is uniting the left and the right ends of the political spectrum. So is illegal wiretapping of Americans and the retroactive legislation to make it legal in the wiretapping/telecom immunity legislation now before the Senate (it already passed the House). Conservative libertarians, represented by the Ron Paul wing of the Republican Party and progressive Democrats and independents have united to oppose the Constitution-deforming monstrosity. You can find out more here and here.
Back to net neutrality and Independence Day. This clip is from a year ago but like other wars, this one is still going on. It's a good primer if this is new to you and gives you a way to get involved if being able to see clips like this and read blogs like this are of value to you:
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in the long run there will be several
competing internets.
Some will be free and independent and allow
anonymous posts, some not (but they may be cheaper).
I don't want the internet to become an ownernet. However, I understand the businesses who would like to protect themselves from hackers, disrupters, and grifters. When I was a tech in grad school, computing was a communal environment -- a wonderful experience for techs and users. But, working late one night, I discovered our first hacker -- an EE doctoral student, doing harmless hacking . . . using all of the the system resources. A month later we found our next one, a professor trying to break a password and, more ominously, the account was the departmental grading records. After that, it turned into a seige.
My wild guess is that companies are spending 10 to 20% of their IT budget on protection and damage cleanup. I suspect that ownernets will be the future -- but I do not entirely agree that all of the motive is greed.
Cathie: Except this has nothing to do with security. It involves throttling traffic. It is not at all involved with protecting anything except their profits.
Revere, I fully understand that from the perspective of net nuetrality it has nothing to do with security, but the ownernets will be able to exert security efforts that they cannot invoke in an open internet. I am pro-net neutrality, but I also understand their perspective that they need a danger-free zone.
The U.S. has relatively little bandwidth compared to most other nations, so this will become a real range war. But even if we had unlimited bandwidth, the development of ownernets will end the 'open' internet as an equal resource for all. It will end the democracy of the internet.
Cathie, you may be right; I don't know enough about what "ownernets" would entail to argue that. What I do know is, right now, Comcast can't make their own and affiliated content load faster; they can't legally block competitors' sites. (As I believe one ISP did try to do; the courts smacked them down.)
Right now, savetheinternet.com or Act Blue's FISA page load as fast as Comcast.com (taking into account server speed, page size, etc.). IOW, if I want to learn about why the telecoms suck, those telecoms can't stand in the way of that. They want to change it so they can, and so they can promote the perspectives and interests of big corporations over Jane Q. Free Geocities page. To me, that's a battle worth fighting.
give them their own commercial net. And us our encrypted,
private net for communication,forums,science.
We won't hack them or post copyrighted stuff there,
if they won't spam us. Deal ?
anon - They won't spam us? No way in hell!
We should all remember that July 4 is INDEPENDENCE DAY. Take 15 minutes and read 2 things: 1. The Declaration of Independence and 2. The Constitution of the USA and the 1st 10 amendments.If you have any questions, get back to me.
FTC has the authority it needs to to ensure competition and protect the consumer interest. Of course, they do not use it. The main problem is lack of competition, not lack of regulation. Break up the monopolies and bring back "competitive markets. In competitive markets, the market serves the consumer. In monopoly markets, the consumer is a price and service quality taker. Congress is already bought by the monopolists. Trusting them to introduce legislation to "protect" anyone but the monopolists is dangerous. The monopolists write the legislation, Congress does not bother to even read it. They just vote depending on who sponsored it and what kind of deal they can get in support for legislation they want to sponsor..
pft--
Real competition would be great, but how do we get it?
The lack of competition is not caused by regulation. (It can be argued that the lack of competition was caused by past regulation, which may or not be correct, but unless you've got a time machine handy that's irrelevant.) It's caused by only having two pipes into most people's homes.
We're supposed to get fiber to the house, or reliable in-home-wireless, or something--but it's looking increasingly like fusion power: about five years away, just like it was five years ago.
The internet is changing, forever. Just look at what happened to ninjavideo recently. They still have a forum though, at www.ninjavideoforum.net and there is a lot of debate on there now about the freedom of internet debate.