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Net Neutrality 5-24-2006

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Net Neutrality Links

I’ve added these links to the Net Neutrality Page today.

Berners-Lee: Neutrality Preserves Net Openness

The computer scientist credited with inventing the World Wide Web strongly condemned moves by U.S. broadband providers to control their subscribers’ content, saying it threatens the Internet’s greatest strength: openness.

Tim Berners-Lee on Tuesday said some Internet regulation is needed but should be minimal. He said efforts to control content have far-reaching impacts on other areas for users, such as decisions on voting and development of democracy.

“I hope that the U.S. will come to the right decision, and there is a very strong groundswell of opinion for net neutrality,” Berners-Lee said. He spoke at the 15th International World Wide Web conference, an all-week meeting in Edinburgh, Scotland, exploring new Internet technology.

Dangerous dolts threaten our internet

When I started reading this story about an effort to use radio bandwidth to provide ubiquitous, cheap or free (ad-supported), broadband internet access across the country, I started to get happy. But then I saw the dolts who were proposing this and the dangerous things they doing and I want to make sure they don’t get anywhere near our internet.

SIVACRACY.NET

The American Library Association and the Association of Research Libraries have joined the SavetheInternet.com Coalition, which includes “groups from across the political spectrum that have banded together to save the First Amendment of the Internet: network neutrality.” The coalition has gathered more than 500,000 signatures in support of policies that would block network operators from charging companies for faster delivery of their content to consumers or favoring certain content over other content.

–ME “Liz” Strauss

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NET NEUTRALITY PAGE

Net Neutrality 5-23-2006

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Net Neutrality Links

I’ve added these links to the Net Neutrality Page today.

The Internet Inventor Speaks Out!

At one point in the comments, [Tim] Berners-Lee says something that absolutely tickles me!

“Suppose your ISP runs an online auction: is there any reason why it should support traffic to eBay at all, when it has its own auction service? Suppose it runs its own on-demand movies – why should it have to allow through HBO packets? Suppose it has its own search portal — why should it give preference to Google’s packets, when the customer has available its own search service? Suppose the degradation happens now, not only to Skype traffic, but traffic from video sources of stations with particular political views? What happens when your ISP’s platinum partners establish favorable treatment for packets from sites with particular views on evolution? It is a slippery slope, and the bottom end is not nice at all. If there is a way of influencing the browsing choices of people, even slightly, there will be money in it, and when there is money in it there will be unscrupulous people trying to get that control. Do you really want to us to set off down that slope? Sometimes you don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone.â€?

User Friendly.org Cartoons

THIS IS USER FRIENDLY.ORG
THIS IS USER FRIENDLY.ORG WITHOUT NET NEUTRALITY.

Vile and Revile

I don’t know how there is no law against this. Also, it’s so pathetically transparent that this group is corrupt when their member organizations include Cingular, the American Conservative Union, AT&T, BellSouth, and so on. A tagline like “Join Us and say NO to government regulation of the environment� is sick. I’m so sick. It’s as bad as using religion to play on people’s emotions for political and monetary gain.

–ME “Liz” Strauss

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NET NEUTRALITY PAGE

Net Neutrality 5-22-2006

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Net Neutrality Links

I’ve added these links to the Net Neutrality Page today.

NET NEUTRALITY – by Gar Lipow on MaxSpeak, You Listen!

You (or your host if hosting is being donated to you) will not only pay your current ISP (who in turn uses part of your money to pay for backbone). You will be charged by your customers’ ISPs – which they already pay for. Perhaps you will be charged a third time, by some of the backbones your ISP and customers already pay for. Alternatively, if you don’t pay this extra ransom, MaxSpeak will suddenly become vvveeerrrry ssllooww for most of your readers. They may start getting time-outs and be unable to read it at all.

Bear in mind that you would not be suddenly paying for something you now get for free. Someone hosts MaxSpeak and pays for the high speed internet access that allows it. Whoever owns the hosting server pays a monthly fee that includes only a certain number of bits. If that number of bits is exceeded, host access will either be shut off, or an additional fee will be charged. (This may not be explicit; but I’ve known people with “all you can eat� agreements cut off when their usage grew too high.)

For that matter; if a road-owner does not like your comments, they may just decide not to deliver them altogether, regardless of what you pay. Right now all the big pipelines protest that they would never, ever, ever do that to you. But we have already have case of e-mail with certain sig lines or key words not being delivered.

Web inventor sees his brainchild ready for big leap

He [Tim Berners-Lee, the Briton who invented and then gave away the World Wide Web] is also concerned about how some Internet providers in the United States have started to filter data, giving priority to premium data for which the operator receives an additional fee. They can do this, because they own the cables, the service, the portals and other key applications.

“The public will demand an open Internet,” he said.

On his blog, at http://dig.csail.mit.edu/breadcrumbs/blog/4, Berners-Lee pays hommage to the democratic principles of the designers of the Internet who decided that all data packets were created equal. “I tried then to make the Web technology, in turn, a universal, neutral, platform.”

“It is of the utmost importance that, if I connect to the Internet, and you connect to the Internet, that we can then run any Internet application we want, without discrimination as to who we are or what we are doing.”

Talking Points Memo by Joshua Micah Marshall May 19, 2006 [via The Big News Blog]

Mike McCurry’s takeaway from his catastrophic effort to spin the blogosphere: blogging is “a primal scream in the darkness.” Like the scions Bourbon Restoration he’s remembered everything and learned nothing. People disagreed with McCurry about the net neutrality issue because people disagree about issues. People got so mad at him precisely because of this kind of patronizing attitude. He was peddling flimsy arguments as if it never occurred to him that the blogosphere is full of people who know a lot about the internet and could handle a grown-up argument (see a non-flimsy, though ultimately unpersuasive, anti-neutrality piece if you’re interested).

–ME “Liz” Strauss

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NET NEUTRALITY PAGE

Net Neutrality 5-05-2006

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Net Neutrality Links

I’ve added these links to the Net Neutrality Page today.

What’s Really at Stake with Net Neutrality by Josh Silver [via caelidh ]

Broadband will soon deliver nearly all television, radio, phone service – and of course the Web – to most Americans. This transition is our big chance to do an end run around 24-7 lapdog journalism, low-brow entertainment, celebrity gossip, and rampant commercialism that has left the public in a fog of Brangelina, windbag pundits, sound bytes and little knowledge about what’s happening in the world and what our elected officials actually think or stand for.

If we lose this net neutrality battle, we lose the greatest opportunity of our lifetimes to get critical journalism and diverse media into living rooms across the nation, as the largest cable and phone companies turn the Internet into modern cable TV: they control what you see and how much it costs.

Neutrality of the Net

This is an international issue. In some countries it is addressed better than others. (In France, for example, I understand that the layers are separated, and my colleague in Paris attributes getting 24Mb/s net, a phone with free international dialing and digital TV for 30euros/month to the resulting competition.) In the US, there have been threats to the concept, and a wide discussion about what to do. That is why, though I have written and spoken on this many times, I blog about it now.
[Note: This is the blog of Tim Berners-Lee, who created the World Wide Web]

–ME “Liz” Strauss

Related
NET NEUTRALITY PAGE