|
View previous topic :: View next topic
|
| Author |
Message |
Kevin
Site Admin
Joined: 13 Apr 2004
Posts: 1349
Location: Eugene, Oregon
|
 Posted: Tue Sep 22, 2009 2:57 pm Post subject: GOP senators declare war on Net neutrality... |
    |
|
GOP senators declare war on Net neutrality
http://rawstory.com/blog/2009/09/gop-senators-net-neutrality/
Plan to keep Internet free of interference from ISPs draws opposition from GOP, service providers
Six Republican senators have introduced an amendment that would block the Federal Communications Commission from implementing its recently announced Net neutrality policy.
Texas Republican Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison introduced the amendment to an appropriations bill. It would prevent the FCC from getting funding for any initiative to uphold Net neutrality. According to The Hill, the co-sponsors are Sen. Sam Brownback (R-KS), Sen. Jim DeMint (R-SC) Sen. John Ensign (R-NV), Sen. John Thune (R-SD) and Sen. David Vitter (R-LA).
The move appears to be an attempt to pre-empt the FCC's expected new policy to ensure that Internet service providers don't discriminate between different types of information on their networks.
On Monday, FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski gave a speech in which he outlined the FCC's plan to enforce Net neutrality, a position President Barack Obama held during his campaign for president.
In recent years, concern has grown that some Internet service providers are slowing down "access to high speed Internet for things like Internet-based voice calls, video streaming, and legal file sharing (that carriers might wish to block or at least charge extra for)," writes Ian Paul at PCWorld magazine.
While Net neutrality is supported by Internet-reliant companies such as Google and Microsoft, it is opposed by major Internet service providers like AT&T, Comcast and Verizon. Those three have come out against Genachowski's plan, ChannelWeb reports.
...
http://rawstory.com/blog/2009/09/gop-senators-net-neutrality/ |
|
| Back to top |
|
 |
SDR
millennium club
Joined: 02 Oct 2004
Posts: 1846
Location: San Francisco
|
| Posted: Tue Sep 22, 2009 5:08 pm Post subject: |
|
|
Can you or someone go a little further into the motives behind the two positions ? I'm usually a little slow on the uptake, in matters like this.
Who stands to gain what, on either side of the issue ? What do you think is the right thing to have happen, in a strictly objective sense ?
SDR |
|
| Back to top |
|
|
Kevin
Site Admin
Joined: 13 Apr 2004
Posts: 1349
Location: Eugene, Oregon
|
| Posted: Tue Sep 22, 2009 10:30 pm Post subject: |
|
|
Sure! The Internet was build up from its original foundations with the principle of net neutrality - though the term didn't come into use until much later. The principle was so built-in and accepted that no term was needed, until some years after the network backbone operations were privatized to the big telecom companies... at which point some of them started to salivate over the possibilities of commercial control... and net neutrality became something that had to be defended.
The explosion of public spirited, open source, and free collaborative online, from the essential Web to the Linux operating system to the Wikipedia of today - as well as independent publishing voices like the Great Buildings and ArchitectureWeek network - are all possible because of net neutrality (as well as a bunch of other things).
The only entities essentially against net neutrality are oppressive regimes that try to control and limit the flow of information for political reasons, and giant corporations that want to control and limit the flow of traffic and information over the network for market manipulation in search of profits at any social cost.
It really is just about that simple.
"At its simplest network neutrality is the principle that all Internet traffic should be treated equally."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Net_neutrality
"Allowing broadband carriers to control what people see and do online would fundamentally undermine the principles that have made the Internet such a success."
—Vinton Cerf in testimony before Congress February 7, 2006 |
|
| Back to top |
|
|
SDR
millennium club
Joined: 02 Oct 2004
Posts: 1846
Location: San Francisco
|
| Posted: Tue Sep 22, 2009 11:00 pm Post subject: |
|
|
Thanks; that helps. So, to your paragraph:
"In recent years, concern has grown that some Internet service providers are slowing down "access to high speed Internet for things like Internet-based voice calls, video streaming, and legal file sharing (that carriers might wish to block or at least charge extra for)," writes Ian Paul at PCWorld magazine."
I'm unclear; is it that the Internet-based voice calls, video streaming, and legal file sharing are things that the carriers can charge more for, at the expense of equal speed for all users ?
SDR |
|
| Back to top |
|
|
Ed Ziomek
Joined: 07 Jun 2005
Posts: 701
Location: Stamford, Connecticut
|
| Posted: Wed Sep 23, 2009 7:23 am Post subject: Confused on this one... |
|
|
Folks, let me weigh in on this one, and great to hear from you Steve.
In my 27 past lives, one of them was with MCI International out of Rye Brook, New York.... Jerry D of Westchester, and Johnny C of Bay Ridge, God Bless you!
Although I was never a star performer, I did have the happiest 4 work years of my life working for great people, including talking on the phone to various pioneers of the internet, Vint Cerf out of Washington for one. I remember a phone call once, asking me to explain NFSnet and Arpanet which I could not do easily, but I did know X25 which was the earlier backbone protocol of the military forerunners of the internet. Long after me in November of 92 I believe, came Mosaic and Netscape, etc.
The "piss and moan" issue even then was the very real complaint about paying money for traffic over other corporations lines, such as international calls having to pay the local RBOCs exorbitant fees (47 cents on the dollar) just to reach the outside world.
I remember like today reading about a European X25 connectivity company that interconnected all the European companies, and they were trying to find a buyer, asking a pittance $10 million, for which I ran into our legal department and weeks later, the deal was sealed and MCI overnight had another full-Europe, hardwired, access method.
At that time stateside, RBOCs ruled the local scene, and de-regulation had not been implemented in full swing, -there was no cable telephone at the time.
Pay or no play, it was simple as that.
Now the reverse is true. Everyone has unlimited use of the international lines of the carriers virtually for free, once the ISP has been subscribed to.
This includes videos on demand, international voice calling, advertising spam, and nobody is regulating volume of content, and problems are starting to show such as ..."entire countries using You Tube as an hour-by-hour news source!" (Who could have predicted that one?)
The internet is not growing in a linear fashion, it is growing exponentially large, every day!
Pre-internet, you paid for Telex calls by the number of words, now it is flat fee based per subscriber.
I don't know all the facts, all the details, but I think we have a crisis of sorts, the carriers are no longer monopolies, there is huge competition, and their investments are catastrophically high, easily $200,000,000 in periodic upgrade costs, with a shelf life of only 2 years or so per new upgrade, until they have to replace or fall behind.
The major question to me is "How can the carriers be regulated by the government, on services that are extremely competitive, and no longer monopolies?" Aren't we crippling our own industries, allowing foreign companies avenues to offer cheaper services to American consumers?
Conversely, "How does the American government step in and protect the massive benefits and influence American carriers provide, as opposed to mandating the zero-pay usage arrangement we have today?"
So the answer has to be ..."What is the harmonious middle ground, between allowing ISPs to run their own services, carriers to be paid for those services used, and the government trying to regulate such a beautiful communications and entertainment and educational juggernaut?"
I am afraid to say, it will probably eventually be some form of usage taxation, sort of a carbon tax type pay schedule.
My only concern with what Kevin wrote about is the Republican-only flavor of the proposed legislation. After the major success of Barack Obama, who used the internet to gain support (and hopefully KEEP support), it sounds ominous to me, and certainly worthy of careful, careful review.
_________________
Ed Ziomek |
|
| Back to top |
|
|
SDR
millennium club
Joined: 02 Oct 2004
Posts: 1846
Location: San Francisco
|
| Posted: Wed Sep 23, 2009 10:47 am Post subject: |
|
|
Thanks, Ed.
Now, to back up, I ask again for a dumbed down explanation, for naifs like myself, of who is to gain by the options originally posed by Kevin. I have to admit a simple bias, myself: If the Republicans want it, I probably don't ! But to make a choice in ignorance is the very definition of foolishness. Help me out ! What is the "right" thing -- the fair and equitable balance (?) -- to hope for ?
I have long felt that the monopoly enjoyed by our original telephone corporation may not have been at all a bad thing -- a sort of "exception that proved the rule" (that monopolies necessarily represent a societal evil). Similarly, I find it hard to believe that deregulation of the airlines, resulting in cut-throat competition and drastic cuts in service quality and even safety (?), was a net plus for the consumer. There's more to life than money (i.e., price) !
SDR
SDR |
|
| Back to top |
|
|
Kevin
Site Admin
Joined: 13 Apr 2004
Posts: 1349
Location: Eugene, Oregon
|
| Posted: Thu Sep 24, 2009 11:48 am Post subject: |
|
|
Also keep in mind that the anti-net-neutrality amendment introduced is a legislative attempt (or saber-rattling) to overrule a considered administrative finding by the FCC.
Not that I'd assume a government agency automatically gets it right - far from that - but as part of the evaluation, in the absence of the kind of documented overriding commercial bias that characterized the last eight years of leadership in many US federal agencies - let's take a look at the FCC's reasoning.
Ed, it's great to hear that direct perspective from the old days of the Internet, when it was still transitioning from a fully public utility into the privately operated public utility we have today. And that proud company you were part of then has been sent back through the Wall Street sausage grinders a few times around, since then, hasn't it?
I don't think it's quite accurate that the big telecoms are being expected to run the Internet backbone for free. And the carrying capacity for the global network has generally increased in proportion to the rise in traffic.
But it's been a while since I was fully up-to-speed on the realtime gory details of global backbone funding, so I'll try to look for a source with a good independent summary. |
|
| Back to top |
|
|
|
blogger
del.icio.us
digg
slashdot
