Net Neutrality Voted Down in U.S. House Committee 354
Ana10g writes "Business Week provides a look at the recent vote by the House Committee on Energy & Commerce, in which the FCC would have been given the power to prohibit discrimination of Internet traffic. The battlefield seems to be centered around which group has the better funded lobbyists, with companies such as Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, and many others competing against the well funded Telecommunications lobbysts. The committee voted the amendment down, 34 to 22."
Hmm... Technicalities. (Score:5, Interesting)
Nationalization (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:Anyone Suprised? (Score:3, Interesting)
I'd love to see this. (Score:5, Interesting)
During that week, any requests for pages from those sites from the telecom's network would respond with a warning page saying
Content providers' sites are one of the few reasons that Verizon and at&t can sell anything. Without sites like Google, Amazon, and Yahoo, Verizon and at&t's pipes are pretty much worthless. The content providers really should make this clear to Verizon and at&t.
End of Net Neutrality means what? (Score:3, Interesting)
It sounds as if the telecos are going to throttle the entire internet, especially the bigger content providers. Then only "paid", higher tiered content providers will be delivered with "premium" speeds? All the while the premium bandwith will be reserved for the telecos digital television over DSL and such.
But how is a teleco operating one of the net backbones going to know what exactly is inside a packet, if the packet is coming from a paid tier source, and where it's destination is without opening it up and examining it? That sounds like a rather ominious intrusion.
Net Neutrality: Three Questions (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:End of Net Neutrality means what? (Score:3, Interesting)
Interesting Question (Score:4, Interesting)
Doesn't it stand to reason that anyone providing last mile connectivity or even backbone suddenly declare themselves worthy of charging these tolls? So instead of Google/Yahoo/etc paying just SBC/Verizon/AT&T - now they're expected to pay every telco the world over to ensure they're competitive globally vs. local competition?
Very dangerous precedent could potentially be set. (And FYI - Congresspeople are not completely oblivious to phone calls and snail mail. If it adds up on them they take that very seriously particularly if you are a constituent. Sending an e-mail though is completely useless (I know...)
So, would you say this is right or wrong? (Score:4, Interesting)
On the one hand, in seems like the people who own the pipes should be able to do whatever they want with them. If we say they can't prioritize traffic of people that pay them good money to do it, aren't we violating their right to property?
On the other hand, if they start charging individual sites they could potentially hamper the economy, which would be against the public good. The problem is something like if all the roads in the country were privately owned and had toll booths everywhere...
Maybe the answer is that bandwidth should become a public utility. The companies who own it should be granted a monopoly, but then should be severely regulated along the lines power is. Its obvious that internet connectivity is as important to the public good as water and power. We need uniform access to these services across the country. Any part of the country that doesn't have access because its not profitable for verizon to provide it, simply can't economically develop. Also, realistically speaking, this would be *vastly* easier to do than power.
I'm sure that the existing bandwidth providers would have to be pulled into this kicking and screaming... but frankly the exact same thing happened with power providers. Originally, power companies didn't want to be forced to do things like run lines out to rural areas. This was unfortunate, because electric lighting is pretty important in agriculture. Eventually, when it was evident that the interest of the power companies came so strongly in conflict with the public interest, the regulations we have today were set up.
I don't know if this is necessary for bandwidth. It hasn't really come up so far, primarily because its a new thing, and because it didn't take them that long to make the internet accessible from pretty much everywhere in the country, by some means or another. Of course, that's just my anecdotal impression. Are there some places where its impossible to get a T1 line at a reasonable price? Are even businesses stuck with satellite in many places? If that's the case, it would be a strong argument to regulate the ISPs in some ways.
However, as far as I know aside from just generally failing to get home broadband to work on their first try, the ISPs seem to have done a pretty good job of getting everyone internet access. I think they must be somewhat aware of what could happen to them in terms of regulation if they abuse the public good too much. I'm sure they will follow a very fine line, but I'm happy to wait to see if they cross it before I consider regulation a good option. As a rule, its best to do nothing if you can. However, prioritized traffic is probably something we have to stop, depending on how strong the prioritization is. If they insure a certain level of quality for all traffic, it probably won't be an issue... but I suspect that they won't if they can get away with it.
How did the committee vote on this? (Score:2, Interesting)
Would it be so hard for the reporter to include that in the story?
The official site of the committee hides their voting record on matters like this very well.
I couldn't find it... Would it be that hard to have a quick link on the main page?
http://energycommerce.house.gov/ [house.gov]
Business as usual within the beltway.
Useless men... (Score:2, Interesting)
In my many years I have come to a conclusion that one useless man is a shame, two is a law firm, and three or more is a congress.
- John Adams
Politicians Also Use the Net (Score:2, Interesting)
Not just geeks, Gun Owners, Libraries all mad too! (Score:1, Interesting)
http://www.savetheinternet.com/ [savetheinternet.com]
Coalition Sounds Off on Net Neutrality Legislation - 04.24.06
http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,1895,1953085,00.a
"Vint Cerf, so-called "father" of the Internet, is among the big names and organizations that have come together to create the SavetheInternet.com Coalition, which hosted a national conference call today.
Other members of the Coalition include Gun Owners of America, Craigslist.com, Public Knowledge, MoveOn.org, the American Library Association, Afro-Netizen.com, the Consumer Federation of America, the Consumers Union, and Free Press."
Call to all geeks... "if you are a geek, then do something about it"!
March on Washington. "We want freedom, kick them out"!
Net Neutrality can be protected locally as well - (Score:2, Interesting)
The legislation that will allow for national cable TV franchises will not be passed into law for at least a year (if at all). That gives us time to approach small towns and tell them to make Verizon put provisions into their cable TV franchise agreement for Net Neutrality.
I know it sounds like a crazy and far fetched idea but it can work.
All we need is a few key towns to stick up for Net Neutrality and we will have the precedent needed at the national level.
Verizon needs to roll out their TV service as fast as they can. Holding them up at the local level is, in my opinion, the best way to protect Net Neutrality.
Check out what we are doing in my town: www.redbanktv.org
Thanks -- Tom
Re:There's something so wrong with this story (Score:3, Interesting)
By discarding existing, advanced technologies and re-inventing the wheel, poorly, for the sole purpose of making sure that everything he touched will be in some way enslaved to Microsoft. Most of the components of Windows-based systems which are "new" today, particularly in Enterprise scenarios, existed as far back as 1960s (OS virtualization for example) and are only now re-appearing after a 40-year hiatus, in wake of the the scenic ride through the thorny bushes of the garden path Bill took us all on. Add to this technologies such as "thin clients" (i.e. 1970s graphical terminals), before that PC LANs crippled by horrendous single-user, non-multitasking nature of DOS (a problem well solved long before that, complete with the TCP/IP protocol) and so on. The list is very, very long. Microsoft simply relied on the general lack of know-how of the computer-technologies-illiterate public, combined with fraudulent advertising and other underhanded chickanery involivng suppliers, and later abuse of its monopoly powers to establish itself as the "innovator" while in fact its entire history, with few exceptions, consists of essentially playing a three-card monty with consumers.