But Google ALREADY pays for their connections and usage. What the telco/comcast/etc lot want to do is charge them twice, basically a penalty for uploading (i.e. pushing content).

I have two choices... but one is Hughes Satellite (which isn't a choice if you have any clue) and the other is a mom'n'pop wireless ISP (which is rather fragile). My useless land line caps out at 26.4kbps (yes, KBPS) because the CO equipment and the stuff in between hasn't been updated since the 1980s. There is no cable at all in my area. Do I live in a wilderness? No, I live a couple of miles from a major Intel Corp. campus in a mixed suburban/rural use area. Verizon steadfastly refused to even provide me ISDN (required by state law)... and recently they've sold the whole thing to Frontier and skedaddled for Brave New Lands.

Exactly.. its always been regulated. And it wouldn't need additional regulation if the CORPORATIONS (telcos) continued play fairly well as has been done up through around 2000. What has changed is not the "cry for Net Neutrality", what has changed is the big ISPs committing felonies (man-in-the-middle-attacks), lying about service, and now trying to DOUBLE-charge for packet transfer (since sources and sinks both ALREADY pay for their internet connections). The WSJ piece is exactly that -- a sound-bite clustered piece of shit written by a shill for those would balkanize the Internet and return us to the days of AOL's prison-wall gardens.

Maybe you should visit some modern large corporations..... where cameras record all employee activities. Here we're talking about being constantly recorded and monitored for poor productivity or petty theft. I know a pharmacist (who technically can also kill people) who works in such a place ... the Big Brother Eye is, of course, to protect the corporation's liability and interests. POLICE have firearms and can kill or seriously injure people... but here we have posters arguing they shouldn't have to worry about being watched, observed, or held accountable by the public that hired them. The instant I hear a cop say "civilians" instead of "citizen" ... its a clue they've lost that little connect-the-dot that they work for the public

This decision makes makes my brain hurt. "Intellectual property" is shoving the species into Idiocracy....

But the company executive who proposed the idea of outsourcing to "save money" got a promotion and/or bonuses and scampered off to the next debacle. You see, it isn't people worried about the stockholders or the long-term viability about a company - its people who are the modern version of snake-oil dealers who pad their own pockets at the expense of the corporation. And they've got the game rigged so they're rarely held accountable.

I was actually part of that poll. I, of course, wrote in the margins loudly that the question was loaded and necessarily opposed the idea of such a law. And yes, I have kids. It would be interesting if the poll was directed at parents who are actually gamers themselves rather than the "mundanes".

Hmmmm, I've been doing tech stuff since the 1970s, no problem. I'll admit I may be unusual (as are most of the people I work with). I'll still say many youth are utterly screwed in their skills set -- cue the "Idiocracy" meme. We're too busy lowering standards so everyone can feel good about themselves instead of improving themselves.

Agreed. But you're watching the intellectual death spiral that is the result of two generations of parental fail in a large percentage of the population (at least in the US). Side note: its very interesting to sit in the kids section of Barnes&Noble and do a little anthropological observation. Watch which families head for the shitty books that squeak and squawk and are mostly pictures. Listen to kids far too old hate on "chapter books". Watch them simply screw with the displays and misbehave ... Now compare this versus the families that sit and read together quietly and put books back that they aren't going to buy. There's about an 80/20 split... hard to sell books to an Idiocracy. This percentage has substantively changed in the last 25 years or so. Yeah, there are pockets of goodness but it rather reminds me of a sociological version of entering a dark age.

"The paper pretends, instead, that broadband networks are 100% private." This is something I call "lying" rather than "pretending". The networks are no more "private" than the roads - both built with massive government (i.e. taxpayer) assistance. Of course, the "public airwaves" are also something the communication corporations like to pretend are their private channels as well.

Aye, since most of "IT" has been turned into the new "janitorial" class.... anyone with a clue is running away. We'll see how many systems have to fail before some twit in management figures out it wasn't such a great idea to do that to the people who keep critical business systems running.

Okay.. I'd burn karma for that at this point. I'm tired of being threatened for not believing in the "right color of unicorn".

Much truth to that... just as Christianity was a good deal more tolerable before the Roman Empire got a hold of it and used it as an ultimate tool of aggression (even after the empire fell and the little empires grew from it's corpse). Islam in the 12/13th Century was fairly progressive for its time, these present arrogant bastards ... well, we can take the line "Jesus would smite the crap out of the people using his name" and substitute "The Prophet" for the same effect.