Net Neutrality

[Rich Parsons]

Net Neutrality

http://www.flixxy.com/save-the-internet.htm


A long video - advertisement - political statement yet it is worth a look in my opinion.


Thoughts?

 

[tellner]

The newspapers, radio and television are owned by an ever-shrinking group of huge corporations. Their message is unremittingly the same: anti-labor, anti-regulation, anti-democracy, pro-corporate, pro-military (except when their noses are really rubbed in it) and deferential to authority. The Fairness Doctrine and public interest are, according to the head of the FCC "dead on arrival". In the cruelest insult possible for a journalist Tony Blair pronounced the White House Press Corps as "a really nice bunch of guys".

The regular print and broadcast media are rife with (unacknowledged) paid VNRs - Virtual News Releases. These are paid propaganda produced seeming to be news, paid for and created by private parties or government agencies. It's not surprising; over the past couple decades the newsroom has generally become part of the entertainment section of the broadcaster. In fact, a Indiana University this last year found that there were more minutes of hard news on "The Daily Show" than on the news.

Democracy requires an informed populace which can get information from a variety of independent sources. Otherwise it is impossible to make rational decisions based on truth. The Internet has been that new commons, a way for information of all sorts to get into the public sphere. It's true that any fool can put up a webpage (and usually does). There is a lot of misinformation out there from nutjobs, paid bloggers, shills and fanatics. But we also have Salon, Black Box Voting, Raw Story, and a wide variety of other sources that make it possible for uncensored news in information that challenges the status quo. The web-based phone banking of MoveOn may well have tipped the Senate to the Democrats, just for instance.

Net Neutrality is vital for this. If the flow of inconvenient information can be slowed to a trickle all that you will be able to see is what the entertainment conglomerates and the large and powerful want you to see.

 

[Tez3]

Mt daughter is working in Dubai where the Internet is censored, she tried to log onto an MMA forum that is very popular here but it came up as being 'forbidden'.It's not a contentious site, there's a lot of other more serious things 'forbidden' too.

 

[wee_blondie]

I saw a link similar to this in the most unlikely page......

www.askaninja.com

I was slacking off work at the time!

In any case, I do agree that the net should be a place for freedom of expression from all points of view. However, it is important that there are some ground rules to keep a lid on some of the more unsavoury pages. The real question is who decides what can and cannot be posted on the web?? Sadly I don't think we'll ever agree on that.

 

[Andrew Green]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Net_Neutrality

Net neutrality is a good idea, in a way. But I have some serious doubts about ANY attempts to legislate it. A law which is promoted as having the best of intents will, eventually, come to favour those with the most lawyers.

The net should remain neutral, and free, and not be shaped to, or legislated to one countries ideals.

If Net neutrality is truly the goal, then prevent the establishment of monopolies by ISP's in any given region. Restrict the number of IP addresses a single entity can control, I don't know what. But ensure that it remains relatively easy for someone to set up as a ISP without going through the larger corporations. I'll give my business to the one that doesn't try to protect me from myself, which I find a little insulting.

Even the basic principle has flaws:

Network neutrality (equivalently "net neutrality", "internet neutrality" or "NN") is a term that was coined around 2003 that refers to a principle of network design and denotes networks that allow all equipment, users and providers on a network to communicate with each other with reasonable throughput and traffic quality.

Anything that tries to regulate this is going to have to be very careful in its wording, and be left open to future technology changes.

Consider that the basic premie there means that the e-mail you sent your Mom and the 10000000 pieces of Spam your neighbours zombie system have to, by law, be given the same priorty by your ISP.

I'm sure some stipulations would go in there to avoid such obvious problems, but internet technology changes at a very fast rate, and given a legal loophole to work with it would only be a matter of time before it was exploited by someone.

 

[Carol]

Consider that the basic premie there means that the e-mail you sent your Mom and the 10000000 pieces of Spam your neighbours zombie system have to, by law, be given the same priorty by your ISP.

It's a bit more serious than that. The only services that are providing true competition to the Big Bells are the cellular companies (which isn't a fair comparison) and the Cable TV companies.

Of the cable companies, there are aftermarket VoIP phone services such as....a company that begins with V and does a lot of advertising. There are also VoIP phone services that can be purchased through the cable carrier if they have the right facilities.

What's the difference?

With the aftermarket company that begins with a V...when a person makes a phone call, their call gets intermingled with all the other internet traffic because it all has an equal Quality of Service. If, during one's phone call, 50 people off the same edge router all hit BitTorrent for their fave download, the quality of voice will suffer because the voice is competing for bandwidth.

With phone service purchased through the provider, the provider can enable a Dynamic Quality of Service...or DQoS as we call it. This means as soon a the phone goes off hook (to dial or answer a call) the traffic for that call is prioritized. It is akin to building a dedicated "pipe" to carry the VoIP data for the call while the call is up. Once the pipe is built, it doesn't matter how hard the neighbors hitting the download sites...their traffic won't interfere with the call. The voice quality of the call is near-perfect.

The Big Bells don't like DQoS because it enables Cable TV companies to directly take a chunk out of their landline market in the more profitable areas of the country (major metropolitain areas).

Something that sounds as innocuous as equal-priority data has the end result of taking a choice away from the consumer.