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Net Neutrality 11-08-2006

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Net Neutrality Links

I’m adding this link to the Net Neutrality Page.

Can Citizen Journalism Save the Internet? Does it Need to?

It’s pretty clear that we DON’T have a problem with content-based Internet blocking in the US today. That doesn’t mean that we won’t tomorrow. “The price of liberty is eternal vigilance.” But that’s not what this post about.

We MAY have a problem with commercially-motivated blocking. At&t CEO Ed Whitacre has been clear that he considers parts of the Internet “my pipes” and that he believes at&t has a commercial right to charge information providers differentially for use of the pipes that we and the information providers believe are already paying for once.

Other telco execs have echoed this view.

Legislation requiring net neutrality has been proposed but may not be a good idea. It is very difficult to define the concept and enforcement itself might be a dangerous government intrusion.

But how do we avoid the need for neutrality legislation? How do we know if legislation has become the lesser of two evils? That’s where citizen journalism comes in.

Tom Evslin offers a process in which citizen journalists invesitgate and report — in real time and large numbers — instances of packet discrimination on the Internet.

Want to know what you can do?
MA Bell Monopoly Versus the Free Internet — Tell the FCC Net Neutrality Is Not Negotiable

–ME “Liz” Strauss

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MA Bell Monopoly Versus the Free Internet — Tell the FCC Net Neutrality Is Not Negotiable

Filed Under Business Life, Community, SOB Business, Successful Blog, Trends | 59 Comments

AT&T and BellSouth Have Already Said So

I’m not political. I don’t ask people to do things for causes. This not a cause. This is an emergency. The merger was almost approved this week. The AT&T-BellSouth merger hands over incredible power. THE MERGER ESTABLISHES A A DE FACTO MA BELL DSL MONOPOLY IN 23 STATES, that is to say new enterprise would be the principal or the only provider available.

The Judiciary Committee has already approved the deal, avoiding a court review. The FCC came close to letting it go through this week, but postponed their response at the last minute, because of letters from people like us.

We’ve got about two weeks to stop what they’ve already said they will do.

According to the Washington Post:

William L. Smith, chief technology officer for Atlanta-based BellSouth Corp., told reporters and analysts that an Internet service provider such as his firm should be able, for example, to charge Yahoo Inc. for the opportunity to have its search site load faster than that of Google Inc.

He’s not alone. Ed Whitacre of AT&T told Business Week last fall:

Now what they would like to do is use my pipes free, but I ain’t going to let them do that because we have spent this capital and we have to have a return on it. So there’s going to have to be some mechanism for these people who use these pipes to pay for the portion they’re using. Why should they be allowed to use my pipes?

[via Savetheinternet.com]

Sir Tim Berners-Lee said the following in the New YorkTimes article “Neutrality’ Is New Challenge for Internet Pioneer an Interview on Net Neutrality with Sir Tim Berners-Lee” By JOHN MARKOFF Published: September 27, 2006.

. . . if the United States ends up faltering in its quest for Net neutrality, I think the rest of the world will be horrified, and there will be very strong pressure from other countries who will become a world separate from the U.S., where the Net is neutral. If things go wrong in the States, then I think the result could be that the United States would then have a less-competitive market where content providers could provide a limited selection of all the same old movies to their customers because they have a captive market.

Meanwhile, in other countries, you’d get a much more dynamic and much more competitive market for television over the Internet. So that you’d end up finding that the U.S. would then fall behind and become less competitive until they saw what was going on and fixed it. I just hope we don’t have to go through a dark period, a little dark ages while people experiment with dropping Net neutrality and then, perhaps, put it back.

Tell the FCC Net Neutrality Is Not Negotiable

Since Wednesday, when the Department of Justice gave their blessing to the AT&T BellSouth merger, more than 20,000 people sent letters to the FCC asking for a Net Neutrality condition to be written into the merger.

freepress.com says this above the letter.

Don’t Let Ma Bell Monopolize the Internet
The AT&T and BellSouth merger would resurrect the Ma Bell monopoly that ruled communications for decades. But this new corporate behemoth would no longer control just phone calls. The new AT&T wants to become gatekeepers to all digital media — television, telephone and Internet — at the expense of the free and open Internet that so many Americans rely upon.

Send a letter by clicking the logo below. It takes only seconds.

Stop the Ma Bell Giveaway

I’ve been following this story since March 18, 2006 when I wrote this piece about Doc Searls and Walter Cronkite. This is the first time I have asked anyone to act . . . Now is the time when you need to. One more letter could tilt the balance.

–ME “Liz” Strauss

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Net Neutrality 8-3-2006

Filed Under Business Life, Community, SOB Business, Successful Blog, Trends | 4 Comments

Net Neutrality Links

I’m adding these links to the Net Neutrality Page.

Stevens Scrambling for Anti-Net Neutrality Votes

Stevens is still trying to force a vote on his inaptly titled telco give-away bill, the Communications, Consumers’ Choice, and Broadband Deployment Act of 2006 (S. 2686). But he’s not having much luck so far. . . .

he article singles out Santorum, DeWine, and Chafee as resisting efforts to push the bill to the floor before the elections. Not only are they hearing from constituents on this issue, they are raking in some serious cash from moneyed interests on both sides of the debate. They really don’t want to have to vote on this before the election. . . .

AT&T’s Whitacre: ‘Nobody Gets a Free Ride’

“This thing is growing at a rate that nobody would imagine,” [AT&T CEO Ed] Whitacre said of the market demand for bandwidth. He said AT&T networks are now handling 5.6 Petabytes of data every day. “There’s more and more content, and you need more and more bandwidth, and somebody’s got to build it.”

“If you build it, you have to make a return on that,” he continued. “Nobody gets a free ride, that’s all.”

This kind of language, of course, leaves open the possibility that AT&T will (or already does) offer some of its customers a better ride across its access networks in exchange for fees. But it doesn’t necessarily mean the provider would block content that it disagreed with, which is a fear that most net neutrality backers discuss the most.

–ME “Liz” Strauss

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Net Neutrality 8-2-2006

Filed Under Business Life, Community, SOB Business, Successful Blog, Trends | 8 Comments

Net Neutrality Links

I’m adding this link to the Net Neutrality Page.

Telcos Keep Castigating the “Free-Riders”

GigaOm’s Katie Fehrenbacher attended today a speech by AT&T Chairman Ed Whitacre before the National Association of Regulatory Utility Commissioners and reports that he’s as hard-line as ever about network neutrality. Here’s what he said:

“Some companies want us to be a big dumb pipe that gets bigger and bigger…No one gets a free ride. The American economy doesn’t work that way…We are not going to build this with no chance for a return. Those that want to use this will pay.”

Comcast, Cox, Time Warner to Start Mobile Voice Tests

The Hollywood Reporter’s Andrew Wallenstein has this extended, excellent piece on the cable-telco battle of the bundles. Buried in the article, however, is something new to me: Comcast, Time Warner and Cox will start this month testing the sale of mobile voice service as part of a new, expanded quadruple-play package.

This potentially killer combination flows from the $200 million dollar-backed consortium formed last year by Comcast, Time Warner, Cox Communications and Advance/Newhouse with Sprint-Nextel. According to the piece, Comcast and Cox will trial a mobile voice service in selected markets including Boston, Austin, Texas, and Portland, OR. . . .

–ME “Liz” Strauss

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Net Neutrality 7-10-2006

Filed Under Business Life, Community, SOB Business, Successful Blog, Trends | Leave a Comment

Net Neutrality Links

I’m adding this link to the Net Neutrality Page.

The Origins of the Net Neutrality Debate

For all the fuss, however, net neutrality was a non-issue one year ago. In the July 7 issue of the National Journal, senior writer Drew Clark asks how the prospect of tiered Internet access suddenly became a focus of public and Congressional debate. He traces the origins of the debate to a few revealing remarks by Ed Whitacre, the CEO of the company then known as SBC (and soon to become AT&T), suggesting that the company was eager to start charging big customers more for access to the company’s Internet backbone connections.

It’s true that Whitacre’s statement raised the alarm among heavy Internet users — but Whitacre was hardly the first to think of turning the Internet into a toll road. . . .

–ME “Liz” Strauss

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