Net Neutrality 5-22-2006

Net Neutrality Links

I’ve added these links to the Net Neutrality Page today.

NET NEUTRALITY – by Gar Lipow on MaxSpeak, You Listen!

You (or your host if hosting is being donated to you) will not only pay your current ISP (who in turn uses part of your money to pay for backbone). You will be charged by your customers’ ISPs – which they already pay for. Perhaps you will be charged a third time, by some of the backbones your ISP and customers already pay for. Alternatively, if you don’t pay this extra ransom, MaxSpeak will suddenly become vvveeerrrry ssllooww for most of your readers. They may start getting time-outs and be unable to read it at all.

Bear in mind that you would not be suddenly paying for something you now get for free. Someone hosts MaxSpeak and pays for the high speed internet access that allows it. Whoever owns the hosting server pays a monthly fee that includes only a certain number of bits. If that number of bits is exceeded, host access will either be shut off, or an additional fee will be charged. (This may not be explicit; but I’ve known people with “all you can eat� agreements cut off when their usage grew too high.)

For that matter; if a road-owner does not like your comments, they may just decide not to deliver them altogether, regardless of what you pay. Right now all the big pipelines protest that they would never, ever, ever do that to you. But we have already have case of e-mail with certain sig lines or key words not being delivered.

Web inventor sees his brainchild ready for big leap

He [Tim Berners-Lee, the Briton who invented and then gave away the World Wide Web] is also concerned about how some Internet providers in the United States have started to filter data, giving priority to premium data for which the operator receives an additional fee. They can do this, because they own the cables, the service, the portals and other key applications.

“The public will demand an open Internet,” he said.

On his blog, at http://dig.csail.mit.edu/breadcrumbs/blog/4, Berners-Lee pays hommage to the democratic principles of the designers of the Internet who decided that all data packets were created equal. “I tried then to make the Web technology, in turn, a universal, neutral, platform.”

“It is of the utmost importance that, if I connect to the Internet, and you connect to the Internet, that we can then run any Internet application we want, without discrimination as to who we are or what we are doing.”

Talking Points Memo by Joshua Micah Marshall May 19, 2006 [via The Big News Blog]

Mike McCurry’s takeaway from his catastrophic effort to spin the blogosphere: blogging is “a primal scream in the darkness.” Like the scions Bourbon Restoration he’s remembered everything and learned nothing. People disagreed with McCurry about the net neutrality issue because people disagree about issues. People got so mad at him precisely because of this kind of patronizing attitude. He was peddling flimsy arguments as if it never occurred to him that the blogosphere is full of people who know a lot about the internet and could handle a grown-up argument (see a non-flimsy, though ultimately unpersuasive, anti-neutrality piece if you’re interested).

–ME “Liz” Strauss

Related
NET NEUTRALITY PAGE