Net Neutrality 5-30-2006

Net Neutrality Links

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

Two sides of net neutrality … Sir Tim vs Bram Cohen

What is more troubling are things like this BBC interview with Bram Cohen—

Bram Cohen, the ‘ubergeek’ who gave us BitTorrent, is right up there in the pantheon of Internet gods. But unlike such luminaries as Shawn Fanning and Tim Berners Lee, Bram still hopes to make money from the fruits of his intellect. To which end he’s done a deal with Warner Brothers to help them to distribute their movies on BitTorrent. . . .

Bram, for all his kudos for creating BitTorrent, has more of an interest in earning money than keeping the Internet open and free. With his deal with Warner Brothers he now has a real incentive to have a multi-tiered Internet. A multi-tier Internet would allow Warner Brothers content to flow faster while the rest of us wait for our e-mail to arrive.

I think that there is a significant opportunity for an enterprising country to set up an free-Internet zone where displaced American businesses could thrive. A place where the world’s Internet traffic could be routed to. Maybe place like Canada. What do you think Mr Harper? Game for Canada to take the lead on the Internet and kick start a whole Canadian tech sector?

The Democratic Web Has Always Been An Illusion

The problem with the democratic web ideal is that no one really owns their own press — not me, not the rest of the blogosphere, not Yahoo, not Google.

Why? Because none of us owns our own internet access. . . .

Whatever democracy there is on the web exists because the ISPs allow it. Now that the ISPs want to take it away, everyone cries out in horror, running to congress to legislate our right to a democratic web.

Let me be clear — I’m a proponent of net neutrality, from the perspective of the public good — but even if the Web is a public good that should provide unfettered access, that doesn’t resolve the issue of who should pay for bandwidth, which is not an unlimited resource.

I pay for electricity, so I should be able to use as much as I want for whatever I want, right? But there’s a reason why I can’t plug a large industrial machine into my wall socket — the infrastructure can’t handle it.

So much for voltage neutrality.

The Web — Not Democratic but open

In any case, I would disagree with Scott’s premise: it’s not so much about democracy as it is about open access — and the telecoms are quite used to dealing with such things, since the telephone network was effectively treated as a public good through “common carrier” legislation. All the net neutrality folks are talking about is doing the same thing for the Internet. If that requires treating the Internet like a utility, then so be it.

–ME “Liz” Strauss

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NET NEUTRALITY PAGE