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Net Neutrality 10-17-2006

October 17, 2006 by Liz Leave a Comment

Net Neutrality Links

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

A Merger of Mixed Blessings

America is at a time where it needs change from the status quo.

Meanwhile, in terms of YouTube, not much has changed since the merger with Google despite the woe and dispair we’ve been told about this merger but Mergers between AT&T and BellSouth get good press despite being a very bad thing.

I’m come to realize that everything that we are told by the media is wrong. The Media can tell us the sky is green because you don’t send Jesus money when we all know that the sky is blue because of the refraction of light particles in the atmosphere.

And since this is not the first time that AT&T has tried to merge with Bellsouth (anyone remember the break up of AT&T in 1984 should know why AT&T is a malevolent entity) this is deja vu all over again. Yet the YouTube/Google merger is consider a bad thing? This coming from a failing mass media regime that tells us “Net Neutrality is bad”, “Net Neutrality is a bunch of mumbo jumbo”, “The Internet is a series of tubes”, and “If you support Net Neutrality, we’ll slow down your internet access and block pro-Net Neutrality websites” (that one wasn’t written down, but Comcast subscribers know exactly what I’m talking about conisering they couldn’t access Google).

–ME “Liz” Strauss

Related
NET NEUTRALITY PAGE

Filed Under: Business Life, Community, SOB Business, Successful Blog, Trends Tagged With: AT+T, bc, BellSouth, Comcast, Google, MSM, Net-Neutrality, YouTube

Net Neutrality 9-02-2006

September 2, 2006 by Liz Leave a Comment

Net Neutrality Links

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

Comcast Provides Preview of Net Non-Neutrality

. . . I have to wonder if a recent gripe from a Comcast cable modem customer, plus a story I read in this morning’s newspaper about Comcast blacklisting The Well, might be providing a sneak preview of what one of the biggest players has in store for us all.

A reader who is a Comcast broadband customer had a disturbing experience recently. “I’m at a total loss about how to handle this situation,” the reader wrote. “An e-mail to me from a friend got bounced apparently by Comcast. He resent it to my G-Mail account so I could see it. It said that his message was “Blocked for abuse. Please send blacklist removal requests to blacklist_comcastnet@cable.comcast.com’ among other stuff. So apparently there exists a Comcast blacklist that I cannot control that stops e-mails and that requires my correspondents to ask to be permitted to send me messages.”

[ . . . ]

Yes, there’s no question that all of this is far more easily explained by the remarkable incompetence Comcast has long displayed (see Comcast Seems Clueless About Blacklists) in the e-mail arena than some malevolent plot. This is a company that has never been able to properly support its own broadband customers, much less innocent third parties impacted by its random actions. But that’s just the point. Is there any reason to believe that non net-neutrality would make Comcast any better at handling such issues? . . .

–ME “Liz” Strauss

Related
NET NEUTRALITY PAGE

Filed Under: Business Life, Community, SOB Business, Successful Blog, Trends Tagged With: bc, blacklists, Comcast, email, Net-Neutrality

Net Neutrality 8-18-2006

August 18, 2006 by Liz Leave a Comment

Net Neutrality Links

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

Comcast Wants To Be Yahoo

AdAge reports on Comcast’s ambitions to become a Yahoo-type portal. The cable giant is beginning to add more online sales people, hoping to capture a piece of the online advertising pot of gold. It is also opening up its Internet pages to its non-broadband subscribers, which quickly doubles its potential user base. In theory at least! Paid Content has a good wrap up of the story, and some pithy observations.

Now with around 10 million broadband subscribers, it is hard to blame Comcast for having portal ambitions. Just as an aside, isn’t portal a throwback of a vertically integrated Internet 1.0 era? How quaint! How old fashioned! Still, I wonder the wisdom of this move, especially since the company is fighting the triple play battle with politically more savvy phone companies. Shouldn’t that be the focus? I think this is yet another example of “google envy.”

[…]

–ME “Liz” Strauss

Related
NET NEUTRALITY PAGE

Filed Under: Business Life, Community, SOB Business, Successful Blog, Trends Tagged With: bc, Comcast, Google, Internet-1.0, Net-Neutrality, Om-Malik, Yahoo

Net Neutrality 8-2-2006

August 2, 2006 by Liz 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

Related
NET NEUTRALITY PAGE

Filed Under: Business Life, Community, SOB Business, Successful Blog, Trends Tagged With: Andrew-Wallenstein, bc, Comcast, Cox, Ed-Whitacre, GigaOm, Katie-Fehrenbacher, Time-Warner

Net Neutrality 7-7-2006

July 7, 2006 by Liz Leave a Comment

Net Neutrality Links

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

Sen. George Allen is deceiving constituents on Net Neutrality

Republican Sen. George Allen is deceiving constituents about his recent vote AGAINST Net Neutrality and Internet freedom–and he’s doing it using taxpayer dollars.

Allen has accepted $113,000 in campaign cash from phone and cable companies AT&T, Verizon, Comcast, and Time Warner. Last week, he voted to let them put tollbooths on the Internet and have more control over what you see and do online–a blow to Internet freedom.

Allen is now using his taxpayer-funded website to say he “voted yes” on a bill that “addresses the issue of Net Neutrality.” Indeed, as MyDD’s Matt Stoller also points out, the bill Allen voted for “addresses” Net Neutrality by putting it on the road to elimination. He voted no on preserving Net Neutrality.

–ME “Liz” Strauss

Related
NET NEUTRALITY PAGE

Filed Under: Business Life, Community, SOB Business, Successful Blog, Trends Tagged With: AT+T, bc, Comcast, George-Allen, Net-Neutrality, Time-Warner, Verizon

Net Neutrality 6-29-2006

June 29, 2006 by Liz Leave a Comment

Net Neutrality Links

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

Net Neutrality Matters by Scott Russell

Imagine a world where Internet performance is controlled by the company who owns the cables and where speed is sold to the highest bidder. Imagine a world where some Web sites load faster than others, where some sites aren’t even visible and where search engines pay a tax to make sure their services perform at an acceptable speed. That’s the world US Telecommunications companies (telcos) such as AT&T, Verizon, Comcast and Time Warner are trying to create. . . .

To the lay person, it may seem like a laughable proposition. As Cory Doctorow (FreePress) put it, “It’s a dumb idea to put the plumbers who laid a pipe in charge of who gets to use it.” And yet the US congress is swaying towards the view of the telcos, so what’s going on?

Blogtopia “Under Grave and Immediate Threat”

Imagine trying to cope with today’s world without blogs.

On second thought, it’s too painful.

Yet, it may happen sooner rather than later:

Blogs have gained a growing cultural and political impact in the United States and worldwide. In the United States, they’ve been credited with playing a key role in the resignation of a U.S. Senate Majority Leader and the public repudiation of a longtime TV news anchor. Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary of the English language deemed “blog” its word of the year in 2004. The Technorati website boasts that it keeps track of some 28 million blogs worldwide.

Undeniably, blogs and their collective identity known as the “blogosphere” have become an extraordinary phenomenon. And no matter what topics they may discuss or what political leanings they may espouse, they are all under grave and immediate threat.

The Internet’s Oedipal Drama

Fundamental changes have already taken place in the Internet’s traffic load. In the good old days when the Internet was a private club for elite Universities and defense contractors, traffic was light even for the primitive pipes of the day. When congestion collapse appeared it was viable, just barely, to manage it with an end-to-end system that relied on good behavior on the part of the community, because there was a community. The overloaded Internet of the mid 80’s got new life from exponential backoff and slow start in TCP, because the most aggressive consumer of bandwidth was ftp, the files it transferred were short, and users were patient. They didn’t have spam, viruses, worms, or phishing either.

Now that the Internet has to contend with a billion users and multi-gigabyte file transfers with BitTorrent, the honor box model no longer works at all. When BitTorrent is slowed down by backoff, it simply propagates more paths, creating more and more congestion. In another year, the Internet is going to be just as unstable as it was in 1985.

This being the case, the carriers have to implement traffic limits inside the network, building on the mechanisms established as far back as the 1980s with RED and its progeny. This is the only way to control BitTorrent. There is no community and we’re not patient people.

And while they’re doing that, it makes perfect economic and technical sense to implement voice- and video-oriented QoS. Even Berners-Lee acknowledges this, he’s just on the neutrality bandwagon because he’s exercised about third-party billing for web content, a very obscure concern. So whether the phone company manages its links or not, whether they offer third-party billing for QoS or not, and whether the phone company competes with Akamai by offering content caching or not, the Internet will either change or collapse.

–ME “Liz” Strauss

Related
NET NEUTRALITY PAGE

Filed Under: Business Life, Community, SOB Business, Successful Blog, Trends Tagged With: AT+T, bc, Comcast, Cory-Doctorow, Net-Neutrality, QoS., TCP, Technorati, Time-Warner, Verizon

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