I guess I've not been paying attention recently, because this entire issue (Net Neutrality) has escaped my attention. Well, no more! Essentially, the large telecom and Internet service providers want to take control over which sites you can see. If NBC pays them more, then bandwidth and access to NBC will be fantastic, while you won't be able to access CBS or BBC or NY1. If Microsoft pays them more than Craig's List, then no more access to Craig's List. That is the issue in a nutshell, and stopping them just failed a Senate Committee.So click on the picture above. Get educated. Sign the petition. Contact your congressional representatives. Save the Internet.
P.S. I'll give credit to James from whom I first found out about this issue. He has a pretty good post on it.
NYC
2 comments:
Heh, I'm sitting here watching Shopgirl on DVD with Ginger while I've got the laptop out writing up tonight's post on Net Neutrality, and I see you've gone and stolen my thunder!
Come on, where's your spirit of compromise? The companies can have what they want, but only after each one either (a) chooses to become a content provider OR a network provider and divests the function they do not choose to do as a business or (b) places their networks under the control of a 3rd party system operator who makes all access decisions.
The biggest problem is not allowing a content provider to pay for faster service, it's that the government allows companies to fulfill both the monopoly network provider function and a competitive marketing function with not enough separation of the two. As far as I can think right now, they may be the only utility service set up that way (phone companies are required by law to not intermingle their wholesale and retail functions) -- but that sort of thinking only took hold in the electric, natural gas, and phone sectors in the last 15 years or so.
Ugh I sound like a regulatory economist this morning.
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