With a Democratically-controlled Congress looming, the prospects for codifying net neutrality into law seem better than ever — which will not stop Comcast, Verizon, et al. from doing their darndest to keep it from happening. The good folks at Save the Internet have put together an informative and entertaining video on the subject which features several politicians who have taken leading roles on the issue — including our own Rep. Ed Markey. Here it is:
With the Dems taking control of the House, Markey is going to be a, if not the, key player on this issue. He’s already on the right side of it. Let him know you support his stance, especially if you live in his district.
Please share widely!
Public and government access channels are included in this as well (hint – the Comcasts want them gone) so PLEASE don’t be net bigots and help keep public TV alive!
I also cannot stress how important local cable access is to communities – the only place residents can go to MAKE programming, rather blog-like from the ground up, instead of be spoon fed whatever crap is out there.
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Here, LTC broadcasts City Council and School Committee, board and subcommittee meetings. It’s a vital part of our city. They also helped host our blogger Lt. Gov debate last spring! Cool stuff happens at your local cable access station.
Not sure what public TV has to do with net neutrality. But either way, if it wasn’t for Government Access Channels Comcast would be able to offer their services for less money.
I have no idea if I’m for it or agin it. It’s impossible to analyze.
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Look at the players: On one side you have the coms, on the other you have google, et al. I’m neither one of them.
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Google, et al is very savy to create a “it’s our internet” movement. Really though, Google doesn’t want to have to pay more to the Coms. I can’t blame Google or the providers for that.
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AT&T, et al want a few buck extra for their pipes and just may be able to innovate some neat new thing that people would pay more for. Innovation is good, right?
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The little guys are already screwed. Forget the pipes, right now little guys have servers that are alot slower than the big guys’ servers. The “it’s our internet” crap rings hollow to me.
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I’m also cynical enough to know that neither Google nor AT&T are looking out for me. It’s the dollars. Kinda like the Question 1 debate in Mass: Big Booze versus big stores, but the big booze won by claiming it was about the children. Mass voted for Big Booze and most of the voters didn’t even know it.
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Now a couple of you claim that net neutrality is about the little guy and public access. I’m not buying it. It hasn’t happened yet. Why would it?
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Look to the nonbiased experts: They don’t know what the right answer is.
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Maybe our elected leaders can help us: Crap, they’re talking about tubes, and internets, and the google, and one guy invented the internet, one guy’s a movie actor … Seriously, you’d trust these guys to draft a law to straighten out broadband? Can your reps even plug in a light?
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So who’s doing the high thinking for the politician? You know damn well that the lobbyist who that is drafting the latest ‘net neutrality’ regulation is paid by google and yahoo and the guy who is opposing him is paid for by AT&T.
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There’s no ‘net neutrality’ law now is there? So far, we’ve survived.
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So why am I mistaken with a “If it’s not broke, don’t break it” solution to this non-problem?
You are correct that we have no net neutrality law at this time, and I lean towards your metaphor that if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. However, as net traffic multiplies exponentially, you CAN make a case that we are teetering on the verge of breakdown – and with no law in place, guess who goes under the bus? (hint – it ain’t Verizon).
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We DO have a government, school and public access law, which madates that cable carriers offer these channels to communities, and they eat up their capacity. This is part of the net neutrality bill for some reason, and the supporters are concerned that they may be thrown under the bus (hint – the suporters ain’t Comcast).
Well assuming that breakdown is possible and that someone will have to have less access (something BTW, I’m not so sure will happen), who should it be?
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And, you’d let ‘net neutrality’ legislators decide that for you?
There is no way we are teetering towards breakdown. The opposite is in fact true. According to Moore’s Law, computer power doubles every 18 months, meaning that computers will be a million times more powerful by 2034. According to Nielsen’s Law of Internet bandwidth, connectivity to the home grows by 50 percent per year; by 2034, we’ll have 200,000 times more bandwidth. That same year, I’ll own a computer that runs at 3PHz CPU speed, has a petabyte (a thousand terabytes) of memory, half an exabyte (a billion gigabytes) of hard disk-equivalent storage and connects to the Internet with a bandwidth of a quarter terabit (a trillion binary digits) per second.
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The specifics may vary: Instead of following current Moore’s Law trajectories to speed up a single CPU, it’s likely that we’ll see multiprocessors, smart dust and other ways of getting the equivalent power through a more advanced computer architecture. But users shouldn’t have to care about such implementation details.
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By 2034, we’ll finally get decent computer displays, with a resolution of about 20,000 pixels by 10,000 pixels (as opposed to the miserly 2048 pixels by 1536 pixels on my current monitor). Although welcomed, my predicted improvement factor of 200 here is relatively small; history shows that display technology has the most dismal improvement curve of any computer technology, except possibly batteries.
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How could anyone use petabytes of memory and terabits of bandwidth for personal needs? Hard to imagine now, but I don’t think we’ll have any trouble putting the coming hardware cornucopia to good use. We’ll use half the storage space to index all our information so that we can search it instantly. Good riddance, snoozy Outlook search.
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check this out: http://www.siemon.co…
That is easy: for it of course. you guys should check this out:http://www.pbs.org/m…
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it goes on to say ackgrounder: Community Connections
In Lafayette, Louisiana, residents and officials took on their phone company, BellSouth, and their cable company, Cox Communications, and built their own high-speed fiber network after the firms refused to bring true broadband connections to their community. Both telcom giants lobbied the state legislature to block Lafayette’s plan, citing unfair competition. Ultimately, lawmakers put it to a vote to let residents decide. The measure allowing the community-built network passed overwhelmingly. BellSouth then filed suit, delaying construction by more than a year, before losing their case in court. There are hundreds of Community Internet and municipal broadband projects underway or in the planning stages in the U.S. But there are also 14 states that either prohibit cities and towns from building their own networks or have passed laws that make it more difficult … [more]…
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Also check this out…: http://www.savethein…
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“Why Citizen Movements Are Citizen Driven
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As many here know, Microsoft is one of the big supporters of network neutrality and a member of the ItsOurNet coalition. ItsOurNet is the industry driven coalition with public interest members. That is different from the SavetheInternet.com Coalition, which is the public interest coalition with industry members.
Harold Feld
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Guest Blog by Harold Feld of Media Access Project
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Read the original post at
Public Knowledge
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And today, Microsoft demonstrated why the distinction is important. MS has taken a temporary hiatus from It’s Our Internet.
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Why? Because It’s Our Internet filed comments with the FCC demanding a net neutrality condition in the proposed AT&T/BellSouth merger. MS has a corporate policy against opposing other people’s mergers – particularly mergers involving large potential customers.
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MS is not unique in this. Many companies have such a policy. It’s why AT&T never said a word against Comcast and Time Warner’s acquisition of Adelphia cable, even though Comcast and Time Warner are AT&T’s chief competitors at the moment.
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This is why, as I have said before, “you can’t outsource citizenship.” It is nice to have big companies like MS on our side, and I have no doubt they will get back in the NN game as soon as the AT&T/BS merger is over. But, at the end of the day, MS – like Google and Ebay and every other company supporting NN – does so to advance its corporate interests. That’s not a criticism. It’s a fact of life.
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If you expect companies to save your bacon and defend your rights, think again. And if you expect the network neutrality movement to vanish if the telcos and tech cos manage to cut some kind of deal, think again. What has put Network Neutrality on the policy map has been people getting together and reminding their elected representatives that they work for us. And if we are going to win this fight in the long haul, we need to remember that.”
…check out and subscribe to the Electronic Freedom Foundation. http://www.eff.org/
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They are an interesting libertarian-oriented hybrid of liberal and conservative. For example, I personally have no problem with the FISA wiretaps they are so exercised about, but applaud their efforts on intellectual property and blogger’s rights.
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Send them money, and they’ll send you a keen tee-shirt!