You didn't act and now the internet will suffer...

[jim]

-----------------------------------------------------------------------
Feds OK Fee For Some Web Traffic

WASHINGTON (AP) -- The Justice Department on Thursday said Internet service
providers should be allowed to charge a fee for priority Web traffic.

The agency told the Federal Communications Commission, which is reviewing
high-speed Internet practices, that it is opposed to "Net neutrality," the
principle that all Internet sites should be equally accessible to any Web
user.

Several phone and cable companies, such as AT&T Inc., Verizon Communications
Inc. and Comcast Corp., have previously said they want the option to charge
some users more money for loading certain content or Web sites faster than
others.

The Justice Department said imposing a Net neutrality regulation could
hamper development of the Internet and prevent service providers from
upgrading or expanding their networks. It could also shift the "entire
burden of implementing costly network expansions and improvements onto
consumers," the agency said in its filing.

Such a result could diminish or delay network expansion and improvement, it
added.

The agency said providing different levels of service is common, efficient
and could satisfy consumers. As an example, it cited that the U.S. Postal
Service charges customers different guarantees and speeds for package
delivery, ranging from bulk mail to overnight delivery.

"Whether or not the same type of differentiated products and services will
develop on the Internet should be determined by market forces, not
regulatory intervention," the agency said in its filing.

The agency's stance comes more than two months after Federal Trade
Commission Chairwoman Deborah Platt Majoras cautioned policy makers to enact
Net neutrality regulation.

Such a regulation could prevent rather than promote Internet investment and
innovation and have "significant negative effects for the economy and
consumers," the Justice Department said in the filing.

Supporters of Internet regulation have said that phone and cable companies
could discriminate against certain Web site and services.

However, the agency said it will continue to monitor and enforce any
anticompetitive conduct to ensure a competitive broadband marketplace.


(Copyright © 2007, The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved.)
-----------------------------------------------------------------------

You should have called your crongressperson. You should have paid attention
and raised hell at the very idea of slowing some sites (that's right -
SLOWING your internet connection to some sites) while allowing corporations
that pay an internet hostage fee to get higher speeds. I did.

You see, I thought that my tiny 1.5 MB connection via AT&T meant that I
could access sites at 1.5 MB. That will no longer be the case. The actual
speed of any site will now depend on whether that site pays AT&T a fee to
get through faster than thier competition.

So, what the hell am I paying for? This is akin to paying to send an
overnight letter, but the letter speed being slowed until the recipient pays
a "speedy delivery" tax.

Don;t kid yourself...AT&T and other internet providers will NOT rush out and
put more servers or faster switches in place to make a premium super highway
for the corporations that pay these fees. It is much easier and cheaper to
simply restrict ALL current traffic on thier network and allow paying
websites to pass through faster.

The internet as you have known it is dead. And its because you sat on your
ass and did nothing.

jim

 

[jim]

-----------------------------------------------------------------------

Feds OK Fee For Some Web Traffic

WASHINGTON (AP) -- The Justice Department on Thursday said Internet
service providers should be allowed to charge a fee for priority Web
traffic.

The agency told the Federal Communications Commission, which is reviewing
high-speed Internet practices, that it is opposed to "Net neutrality," the
principle that all Internet sites should be equally accessible to any Web
user.

Several phone and cable companies, such as AT&T Inc., Verizon
Communications Inc. and Comcast Corp., have previously said they want the
option to charge some users more money for loading certain content or Web
sites faster than others.

The Justice Department said imposing a Net neutrality regulation could
hamper development of the Internet and prevent service providers from
upgrading or expanding their networks. It could also shift the "entire
burden of implementing costly network expansions and improvements onto
consumers," the agency said in its filing.

Such a result could diminish or delay network expansion and improvement,
it added.

The agency said providing different levels of service is common, efficient
and could satisfy consumers. As an example, it cited that the U.S. Postal
Service charges customers different guarantees and speeds for package
delivery, ranging from bulk mail to overnight delivery.

"Whether or not the same type of differentiated products and services will
develop on the Internet should be determined by market forces, not
regulatory intervention," the agency said in its filing.

The agency's stance comes more than two months after Federal Trade
Commission Chairwoman Deborah Platt Majoras cautioned policy makers to
enact Net neutrality regulation.

Such a regulation could prevent rather than promote Internet investment
and innovation and have "significant negative effects for the economy and
consumers," the Justice Department said in the filing.

Supporters of Internet regulation have said that phone and cable companies
could discriminate against certain Web site and services.

However, the agency said it will continue to monitor and enforce any
anticompetitive conduct to ensure a competitive broadband marketplace.


(Copyright © 2007, The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved.)
-----------------------------------------------------------------------

You should have called your crongressperson. You should have paid
attention and raised hell at the very idea of slowing some sites (that's
right - SLOWING your internet connection to some sites) while allowing
corporations that pay an internet hostage fee to get higher speeds. I
did.

You see, I thought that my tiny 1.5 MB connection via AT&T meant that I
could access sites at 1.5 MB. That will no longer be the case. The
actual speed of any site will now depend on whether that site pays AT&T a
fee to get through faster than thier competition.

So, what the hell am I paying for? This is akin to paying to send an
overnight letter, but the letter speed being slowed until the recipient
pays a "speedy delivery" tax.

Don;t kid yourself...AT&T and other internet providers will NOT rush out
and put more servers or faster switches in place to make a premium super
highway for the corporations that pay these fees. It is much easier and
cheaper to simply restrict ALL current traffic on thier network and allow
paying websites to pass through faster.

The internet as you have known it is dead. And its because you sat on
your ass and did nothing.

jim

You can chew on this while you're pissed at me......

_____________________________________________
September 6, 2007 5:00 PM PDT

Ten things that finally killed Net neutrality
Posted by Declan McCullagh

(http://news.com.com/8301-13578_3-9773538-38.html)

If you haven't heard much about Net neutrality this year, you're not alone.
It went from being the political equivalent of a first-run Broadway show,
with accompanying street protests and high profile votes in Congress, to a
third-rate performance with no budget and slumping attendance.

So what killed Net neutrality? Here's a list, in no particular order:


You don't see these kinds of marching-in-the-street protests anymore

(Credit: Declan McCullagh/mccullagh.org)1. The Bush administration.
Democrats may control Congress, but the White House and federal agencies
matter. And the administration made it perfectly clear on Thursday that no
new Net neutrality regulations are necessary. That gives the Republicans in
Congress their marching orders, and a unified GOP front means the Democrats
are more likely to expend ammunition elsewhere.

2. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. The California Democrat claimed to adore Net
neutrality last year, saying: "Without Net neutrality the current experience
that Internet users enjoy today is in jeopardy. Without the Markey
Amendment, telecommunications and cable companies will be able to create
toll lanes on the information superhighway. This strikes at the heart of the
free and equal nature of the Internet." The Markey Amendment was defeated in
a Republican Congress last year.

But even though Pelosi's now in charge, she's done precisely nothing (at
least nothing that's been publicly visible) to live up to last year's
rhetoric.

3. The AT&T merger. Net neutrality rules were part of the Federal
Communications Commission's approval of the AT&T and BellSouth merger in
December 2006. The company pledged not to privilege, degrade, or prioritize
"any packet transmitted over AT&T/BellSouth's wireline broadband Internet
access service based on its source, ownership or destination" for two years.
That defused concerns for a while, which had grown after AT&T CEO Edward
Whitacre was quoted as talking about giving Google and other Internet
companies a "free ride" on his network, whatever that means.

4. A fragmenting coalition. The major pro-Net neutrality coalition last year
was called "It's Our Net" and boasted 148 members. Now, says coalition
spokesman Eric London, it's been "reconstituted in a different form" with a
broader focus and is called the Open Internet Coalition. (The old domain
name redirects to the new one.)

But the list of members today is far smaller, at just 74 members. Missing
are previous members including Adobe, Amazon.com, the Business Software
Alliance, Expedia, Intel, Microsoft, Sony, and Yahoo. Companies that stayed
in the coalition include eBay, Earthlink, Google, NetCoalition (which
includes CNET Networks), and TiVo.

5. Mixed messages. Most proposals for extensive Net neutrality regulations
have given the FCC broad authority, not least because the chairman of the
Federal Trade Commission said in August 2006 that she was skeptical of
aggressive regulation.

Then Google's head of public policy said a few months later that "cutting
the FCC out of the picture would be a smart move" in favor of Justice
Department or FTC enforcement. Now, maybe he was misquoted, and Google
subsequently said there's "no change" in the company's position. And it's
true that the company has continued to be a part of pro-Net neutrality
coalitions. Still, the legislation that Google officially supported in
mid-2006 would have put the FCC--not the FTC--in charge.

There's also Google CEO Eric Schmidt's speech last month in Aspen, Colorado
that I covered. By Google's standards, it was remarkably conciliatory: it
mentioned Net neutrality only once and did not call for new federal laws.
Schmidt even acknowledged "the billions of dollars that have been spent to
do both wireless and wireline data deployment networks"--by the broadband
providers that have been his political enemies for the last two years.

6. The Bush administration. Yes, it's on the list twice. It's on here again
because of how much President Bush's and the Justice Department's arguably
illegal wiretapping program and related policies have consumed Congress. The
four most recent headlines on the House Judiciary Committee's Web site are
about FISA or the Justice Department. In the Senate, the Judiciary Committee
has held no fewer than seven hearings on the dismissal of U.S. Attorneys.
It's true that the two Commerce committees haven't been tied up with those
topics, but the Iraq War and global warming have been higher priorities than
less pressing concerns about broadband regulation.

7. The Federal Trade Commission. The lifelong bureaucrats at the FTC are
hardly a bunch of Hayek-quoting, Ron Paul-voting libertarians. Which is why,
as I wrote in June, it's notable that they came out with a report saying no
new laws are necessary. In part it's something of a turf battle, of course,
and a way to warn the FCC that it doesn't have a monopoly on this issue. But
it could have been far more enthusiastic about new laws, and is sure to make
otherwise pro-regulation Democrats think twice about supporting them again.

8. No smoking gun. The problem with the Net neutrality debate has been
two-fold. First, the term is vague and means different things to different
people. Does it mean broadband providers shouldn't block content (a
perfectly reasonable principle, that) or does it mean the FCC gets to
prevent AT&T from entering into deals to make its partners' TV shows stream
without hiccups? Second, it's possible to support the goals of Net
neutrality while being deeply skeptical of the FCC getting things right when
it comes to Internet regulation.

Which brings me to Point No. 8: With one or two exceptions like the Madison
River blocking, there's no evidence of wrongdoing by broadband providers.
Sure, maybe broadband providers have been on their best behavior now that
their arch-nemesis Rep. Ed Markey can haul them before his subcommittee, but
without horrific examples of abuses (or, even any examples of abuses) it's
hard for advocacy groups to raise the alarm.

9. 700 MHz wireless spectrum. Perhaps as a result of being trounced
repeatedly in Congress last year, the proponents of Net neutrality have
spent 2007 lobbying federal agencies instead (this is also known as the "FCC
is a softer touch theory"). One catalyst was probably Columbia University
law prof Tim Wu's paper, and Google's lobbying to persuade the FCC to impose
open access requirements on a chunk of the valuable 700 MHz spectrum. They
won in part in July, and Google said last month it will "probably" place a
bid.

10. Partisan gridlock. Most technology debates in Congress aren't especially
partisan: Both Democrats and Republicans fall over each other to enact
unconstitutional restrictions on free speech when it comes to laws like the
Communications Decency Act. The R&D tax credit is another. But somehow along
the way, perhaps because Internet companies allied themselves so closely
with MoveOn.org (hardly a non-partisan group), it became a partisan issue.
And that led to the usual partisan gridlock.

James Gattuso, a senior research fellow at the conservative Heritage
Foundation, has a related explanation he told me on Thursday: "When this
became a hard left issue, I think some of the for-profit members of the
coalition got cold feet. Some of the rhetoric got a bit out of control on
the left. They started talking about the evils of pricing and the evils of
price discrimination in markets. Anyone in the corporate side had to have
second thoughts about that."

I should point out, to be fair, that Art Brodsky, a spokesman for pro-Net
neutrality group Public Knowledge, thinks I'm wrong about the death of Net
neutrality (and also thinks that Gattuso is wrong on the hard-left impact).
"It's not dead," Brodsky said. "It's dormant, pending metamorphosis. It will
re-emerge at some point." His group still wants Net neutrality rules
enshrined into law as "part of a bigger broadband policy rather than a
centerpiece of a discrete issue."

He may be right. Maybe some Net neutrality bill will come back from the dead
under a Democratic administration in 2009. But I'd say the most likely
scenario is that Net neutrality, at least in its current form, fades away
like Show Boat and other onetime Broadway hits that are now just faint
memories.
_____________________________________________

 

[V Green]

So YouTube will load & run slower.

Who the F cares.

A positive result might be that bloated, bandwidth-sucking,
Flash-ridden sites will be re-written WITHOUT that crap
in order to keep the speed up unless they wanna pay.

 

[jim]

So YouTube will load & run slower.

Who the F cares.

A positive result might be that bloated, bandwidth-sucking,
Flash-ridden sites will be re-written WITHOUT that crap
in order to keep the speed up unless they wanna pay.

I agree that flash takes more bandwidth than the user experience gains. I
turn off flash myself.

But the problem is that great ideas, that 95% of the time start in
basements, dorm rooms, bedrooms and garages, will suffer when their
popularity causes a spike in their bandwidth. This will make the apps SEEM
slow, when they are really being throttled (held hostage) for fees that the
ISPs simply didn't earn and don't deserve.

Do you really want to be at the mercy of large corporations for innovation?

jim

 

[V Green]

I agree that flash takes more bandwidth than the user experience gains. I
turn off flash myself.

But the problem is that great ideas, that 95% of the time start in
basements, dorm rooms, bedrooms and garages, will suffer when their
popularity causes a spike in their bandwidth. This will make the apps SEEM
slow, when they are really being throttled (held hostage) for fees that the
ISPs simply didn't earn and don't deserve.

Do you really want to be at the mercy of large corporations for innovation?

We already are. And have been for some time.

Your last sentence could have been more accurately written:

"Do you really want to be at the mercy of large corporations for everything?"

There just aren't enough of us who will stop blabbing on our cell
phones and turn off American Idol long enough to get involved and
make a difference...