The US government and the internet
Yoinked from kalla, who took it from jediboadicea's post here. And left public because it is important.
The U.S. House of Representatives has just passed the COPE bill: the Communications Opportunity, Promotion and Enhancement act.
If you're reading this online, then this issue matters to you, because you use the internet for personal enjoyment. You like to keep up with the mundane trivialities of on-line friends in your life, because hey, why the hell not? It's your life, it's your free time, and this is harmless fun of the superficially enriching but sometimes necessary variety.
What the COPE bill does is continue to utterly destroy the concept of "net neutrality" that was first gutted by the Supreme Court and the FCC just last year. This new law says that all internet service providers will now be able to create a two tier internet. Every person or company who wants to run any sort of website will have to now pay additional money- money on top of what they pay to buy webspace in the first place - to the telecom companies in order to have a website that loads smoothly and more quickly than those who don't pay. It means that if Google wants to load as quickly on your browser as it currently does, they will have to approach the internet service providers in every region individually and pay additional money to get premium service.Otherwise, Google will be relegated to the lower tier, and load less quickly.
But you have high-speed internet, you say? Tough cookies. It doesn't matter what sort of connection you have if the internet service providers themselves are feeding the site to you more slowly. This means that unless you - yes, you - as a site owner - can pay a ransom fee to every different internet service provider in the country, your site will load like crap.
It means that Verizon,or Comcast, or TimeWarner, or whoever runs your internet service in your area, will now have power over deciding which websites are easily accessible to you and which are not.
Your favorite blogger couldn't pay the additional fee for your area? Oh well. Your favorite specialty online store couldn't pay this additional operating cost?Tough luck. Your political candidate's fundraising site couldn't pay extra money in order to fundraise? He was probably just a jerk anyway.Your favorite fandom site where you download all your crack fandom fixes? Yeah right, like they have the money to pay Verizon to give you stuff for free.
If you have a Live Journal account as you read this, then this issue matters to you, because this is a perfect example of the type of service that will be affected, and how it will change an aspect of your life you have happily taken for granted. You have your Live Journal account for free? Awesome. You pay a few dollars every couple months to have your Live Journal account and100 fun user pics? Cool. But if the Senate passes a similar bill to COPE, you can kiss the speed with which Live Journal loads goodbye,because they will now have to pay additional money to every single internet service provider to keep up this level of service.
If you live in major urban centers, like New York or Los Angeles, you might be okay, because should Live Journal choose to make that additional payment, they'll likely make it to providers in areas with the most clientele to be serviced. But if you live in Wyoming? You're out of luck, buddy. They likely can't afford to make a ransom payment to every provider in the country; they're going to have to pick and choose. Because remember, it's not some big blanket provider that services everyone. Every region has different providers, and each would have to be negotiated with independently. Oh, and those few dollars you pay for your LJ account? You can expect that to increase, I'll bet. Who could blame them? On top of all the money they already pay now just to get space on the internet, now they'll have to pay more in order to get the "good" service.
If you have your own website, or a free account to share pictures, or a favorite site to download media,or post your fanfiction at an online archive, then this issue matters to you.
You like YouTube? You like Flickr? You like PhotoBucket?You like blog spaces? What's so cool about all these places is that now you can share your pictures, your words, your passions, with faraway family, with faraway friends, with the whole world, at the click of a button. It's easy. It's fast. It connects us all. Most of the time it's free. Best of all, it's a place where Joe in New York and Mandisa in India can be in the same place, on the same footing, no barriers, no issues of distance or social or economic preference between them. You can access the internet? Awesome. We're all free here.
So much for that. Do you think that awesome site devoted to your obscure OTP is going to be able to pay premiums to internet service providers to make sure that they load as easily on your browser as they do now?
Google,eBay, Amazon, and Microsoft have all joined together to ask people to fight against the passage of this new law. If they think it's going to negatively affect their operations, if they think that paying these ransoms will put a crimp in their style, then how is it going to affect you? Most of us lack their bargaining power.
If you use the internet to study for your schoolwork, or research information for private interest, then this issue matters to you, because these are certainly sites that will not be able to pay for premium service. Most of these places are already operating at a loss anyway, because they feel that providing information is a service to the community, and so they do it at no cost to you, willing to pay what is already necessary just to buy webspace in the first place. While we cut funding to libraries all across the country, we have all clung to the hope that at least the internet is a place where information can be shared freely.Who hasn't come to rely on the ease of a search engine to learn just about anything you could possibly want to know about in the world? That awesome site about Middle Ages textiles, with all the amazing pictures and scans, that you have bookmarked in the hope of maybe someday using that information in a story? That page with the Central Asian recipes that you have bookmarked in the hope of inflicting them on an unsuspecting family someday? Be prepared for those to take much longer to load.
Well, and what's the big deal about that? you say.Who cares if it's a few more seconds, or even a minute or two? It's still there. You just have to be patient, right?
Honestly, how patient are you? When Live Journal takes more than a few seconds to load, don't you mutter darkly, hit stop, hit refresh, and expect it to pop up instantaneously? How irritated will you be when that doesn't happen? How irritated will you be when that happens on nearly every site you go to?
More importantly, why should you sit back and let this happen to an internet that has been equal and free to everyone for so long? Why give up what already exits? Why let massive companies who are already being paid by you for access, AND by the website owners for webspace, have the right to say that they need to be paid again in order to give you what they're already giving you now?
The argument that implementing cutting edge technology raises the telecom companies' operating costs doesn't hold water here either. Since when have big companies not implemented the newest technology? That's standard operating practice. That's what you're already paying for. And anyone who has seen their cable or DSL costs keep going up knows perfectly well that they're paying for just that. But we still do it,right? Because we're getting the same end result. You want to keep paying the same price for a different and unequal and filtered end result?
If any internet service provider absolutely requires more money in order to keep up with operating costs, then they can charge us more for our internet access. We'll complain, but most likely we'll pay it. For universal internet access and a free internet, we'll pay. What we are not paying for is to be told what we can or cannot view easily - a decision which will be entirely out of our hands, made without our consent or input.
I don't know about other people,but I certainly don't pay for internet for the privilege of getting Paramount Pictures' official website to load faster; I pay for the internet to have access to my obscure anime downloads and online journaling. Somehow I don't think those types of sites are going to be able to meet new gatekeeping ransoms when actual for-profit websites can't.
If you've ever paid to upgrade your internet access, then this issue matters to you. This is the real kicker, and I hope that those with more capitalist and free-market tendencies than I will be angered by this part of it too. Because what the passage of this law means is that, even if you pay for a service, it doesn't matter. You have paid for internet access in the first place. Okay,that's fine, that just means you have access to whatever is out there and however it is designed to come to you. But if you've ever paid even a penny to get faster access, you've done it on the premise that the product you are paying for is faster access. This is what you have paid for. This is the product you have paid for. You, as a consumer, have paid money to a provider, and you expect to be provided with the product you paid for. Why am I emphasizing this? Because under this law, it won't matter what you paid for. You can have paid for light-speed internet access that actually predicts your thought and loads your desired page before you've finished typing in the url, but it won't matter one whit unless the page you're trying to load has paid the ISP for special-treatment equally lightning-fast access too. Those pages that haven't paid are going to load like dial-up, baby. Which means that the lightning-fast access you paid for is only going to apply to those sites that are on the ISP company's "good list."
What,you mean you wanted access to everything on the internet at the same speed? You mean that's why you paid for high-speed access in the first place? Isn't the first law of good business that you give the customer what they paid for, otherwise you're a fraud and a thief and not serving the market properly?
Oh well.
This is not an issue of liberals wanting to "regulate" the internet. If anything, this is much more a self-interested issue of pure Money As God, that everyone should be able to agree with. You're paying for something. You should get what you paid for. You didn't pay for the internet in order to be told by a massive telecom company which sites you should be allowed to view easily and which you shouldn't. How many times have those of us who pay for cable television flipped through 400channels and moaned that there was nothing worth watching? That's because someone else chooses what you get access to. The internet has never been that. The internet has been everything, has been the world,has been the place where everyone has a place. That awesome independent musician. That radical political group. That cartoon fan site.
Preventing the government from passing a law that gives massive corporations the right to tier the internet does not mean you want the government to regulate the internet. It means you just want the internet to be what it has always been - a place where everyone and every site is equal,you pay for your bandwidth and your space, you pay for your LiveJournal, and you get exactly what you paid for, no preferences, no gatekeeping, just payment and product and a free exchange of ideas and information and art and friendships. That's what you have now. That'snot government regulation.
That's what you won't have, if the Senate agrees to pass these new laws.
The argument that "protecting net neutrality" will introduce government regulation is deceptive; "net neutrality" has existed on the internet all along up until now, has been what the internet was founded on. It is what we have been enjoying all these years. The change being proposed now is the removal of net neutrality, not its implementation.Do not let the spin-doctors fool us on this one.
This is not a trivial issue that will only affect the trivial aspects of your life.Do you really want Verizon to be able to decide which news and information sites load more easily for you? Do you really want TimeWarner to be able to decide which fansites you can easily download from? Do you want everything you have known and loved about the internet to be fundamentally changed? Good luck getting back across that bridge once it's crossed. Getting internet freedom back after it's been parced out and sold is going to be infinitely hardly than giving it away was, if not impossible.
This website has loads of information:
http://www.savetheinternet.com/
Anyone who has heard my stance on the immigration issue should have an idea of how poorly I think of Representative Sensenbrenner, so when I say that he is listed as a Net Hero on this site, you can bet it's not some"liberal bastion of partisanship," but an important information site for everyone. Visit it while you still can.
Here are some articles and op-ed pieces from various other sites:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/06/07/AR2006060702108.html?referrer=emailarticle
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/5009250.stm
http://www.snopes.com/politics/business/neutrality.asp
http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=06/06/09/1427218
Back on Save The Internet, this relatively short page - http://www.savetheinternet.com/=threat- explains just a few of the ways this could impact individuals, with some very important examples of ways in which this sort of"gatekeeping" has already been abused. Proving that once you open the door...
The site also provides a way to automatically send a message to your representatives. To do so, go here:
http://www.savetheinternet.com/=act
I want to add something here, my own little voice of reason and moderation if you will. I'm not saying that everything that I've described in this hypothetical future is what is actually-factually going to happen. Verizon and AT&T may not be Evil Uber Corporations who decide to screw over every little guy on the internet. They may decide just to make all the websites who pay extra faster, while leaving the rest of us the way we are. They may not be the devil incarnate. But that's really not the point I'm trying to make here.Whether or not they choose to do what I've described is not as important as the fact that under this new law they will have the power to choose. I see this as a Pandora's Box. I'm saying that the potential for abuse is huge, whether it be abuse of the consumer by interference with the product, or the actual filtering of content to conform with any bias of the moment (monetary or otherwise). I'm saying that access to the internet should not be a matter of trust and hope - just trusting that Verizon and AT&T won't abuse the power to tollbooth our internet, and simply hoping that the sites you happen to like won't be the ones to suffer. There may be a million different stopgap measures we can implement individually to try to circumvent such abuses- but my question is, why should we have to?
And to those outside of the U.S. I say this: This law may not affect you directly -yet. But telecom corporations in the U.S. are the same as telecom corporations anywhere. If the ball gets rolling here, if the precedent is set just once, then the snowball effect will have started. The internet is what it is - it is all connected. What begins in one place will spread to others, given time. This is not something we want to let begin, anywhere. It also means that the U.S.-resident website owners of some of the sites you love and visit may end up having slower access to their own websites or forums, possibly making it more difficult or tedious for them to operate the sites in the first place. So if you're on the internet, chances are you have internet friends and acquaintances who can act on this issue within the U.S. - help get the word to them.
Pass this word on. Please feel free to cut and paste this entry, or to abbreviate it, or to paraphrase it, or to just post the provided links - do whatever is necessary to get the word out.We turn a blind eye to politics all the time because it's so overwhelming and annoying sometimes, but if you are reading this on the internet, then this issue matters to you.
The U.S. House of Representatives has just passed the COPE bill: the Communications Opportunity, Promotion and Enhancement act.
If you're reading this online, then this issue matters to you, because you use the internet for personal enjoyment. You like to keep up with the mundane trivialities of on-line friends in your life, because hey, why the hell not? It's your life, it's your free time, and this is harmless fun of the superficially enriching but sometimes necessary variety.
What the COPE bill does is continue to utterly destroy the concept of "net neutrality" that was first gutted by the Supreme Court and the FCC just last year. This new law says that all internet service providers will now be able to create a two tier internet. Every person or company who wants to run any sort of website will have to now pay additional money- money on top of what they pay to buy webspace in the first place - to the telecom companies in order to have a website that loads smoothly and more quickly than those who don't pay. It means that if Google wants to load as quickly on your browser as it currently does, they will have to approach the internet service providers in every region individually and pay additional money to get premium service.Otherwise, Google will be relegated to the lower tier, and load less quickly.
But you have high-speed internet, you say? Tough cookies. It doesn't matter what sort of connection you have if the internet service providers themselves are feeding the site to you more slowly. This means that unless you - yes, you - as a site owner - can pay a ransom fee to every different internet service provider in the country, your site will load like crap.
It means that Verizon,or Comcast, or TimeWarner, or whoever runs your internet service in your area, will now have power over deciding which websites are easily accessible to you and which are not.
Your favorite blogger couldn't pay the additional fee for your area? Oh well. Your favorite specialty online store couldn't pay this additional operating cost?Tough luck. Your political candidate's fundraising site couldn't pay extra money in order to fundraise? He was probably just a jerk anyway.Your favorite fandom site where you download all your crack fandom fixes? Yeah right, like they have the money to pay Verizon to give you stuff for free.
If you have a Live Journal account as you read this, then this issue matters to you, because this is a perfect example of the type of service that will be affected, and how it will change an aspect of your life you have happily taken for granted. You have your Live Journal account for free? Awesome. You pay a few dollars every couple months to have your Live Journal account and100 fun user pics? Cool. But if the Senate passes a similar bill to COPE, you can kiss the speed with which Live Journal loads goodbye,because they will now have to pay additional money to every single internet service provider to keep up this level of service.
If you live in major urban centers, like New York or Los Angeles, you might be okay, because should Live Journal choose to make that additional payment, they'll likely make it to providers in areas with the most clientele to be serviced. But if you live in Wyoming? You're out of luck, buddy. They likely can't afford to make a ransom payment to every provider in the country; they're going to have to pick and choose. Because remember, it's not some big blanket provider that services everyone. Every region has different providers, and each would have to be negotiated with independently. Oh, and those few dollars you pay for your LJ account? You can expect that to increase, I'll bet. Who could blame them? On top of all the money they already pay now just to get space on the internet, now they'll have to pay more in order to get the "good" service.
If you have your own website, or a free account to share pictures, or a favorite site to download media,or post your fanfiction at an online archive, then this issue matters to you.
You like YouTube? You like Flickr? You like PhotoBucket?You like blog spaces? What's so cool about all these places is that now you can share your pictures, your words, your passions, with faraway family, with faraway friends, with the whole world, at the click of a button. It's easy. It's fast. It connects us all. Most of the time it's free. Best of all, it's a place where Joe in New York and Mandisa in India can be in the same place, on the same footing, no barriers, no issues of distance or social or economic preference between them. You can access the internet? Awesome. We're all free here.
So much for that. Do you think that awesome site devoted to your obscure OTP is going to be able to pay premiums to internet service providers to make sure that they load as easily on your browser as they do now?
Google,eBay, Amazon, and Microsoft have all joined together to ask people to fight against the passage of this new law. If they think it's going to negatively affect their operations, if they think that paying these ransoms will put a crimp in their style, then how is it going to affect you? Most of us lack their bargaining power.
If you use the internet to study for your schoolwork, or research information for private interest, then this issue matters to you, because these are certainly sites that will not be able to pay for premium service. Most of these places are already operating at a loss anyway, because they feel that providing information is a service to the community, and so they do it at no cost to you, willing to pay what is already necessary just to buy webspace in the first place. While we cut funding to libraries all across the country, we have all clung to the hope that at least the internet is a place where information can be shared freely.Who hasn't come to rely on the ease of a search engine to learn just about anything you could possibly want to know about in the world? That awesome site about Middle Ages textiles, with all the amazing pictures and scans, that you have bookmarked in the hope of maybe someday using that information in a story? That page with the Central Asian recipes that you have bookmarked in the hope of inflicting them on an unsuspecting family someday? Be prepared for those to take much longer to load.
Well, and what's the big deal about that? you say.Who cares if it's a few more seconds, or even a minute or two? It's still there. You just have to be patient, right?
Honestly, how patient are you? When Live Journal takes more than a few seconds to load, don't you mutter darkly, hit stop, hit refresh, and expect it to pop up instantaneously? How irritated will you be when that doesn't happen? How irritated will you be when that happens on nearly every site you go to?
More importantly, why should you sit back and let this happen to an internet that has been equal and free to everyone for so long? Why give up what already exits? Why let massive companies who are already being paid by you for access, AND by the website owners for webspace, have the right to say that they need to be paid again in order to give you what they're already giving you now?
The argument that implementing cutting edge technology raises the telecom companies' operating costs doesn't hold water here either. Since when have big companies not implemented the newest technology? That's standard operating practice. That's what you're already paying for. And anyone who has seen their cable or DSL costs keep going up knows perfectly well that they're paying for just that. But we still do it,right? Because we're getting the same end result. You want to keep paying the same price for a different and unequal and filtered end result?
If any internet service provider absolutely requires more money in order to keep up with operating costs, then they can charge us more for our internet access. We'll complain, but most likely we'll pay it. For universal internet access and a free internet, we'll pay. What we are not paying for is to be told what we can or cannot view easily - a decision which will be entirely out of our hands, made without our consent or input.
I don't know about other people,but I certainly don't pay for internet for the privilege of getting Paramount Pictures' official website to load faster; I pay for the internet to have access to my obscure anime downloads and online journaling. Somehow I don't think those types of sites are going to be able to meet new gatekeeping ransoms when actual for-profit websites can't.
If you've ever paid to upgrade your internet access, then this issue matters to you. This is the real kicker, and I hope that those with more capitalist and free-market tendencies than I will be angered by this part of it too. Because what the passage of this law means is that, even if you pay for a service, it doesn't matter. You have paid for internet access in the first place. Okay,that's fine, that just means you have access to whatever is out there and however it is designed to come to you. But if you've ever paid even a penny to get faster access, you've done it on the premise that the product you are paying for is faster access. This is what you have paid for. This is the product you have paid for. You, as a consumer, have paid money to a provider, and you expect to be provided with the product you paid for. Why am I emphasizing this? Because under this law, it won't matter what you paid for. You can have paid for light-speed internet access that actually predicts your thought and loads your desired page before you've finished typing in the url, but it won't matter one whit unless the page you're trying to load has paid the ISP for special-treatment equally lightning-fast access too. Those pages that haven't paid are going to load like dial-up, baby. Which means that the lightning-fast access you paid for is only going to apply to those sites that are on the ISP company's "good list."
What,you mean you wanted access to everything on the internet at the same speed? You mean that's why you paid for high-speed access in the first place? Isn't the first law of good business that you give the customer what they paid for, otherwise you're a fraud and a thief and not serving the market properly?
Oh well.
This is not an issue of liberals wanting to "regulate" the internet. If anything, this is much more a self-interested issue of pure Money As God, that everyone should be able to agree with. You're paying for something. You should get what you paid for. You didn't pay for the internet in order to be told by a massive telecom company which sites you should be allowed to view easily and which you shouldn't. How many times have those of us who pay for cable television flipped through 400channels and moaned that there was nothing worth watching? That's because someone else chooses what you get access to. The internet has never been that. The internet has been everything, has been the world,has been the place where everyone has a place. That awesome independent musician. That radical political group. That cartoon fan site.
Preventing the government from passing a law that gives massive corporations the right to tier the internet does not mean you want the government to regulate the internet. It means you just want the internet to be what it has always been - a place where everyone and every site is equal,you pay for your bandwidth and your space, you pay for your LiveJournal, and you get exactly what you paid for, no preferences, no gatekeeping, just payment and product and a free exchange of ideas and information and art and friendships. That's what you have now. That'snot government regulation.
That's what you won't have, if the Senate agrees to pass these new laws.
The argument that "protecting net neutrality" will introduce government regulation is deceptive; "net neutrality" has existed on the internet all along up until now, has been what the internet was founded on. It is what we have been enjoying all these years. The change being proposed now is the removal of net neutrality, not its implementation.Do not let the spin-doctors fool us on this one.
This is not a trivial issue that will only affect the trivial aspects of your life.Do you really want Verizon to be able to decide which news and information sites load more easily for you? Do you really want TimeWarner to be able to decide which fansites you can easily download from? Do you want everything you have known and loved about the internet to be fundamentally changed? Good luck getting back across that bridge once it's crossed. Getting internet freedom back after it's been parced out and sold is going to be infinitely hardly than giving it away was, if not impossible.
This website has loads of information:
http://www.savetheinternet.com/
Anyone who has heard my stance on the immigration issue should have an idea of how poorly I think of Representative Sensenbrenner, so when I say that he is listed as a Net Hero on this site, you can bet it's not some"liberal bastion of partisanship," but an important information site for everyone. Visit it while you still can.
Here are some articles and op-ed pieces from various other sites:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/06/07/AR2006060702108.html?referrer=emailarticle
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/5009250.stm
http://www.snopes.com/politics/business/neutrality.asp
http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=06/06/09/1427218
Back on Save The Internet, this relatively short page - http://www.savetheinternet.com/=threat- explains just a few of the ways this could impact individuals, with some very important examples of ways in which this sort of"gatekeeping" has already been abused. Proving that once you open the door...
The site also provides a way to automatically send a message to your representatives. To do so, go here:
http://www.savetheinternet.com/=act
I want to add something here, my own little voice of reason and moderation if you will. I'm not saying that everything that I've described in this hypothetical future is what is actually-factually going to happen. Verizon and AT&T may not be Evil Uber Corporations who decide to screw over every little guy on the internet. They may decide just to make all the websites who pay extra faster, while leaving the rest of us the way we are. They may not be the devil incarnate. But that's really not the point I'm trying to make here.Whether or not they choose to do what I've described is not as important as the fact that under this new law they will have the power to choose. I see this as a Pandora's Box. I'm saying that the potential for abuse is huge, whether it be abuse of the consumer by interference with the product, or the actual filtering of content to conform with any bias of the moment (monetary or otherwise). I'm saying that access to the internet should not be a matter of trust and hope - just trusting that Verizon and AT&T won't abuse the power to tollbooth our internet, and simply hoping that the sites you happen to like won't be the ones to suffer. There may be a million different stopgap measures we can implement individually to try to circumvent such abuses- but my question is, why should we have to?
And to those outside of the U.S. I say this: This law may not affect you directly -yet. But telecom corporations in the U.S. are the same as telecom corporations anywhere. If the ball gets rolling here, if the precedent is set just once, then the snowball effect will have started. The internet is what it is - it is all connected. What begins in one place will spread to others, given time. This is not something we want to let begin, anywhere. It also means that the U.S.-resident website owners of some of the sites you love and visit may end up having slower access to their own websites or forums, possibly making it more difficult or tedious for them to operate the sites in the first place. So if you're on the internet, chances are you have internet friends and acquaintances who can act on this issue within the U.S. - help get the word to them.
Pass this word on. Please feel free to cut and paste this entry, or to abbreviate it, or to paraphrase it, or to just post the provided links - do whatever is necessary to get the word out.We turn a blind eye to politics all the time because it's so overwhelming and annoying sometimes, but if you are reading this on the internet, then this issue matters to you.