yay politics
Every once in a while, I get political and vocal; now's one of them.
Senator Ted Stevens (Republican from Alaska), Mr. Series-of-Tubes himself, is advocating the "Advanced Telecommunications and Opportunities Reform Act." I encourage you to read this brief article from the Nation on the issue.
In short, the ATORA is an attempt by the telecommunications lobby to use a clearly loopy old man to get their agenda through: allowing them to be ultimate arbiters of the Internet. It would give them the authority to allow some internet traffic and disallow other internet traffic, based on either source or form. More annoying could be deliberately slowing down traffic from one site: imagine having to use the net where Google takes a minute or two to load, but, hey, MSN Search comes up in a second! This would ultimately let the big cable companies decide who wins and loses, and the winner is probably the company with the deepest pockets. This means you can say goodbye to innovations like YouTube, Flickr, and Livejournal; in this future, the big companies put out their own halfassed versions of these sites (cough cough) and ask that pretty please with a few million on top that these other sites be slowed down to make them unappealing and/or annoying to use. It is an attempt at a massive corporate welfare scheme.
On top of all this is that it should be noted that the big telecommunications companies got enormous tax write-offs to put the internet backbones in place. The "tubes" are largely publicly funded, and the telcos would like you to forget that.
We in Washington are half lucky; one of our senators has already committed herself to net neutrality, though Patty Murray has yet to take a stand. If you don't live in Washington, I encourage you to examine the tally on where your senator stands on net neutrality, and encourage them to support it and oppose the ATORA.
Senator Ted Stevens (Republican from Alaska), Mr. Series-of-Tubes himself, is advocating the "Advanced Telecommunications and Opportunities Reform Act." I encourage you to read this brief article from the Nation on the issue.
In short, the ATORA is an attempt by the telecommunications lobby to use a clearly loopy old man to get their agenda through: allowing them to be ultimate arbiters of the Internet. It would give them the authority to allow some internet traffic and disallow other internet traffic, based on either source or form. More annoying could be deliberately slowing down traffic from one site: imagine having to use the net where Google takes a minute or two to load, but, hey, MSN Search comes up in a second! This would ultimately let the big cable companies decide who wins and loses, and the winner is probably the company with the deepest pockets. This means you can say goodbye to innovations like YouTube, Flickr, and Livejournal; in this future, the big companies put out their own halfassed versions of these sites (cough cough) and ask that pretty please with a few million on top that these other sites be slowed down to make them unappealing and/or annoying to use. It is an attempt at a massive corporate welfare scheme.
On top of all this is that it should be noted that the big telecommunications companies got enormous tax write-offs to put the internet backbones in place. The "tubes" are largely publicly funded, and the telcos would like you to forget that.
We in Washington are half lucky; one of our senators has already committed herself to net neutrality, though Patty Murray has yet to take a stand. If you don't live in Washington, I encourage you to examine the tally on where your senator stands on net neutrality, and encourage them to support it and oppose the ATORA.