Correct correct correct.

Net Neutrality was important when the network was a slow beast of an environment. Regulation of the phone company was important at one time too.

The future growth of an industry that provides huge numbers of good paying jobs is at stake here.

Net Neutrality is a limiter on growth of capacity. With the repeal of neutrality laws, content providers will be able to shoulder some of the cost of feeding all that wonderful new high speed data to consumers. Without such repeal, either consumer access pricing will have to rise dramatically, or the growth of the internet as a business will be forced to stop.

It is ludicrous to suggest that somehow I will be less able to access small independant websites. Network providers are talking about this change taking place as a part of modern triple play installations, pipelins that are already WAY to big for the average users needs.

Don't let the aging radically egalitarianist hippies scare you, you will still be able to get all the blogs you want, and there will be no decrease in the speed with which you access them.

The only difference will be a vast increase in the number of and variety of content that will be available to everyone, including fantastic new FREE products provided by the likes of Google and even, gasp, Microsoft that will be advertising driven.

The time for unleashing the true potential of broadband networking is here.

I don't think everyone wants the internet to turn into what television has become. TV has plenty of content ( almost all of it useless content that is). Who said the internet was only for business?

Go on, pull the other one. I have two choices for broadband service in my area. 2. you expect me to believe than multibillion dollar corporations are going to beg to serve me or my business?

the crap about the "true potential" is just an excuse for companies to find a way to horn out the other guy. did you like youtube, myspace, google,? guess what- they are going the way of the buffalo without net neutrality while verizon serves up fiber TV at a premium.

this not is the free market. this is private control of public infrastructure- PRECISELY the opposite.

If the issue is how much throughput a user is allowed to transmit or receive over a certain amount of time, that is on thing, which can be and often already is stated in the subscription agreements.

That has nothing to do with the issue of political selectivity, and I do think there has to be something, if only as you might say, keeping the government out of the way of individuals seeking legal action against a carrier which they feel they can prove to be prioritizing one site over another for reasons other than the amount of data transmitted.

As for finding another ISP, this is not the dial-in world anymore. One can reach any number of dial-in ISPs on the COMMON CARRIER phone line, which is enforced to be a common carrier on the basis of the monopoly which exists. That same monopoly usually exists for DSL. The only competition comes perhaps from the monopoly cable provider, or from satellite providers, and it would take a pretty deep slowdown of a site by a DSL or cable provider to warrant the comparatively slow speed of satellite, not to mention the up-front equipment costs. Of course, the sats could always find ways of waving those if they think they'll swell their subscriber ranks as a result of such worries.

And of course there's always the community wireless movement. So perhaps in the long run there are options if broadband ISPs are not common carriers.

However, I also think it's ludicrous to claim that growth will be inordinately stifled by such laws. A corporation survives by growing, and will always find a way to grow. It will grow where resistance is least, and if it finds resistance in one aspect it will grow in another. It's only about how much profit is made.

I am all for turning a profit, but these same telcos have stashed or wasted $200 Billion of our dollars to date to build a high speed fiber to premise network that is only starting to emerge in small pockets of the country now...and that is because they are being pushed by municipal and smaller telcos. I do not feel one bit of remorse for the telcos that have become so incestual they feel they don't have to think future use...
They have chosen to ignore the need for distribution and POP build outs to support the growth of the Internet. No wonder the US is a distant 16th place in the world of those with access to affordable broadband...
Sorry guys, this is not capitalism, what they are proposing is yet another way to slow down growth industries and screw the folks that are already paying too much for basic access.

If you truly believe that the privately-created and financed Internet (the DARPA days are long gone) should be public infrastructure, then the government should take it over, regulate the pricing/access, and we'll be left with somethine akin to the power network in terms of adoption of new technology. Regulated monopolies are the last people to innovate -- you want to harness the Internet to this broken model?

"Who said the internet was only for business?"
Posted by: Jesse D at June 1, 2006 03:13 PM

Of all the bones being chewed on of this word carcass, this one made me think the most - thanks.

I just installed OpenBSD for use as a primary name server located directly in Tier1 territoy in the middle of the wild west in Equinix downtown L.A.

Looking at Cisco and Juniper interfaces also, I notice that all the network infrastructure which is used to turn the highest profits in history, were mostly done by companies who took advantage of the BSD licensing scheme.

I think any non-public organizations should pay taxes to connect to the backbone, and start giving back to the community that continues sustaining them, i.e. the cheap overeducated (relative to American education) foreign labor.

There obviously is some government regulation, otherwise the terrain would be filled with multiple redundant telephone and cable infrastructures. Some government somewhere decides how many different MANs are going to be permitted, keeps track of what to add to the as-builts, etc.

As for the power system, the holders of old technology hold so much sway over the political process as to be virtually self-regulating. We're told by the stockholders of these corporations that this is what capitalism is about, but for those who don't have the spare change to engage in investing beyond some paltry 401k allocation, how is this not calcified autocracy really?