@ 11:58 PM (23 months, 12 days ago)
Tuned
in to Bill Maher and of course all the commotion was centered on Foley
and Bill made a statement regarding the "children" who respond when in
chat rooms that I found appalling.
Read the rest of this entry ... (171 words left)
@ 07:00 PM (23 months, 12 days ago)
Net Neutrality: This is serious...Submitted by timbl on Wed. 2006-06-21 ~ 16:35 ~ Public Policy and the Web
When I invented the web, I didn't have to ask anyone's permission. Now,
hundred's of millions of people are using it freely. I am worried that
that is going to end the USA. I blogged on net neutrality before, and
so did a lot of other people. (see e.g. Danny Weitzner,
SaveTheInternet.com, etc.)
Since then, some telecommunications companies spent a lot of money on
public relations and TV ads, and the US House seems to have wavered
from the path of preserving net neutrality.
There has been some misinformation spread about. So here are some clarifications.
Net Neutrality is this:
If I pay to connect to the Net with a certain quality of service, and
you pay to connect with that or greater quality of service, then we can
communicate at that level. That's all. It's up to the ISPs to make sure
they interoperate so that that happens.
Net Neutrality is NOT asking for the internet for free. Net Neutrality
is NOT saying that one shouldn't pay more money for high quality of
service. We always have. We always will.
There have been suggestions that we don't need legislation because we
haven't had it. These are nonsense, because in fact we have had net
neutrality in the past -- it is only recently that real explicit
threats have occurred. Control of information is hugelypowerful. In the US, the threat is that companies control what I can access for commercial reasons.
(In China, control is by the government for political reasons.) There
is a very strong short-term incentive for a company to grab control of
TV distribution over the internet even though it is against the
long-term interests of the industry. Yes, regulation to keep the
Internet open is regulation. And mostly, the Internet thrives on lack
of regulation. But some basic values have to be preserved. For example,
the market system depends on the rule that you can't photocopy money.
Democracy depends on freedom of speech.
Freedom of connection, with any application, to any party, is the
fundamental social basis of the Internet, and, now, the society based
on it.
Let's see whether the United States is capable as acting according to
it's important values, or whether it is, as so many people are saying,
run by the misguided short-term interested of large corporations.
I hope that congress can protect net neutrality, so I can continue to
innovate in the internet space. I want to see the explosion of
innovations happening out there on the Web, so diverse and so exciting,
continued unabated.
