I am not one to care about much of anything, but I have been hearing about net neutrality a bit over the last few days and did not realize what a big deal it is and how it can effect the lives of me and many of my friends.
Internet providers like AT&T, Verizon and Comcast are spending millions of dollars lobbying Congress to gut Net Neutrality, why would they want to do this? To cash in on what they are missing out on and charge large websites, such as google, a huge chunk of money to make sure that the ISPs customers get quick and high speed access to the site.
As comcast subscriber I am outraged that these fucks want to make more money from the other end of the pipe…you have me on one end paying $60 a month for their average service, now they want google to pay an un godly ammount of money on the other end to make sure that I can view their page as fast as I used to be able to? What is the point? The point is they want a cut of what they missed out on…the interaction between a website and its end user…they are nothing but a channel of connectivity, but that connection is crucial in this whole process.
Another thing that has me worrried is that I make money from websites, and from google… I make sites that people find via google, and they do some sort of an action, click on a contextual ad, or make a purchase through an affiliate link… something. How do I know that my sites will not be throttled down until I paid some sort of fee to insure that my readers/users, or would that be the responsibility of my web host? Or would I have to host with one of the major ISPs to ensure that my sites would be served quickly? If that was the case would it put thousands of web hosts out of business? Would it put me out of business?
Overall what it seems like to me is that it would destroy the reliability of the internet and give the power to someone who controls the path of the data rather than the people that create it.
Here are some more resources about this:
The clueless Senator Stevens speaking about the interweb
Its Our Net.org
More info at wikipedia
And here are some fun YTMDG’s making fun of Senator Stevens – 1, 2 (this is brilliant) , 3 (takes it back home), 4, 5. The last one reminds me of Soilent Green: The internet is TUBES!
I urge my 3 readers to raise some hell about this, sign a petition (or two) and spread the word either on their blogs or in email.
What are your thoughts on net neutrality?
{ 0 comments… add one now }