Howdy, Stranger!
It looks like you're new here. If you want to get involved, click one of these buttons!
This forum is in permanent archive mode. Our new active community can be found here.
Net-Neutrality Act & The Daily Show
For anyone who missed it, this is why we could be in trouble....
http://www.i-am-bored.com/bored_link.cfm?link_id=18559
http://www.i-am-bored.com/bored_link.cfm?link_id=18559
Comments
My main position all along has been that those who want to be ISPs should only be ISPs. Restrict all ISPs from providing content and services over the web.
Because the Telecoms are trying to be both ISPs and content providers they are looking at the Internet as something they "own". This is wrong.
Think of it this way:
Right now roads in the USA are "owned" by the state. Anyone is free to travel on these public roads though some people are charged a fee on certain roads and for hauling certain cargo over those roads.
What would happen if the "state" opened up its own shipping company that did not have to pay any fees for travel over the roads? What if the "state" also built an extra lane on each road that only their vehicles could travel on?
Now you have a problem. Because the "state" is now in competition with other shipping companies who use its roads they have a vested interest in making their private road better and neglecting all but the toll roads.
This is what has happened with the Internet. at&t (for example) owns a large portion of the Internet backbone. Some of that portion is leased to other companies but they still claim it as theirs. (A fiber from CT to TX is physically "owned" by at&t but a third party leases and uses the fiber.) As long as at&t was just an ISP there were no problems. As soon as they decided they wanted to become a "web content provider" (Google, Yahoo, YouTube, Vonage) they hit a big wall of "conflict of interest".
Now they have ability to filter packets that travel over their network and fiddle with packets that belong to competing services.
"What's that, your VOIP service is coming out crappy? Well you can just use ours!" Granted there are existing laws against this practice but how do you prove they are fiddling with the packets?
The easiest solution is to just enforce a non-compete law in the ISP business. Make those companies choose. They can either be an ISP or they can be a company that uses the web to deliver content, just not both.