can someone explain net neutrality?
 

I've been reading a lot about this and find myself a little bit confused. If I understand it correctly what it means is that a company, say AT&T, can control which sites it wants to server fast to its users and which it wants to serve slowly. I read that these companies could then start charging webmasters a fee to put their site in the "fast lane". Is this correct or am I still not understanding it?

pretty much - how fast your site is will be determined by how much you pay.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...060702108.html

http://www.savetheinternet.com/

actually, that's the effect of eliminating net neutrality.

net neutrality is the idea that all packets/data being transferred are treated in the same way. however, bandwith providers want to charge fees to companies delivering loads of multimedia content (MTV.com, for example) in return for prioritizing their traffic over other traffic.

thanks that is some good info.

another way for the man to bring us down :disgust

yeah that's what i meant.

In a nutshell . . .

A way for the corporate fuckers that own the pipelines to jack lots more money out of huge content providers and distributers and then fuck over the little guys by allowing the big boys packets to always go the front of the line.

I had it kind of backwards. So at the moment we have net neutrality and they would like to put an end to this.

I had also read that on the same bill as this something that would end the monopolies that cable companies have on internet and cable TV access. Right now in most places in the country you only have one option for cable modem service or cable TV service ( although some phone companies are now offering TV service and you can get a dish) from what I understand this bill would also allow other cable companies to move into areas and compete which would lower prices... I'm not sure if that is 100% correct, but I seem to remeber hearing about this somewhere. I would like that, but not at the cost of losing net neutrality.