Holy Shit: Feds OK fee for priority Web traffic
 

Is anyone paying attention to this? Looks like the internet is about to change.

You've got to be fucking kidding me!

WASHINGTON - The Justice Department on Thursday said Internet service providers should be allowed to charge a fee for priority Web traffic.

The agency told the Federal Communications Commission, which is reviewing high-speed Internet practices, that it is opposed to "Net neutrality," the principle that all Internet sites should be equally accessible to any Web user.

Several phone and cable companies, such as AT&T Inc., Verizon Communications Inc. and Comcast Corp., have previously said they want the option to charge some users more money for loading certain content or Web sites faster than others.

The Justice Department said imposing a Net neutrality regulation could hamper development of the Internet and prevent service providers from upgrading or expanding their networks. It could also shift the "entire burden of implementing costly network expansions and improvements onto consumers," the agency said in its filing.

Such a result could diminish or delay network expansion and improvement, it added.

The agency said providing different levels of service is common, efficient and could satisfy consumers. As an example, it cited that the U.S. Postal Service charges customers different guarantees and speeds for package delivery, ranging from bulk mail to overnight delivery.

"Whether or not the same type of differentiated products and services will develop on the Internet should be determined by market forces, not regulatory intervention," the agency said in its filing.

The agency's stance comes more than two months after Federal Trade Commission Chairwoman Deborah Platt Majoras cautioned policy makers to enact Net neutrality regulation.

Such a regulation could prevent rather than promote Internet investment and innovation and have "significant negative effects for the economy and consumers," the Justice Department said in the filing.

Supporters of Internet regulation have said that phone and cable companies could discriminate against certain Web site and services.

However, the agency said it will continue to monitor and enforce any anticompetitive conduct to ensure a competitive broadband marketplace.

Full Article

America is good at pushing business off shore. I wish I owned shares in a hosting company in Europe....actually I fucking do own shares!

The postal service analogy is pure bullshit.

My website data is not heavier or shaped different than yahoo's.
Neither is my data shipped to the surfer via a separate transport system.
All this shit is sent the same and the only differrence is the "size of the truck".

Those functions are already in place in the form of dial-up, DSL, cable, T1, T3 and OC3 etc...

Websites are already paying more to use a faster delivery truck.

Don't believe me, then get on a virtual server with 100 other people that all use the same T1 and get back to me.


Further,

What a fucking joke.
So yahoo and google will pay to serve faster a bunch of fucking links that don't load.

:1orglaugh :1orglaugh :1orglaugh :1orglaugh

Yeah, that will make the internet grow.

wow....... this is just ridiculous!! Money Greedy Capitalists

The real issue behind the sceens is probably that people still think that porn is making all the money and they can get a big cut by changing more to deliver porn content. They will just make us broke and receive nothing.

So let me get this right.

Websites/owners pay ISPs to have their sites online for bandwidth etc.

Consumors pay their ISPS to surf the web.

now the ISPS want websites to pay more so they can load faster? wait arn't you guys already paying for this?

yep, and it's just the beginning.

Plz realize that to understand what's happening here, you got to think many steps ahead. This is only the first step towards turning internet into something more "predictable" and manageable like tv is for bigCorp today.

Did you think YOU would get to keep this medium, where you can utter your opinions freely, and have others read them? "Plastic is bad", "Save the retards", Lol....

Also the days where 1 guy in a basement could come up with a great idea, put it online and make cash will also vanish. Large corporations hate this phenomenon. No real barrier of entry they say. Goody for them, it's an easy fix. Your new interesting website will now be 17 times slower than GFY:winkwink:, and not available to everybody. This way people can't pass the links successfully between themselves. You will bust, but bigCorp will pick up the idea within days, and bring it to their users...

Somewhere down the line they'll make sure that even your opinions, will come prepackaged with the subscription you can afford/qualify for. If it's not in some package - it doesn't exist, and can't be spread.

And remember that everything that happens in America, happens in the "Rest of the West" with some lag...

Yep, it sucks...

Here's another attempt by the US to regulate a global entity. This will do nothing but push people off shore while reducing the quality of services for 90% of the US based consumers. Not only will web site marketers go off shore, but many consumers could start using overseas web sites to avoid the "slow lanes".

Someone plans to get paid. As usual.

going offshore wont make a bit of difference unless the end user moves off shore. this is limiting for the end users

THe DOJ doesnt make the law.

what I find very funny is that anyone thought they could stop this from happening. There's TRILLIONS of dollars to be made with this and /nothing/ will stop it from becoming a reality

You had very very big fish against this Google ,Microsoft , Yahoo these arent the webmaster down the street.

So if this happens what happens does hosting become more expensive? I can see this slowing down Tube sites from popping up.

Except those that leech. :1orglaugh

See Sig!


PS: Read above, Yahoo serving up millions of links that will be slow is going to piss them off. They won't go for it. Yahoo wouldn't be shit without small websites they link up in search.
Also, how fast is google bot and yahoo bot going to be when this happens?
The bot can't crawl my links faster than my sites loads!!!
Their new link generation would be 5 times slower. It would ruin their plans.

Besides, by the time they ever get this shit into place Sattlelite connections with no incentive to charge more will be into place and they will love the windfall of customers trying to get off "slow-high-speed-connections".

Somehow I don't think it'll ever get quite that bad.

But if you are right....I for one would much prefer see the internet eliminated all together. Not that that's likely to happen either.

I mean think about it, we already have television which is quite capable of providing all of the politically correct, electronic pabulum the planet will ever need to remain hopelessly bored for many, many a decade to come.

Who needs to see the same shit on their computer monitors?

Without those guys in the basement, the internet would become as worthless as tits on a bull, except of course as a money making machine for a few select multinational CEO's.