Interesting take on Net Neutrality- Should we raise the bar of entry?
 

Net Wit
By Joel Stein

I am neutral on most things that don't involve food or sex or sexfood, which does not yet exist but which I already feel strongly about. But I am against Net neutrality. That's the idea being pushed by the President, the FCC and people who write comments on blogs and want everything to be free except what they happen to do for a living. Net neutrality would set up rules to make sure your Internet provider treats all information equally; no website would be able to pay to move more quickly. This sounds good because people like the fact that the Internet has no barriers to entry. But that's the worst thing about the Internet. It's why looking for information about Net neutrality requires clicking around for three hours, since each site is written by some dude who knows as little as you do.

I like that everything is allowed to be on the Internet, which is like a planet-size bookstore with, for some reason, a continent-size section for pets doing stupid things. But I like that at a real bookstore, I can instantly tell the difference between works by actual historians and works by conspiracy theorists, since the real books are printed on good paper with pretty covers and the others are smudgy pamphlets. We need to bring those barriers of entry to the Internet, and speed is a key way to do it. (See the 50 best websites of 2010.)

Senator Al Franken, at the Netroots Nation conference in late July, talked about a dystopian future without Net neutrality: "How long do you think it will take before the Fox News website loads five times faster than Daily Kos?" Hopefully, this will happen right away. Fox News should load 20 times faster than Daily Kos, because far more people read it. It's better for society that millions of people get someplace a little faster while the relatively few Daily Kos readers wait a few seconds. This is why not all roads are the same width. And more people go to the Fox News site because it's got tons of people reporting, balancing and fairing, whereas two of the contributing editors at Daily Kos are named DarkSyde and Angry Mouse.

Bandwidth is an increasingly limited resource, and we've got to figure out a better way to allocate it. You're grateful that your cell-phone carrier nonneutrally allows 911 calls through first, phone calls second (so they don't break up), instant messages next and Web searches last. But because some people hog bandwidth by pirating movies all day, we don't have doctors supervising real-time surgeries online, video calls that don't look like dispatches from the Mir space station or decent real-time video games. My Web connection is slow largely because some idiot on the block is spending hours downloading porn. The fact that the idiot is me makes me feel only a tiny bit better.


Read more: http://www.time.com/time/magazine/ar...#ixzz0z8l1ZX1i

Thoughts?

all progress is slowed by people who want to be in control.
we will probably lose this battle too because the sheeple only care about their backyard

But should the "sheeple" be taken out of the process I think is the real question?

Corporations and politicians who work for them (lets not mince words) want to slap a meter on the internet and make you pay more. They want to force you to see their propoganda filled pages in a hurry, and force wait times or time out errors on shit they dont agree with. Truly a scary proposition that everyone should know about. They've been trying to do it for years already.

Now lets hear more about this sexfood thingy.

Do you really think capacity is a issue you have no real idea on how the internet really works involving the networks.

There is plenty of capacity the problem is your Local isp's lack of technology to play catch up with today needs.

If you think your hosting bill sucks now wait till these clowns start making special networks "faster" this is not going to make your hosting any cheaper.

The problem is there is a government made localized monopoly and it has given us two very shitty choices. Let the government regulate it (I cant wait for a Sarah Palin type president and have them (fcc) in control of the internet :Oh crap) or let the companies do what they want because they can because there is no local competition.

Though hosting has gotten dirt cheap, I wonder if people would be willing to pay more if that increase bumped out some of their competition?

The problem is "big" sites that have their own network sure, paynig access to comcast/etc is already done through paid peering arrangements. Companies already pay reduce rates to get into other networks. Now, prioritizing that traffic to get to the end users within that network is a different story, but connecting to people such as say comcast directly is already being done.

Comcast peers for free with large networks. What they can't peer or get traffic wise they pay for. That rate? probably 2-4/Mbps. If a company like us goes to comcast and says hey we want faster access to your customers. We will pay you 1/Mbps for your own traffic to your own network. Comcast will be happy to negotiate a rate thats less than their transit rates for their own traffic, basically cut down on their own expenses while making money. So they will save 2/Mbps and make 1/Mbps for a net gain of 3/Mbps worth of traffic that you send them directly.

Do you really think comcast will give two craps for their end users to get faster access to "specific" sites/networks within their network going to their end nodes? You bet your ass they wont.

I kind of agree with you. Maybe throttling peer to peer networks could help crack down on piracy.