I’m not sure if this is good news or bad news. I’m hoping it’s good news and that the Senators on the Committee realize that there’s more here than meets the eye. I’m hoping they end up delaying it long enough so that it doesn’t make it through voting before the Senate adjourns. I’m hoping.

The inventor of the internet, Tim Berners-Lee, has a very eloquent post about why Net Neutrality needs to be preserved. He really blasts through the telecom bullshit. He states, “Yes, regulation to keep the Internet open is regulation. And mostly, the Internet thrives on lack of regulation. But some basic values have to be preserved. For example, the market system depends on the rule that you can’t photocopy money. Democracy depends on freedom of speech. Freedom of connection, with any application, to any party, is the fundamental social basis of the Internet, and, now, the society based on it.” Heh, you can’t photocopy money. Seems the Telecomms are trying to do just that by stealing the internet legally.

I found some more articles about the possible ramifications of the end of Network Neutrality. The best one, on Cringely’s blog, explores how, because of bittorrent traffic, which makes up 30% of current bandwidth used, the result of prioritized packets will be a slowdown of the WHOLE WEB, including that fast lane everybody’s talking about. Cringely says, “My simple test suggests that one possible impact is that Bit Torrent traffic, which currently uses, say, 30 percent of Internet bandwidth, is going to expand to about 36 percent simply because of inefficiencies created by the tiered services. This will increase the backbone costs for ISPs and will take back at least some of the very performance advantage they are supposedly selling to their priority customers.” If you’re technically inclined you might want to give the whole article a read, it’s very well thought out, and he obviously knows how internet traffic works, and does a pretty good job of explaining it to those of us who have less of an understanding.

Another Net Neutrality article from Daniel Weitzner of MIT explores in a very detailed and technical way the needs of both sides of this equation. He posits creating a separate broadband network for the video capability that Telecoms wish to sell, and leaving the current internet neutral. He suggests that differentiating between the two, namely the internet and a separate broadband video delivery system, gives both sides what they need. He differentiates, calling “internet neutrality” necessary, but pointing out that video broadband need not be neutral. I found it an interesting read.

Actually the most interesting part of the article was one of the footnotes, which goes a long way toward explaining how we’ve gotten to where we are in the US, while other countries have open networks with public peering points routing the bulk of the traffic. They also have cheap reliable broadband. Hmm. It says, “Recently, mergers of the major telecommunications companies have resulted in consolidation of both the backbone and into other parts of the network. Verizon’s acquisition of MCI greatly increased its backbone ownership, as MCI had previously purchased UUNet, one of the originally dominant players in the backbone market. The combination of AT&T (which was already one of the top backbone operators) with SBC (the largest DSL provider in the country) and BellSouth (with a substantial presence in both DSL and backbone service) has increased that company’s power across the board. Thus, the two companies that currently control a significant part of the Internet backbone are now also powerful owners of last-mile networks.” Funny how this used to be one company, then it was a bunch of companies (which is when the internet first got off the ground, hmmmmmm!) and now it’s TWO. Just enough not to be called a “monopoly” but still close enough to screw it up for anyone smaller than a Fortune 500.

We, as a country, need to look at putting the internet back into public hands with community wifi, and with public peering once more being the rule rather than the exception. Letting the huge and monopoly minded telecoms control this is going to hurt everyone over the long haul. Seeing how the telecomms manipulate our government with lobbying and campaign contributions should be a wake up call to us all. Senator Stevens from Alaska, who drafted the Senate Legislation on Telecommunications Reform, took campaign contributions from those same telecomms, and has been arguing vociferously in their favor, which comes as no surprise to me. We all, as a country, need to wake up to how these large corporations are trying to control our life, our government, what we see on television, what we read in the paper, what we hear on the radio, and next, what we can access on the internet. We need to tell our politicians clearly that this is unacceptable and that those politicians who vote against the best interests of the people they represent will be voted out.

And the most amazing thing about it all is that the telecomms don’t see that they’re going to hurt themselves just as much as the rest of us.

Technorati Tags: Network Neutrality, Tim Berners-Lee, Daniel Weitzner, Peering, Backbone, Senator Stevens, Telecomms, free speech

This entry was posted on Friday, June 23rd, 2006 at 10:31 pm and is filed under Web News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.