Cory Doctorow Draws the Line On Net Neutrality 381
Nerdposeur points out that Cory Doctorow has a compelling piece in The Guardian today, arguing that network neutrality is not only crucial for the future of the Internet, but is what the ISPs owe to the public. He asks, "Does anybody else feel like waving a flag after reading this?" "If the phone companies had to negotiate for every pole, every sewer, every punch-down, every junction box, every road they get to tear up, they'd go broke. All the money in the world couldn't pay for the access they get for free every day... If they don't like it, let them get into another line of work — give them 60 days to get their wires out of our dirt and then sell the franchise to provide network services to a competitor who will promise to give us a solid digital future in exchange for our generosity."
Dirt Rental (Score:5, Interesting)
Why do we have corporate-controlled wires anyway? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Just keep competition alive (Score:3, Interesting)
Of course, things may turn out very different if we allow dominant market positions to be built in the ISP market.
That totally hasn't happened.
Re:flag-waving? (Score:3, Interesting)
No. I feel like marching in protest. That didn't make me feel more patriotic. It made me feel more willing to express my frustration with the telcos
Uhh... Have you ever been to a protest?
I, for one, have waved the red flag [wikipedia.org] in several protests and would be willing to do so for this too, I guess. I have also seen a black flag [wikipedia.org] waved in some protests and am sure that it would fit in those too.
Not that there is an issue about net neutrality where I live. Government regulates companies enough that ISPs couldn't threat net neutrality without putting a lot of effort into making it very clear what it's all about and in such case the competition would take care of the problem.
A couple points to consider (Score:4, Interesting)
(1) If you treat Cory Doctorow like he's relevant, then he will believe he is.
(2) Yes, it is important to preserve NetNeutrality, but I'm surprised anyone is writing up an article so late in the game.
(3) "Finally, there's the question of metered billing for ISP customers." This has nothing to do with net neutrality. I don't see what the problem is. He's arguing that people don't know how much internet they're going to use. But, please don't try to fool us into thinking that we have *no idea* how much internet we use. The only way you're going to end up in the top 2% is if you're downloading massive quantities of information (not webpages!) Metered access to the internet isn't much different than cell-phone minutes. (Oh! We have NO IDEA if we're going to use 10,000 minutes a month, or 50 minutes a month - therefore telecoms can't charge us by the minute!) How absurd. I'd be pretty unhappy if they started changing a lot per MB, but in the real-world, I don't see this being much of a problem at all unless you're uploading/downloading Gigs of data. And, isn't this how companies pay for internet service anyway? A company's internet usage will vary significantly based on factors like "number of employees". So, they simply charge by bandwidth.
Re:Not that I'm against net neutrality (Score:1, Interesting)
If it weren't for some users flooding the network with massive filesharing packets, this would all be a non-issue. Actually, for most users it still is since most users are not affected at all by bandwidth strangling.
That's what contention ratios are for. That's not a network neutrailty issue (even though the ISPs try and sell it as one to make people like yourself think they have a point). Network neutrality is about the ISP not being able to pick and choose what data gets priority, with the line being drawn either by protocol or by content provider.
Cory, you, sir are an idiot (Score:3, Interesting)
I dislike Cory. I hate Creative Commons. I detest copyright, public-use rights, public utilities, and anything related to non-market forces for real property. Intellectual property is a dying term, long dead in my dictionary (note, I am a writer and I get paid to write).
I want to see municipal allowances for duopolies destroyed. Let residents who own property rent it to whoever wants to take the time to rent it. Let competing companies, even at the local level, battle for access to the last mile. They'll get good international uplinks, they'll battle each other on service and price and performance.
Today, we have public funding across the board, regulations that restrict competition, and people afraid of seeing 500 internet lines over their house (note, they won't).
Cory should roll over and retire. He's a geek's dream, and a capitalist's nightmare. Capitalism will save the web, net neutrality won't.
Re:Dirt Rental (Score:5, Interesting)
Instead, make infrastructure part of building codes and get community builders mandated to run decent fiber (not FiOS) drops to each residence.
Doctorow makes a great point about the abuse and monopolistic attitude that telcos have had for decades-- all bought and paid for at the Legislative Market. These stinking thieves do indeed put out capital for infrastructure, but they're only beholden to shareholders, not ratepayers in their captive markets.
Re:Opposing side? (Score:4, Interesting)
Actually, it is not. Speaking as somebody that has been to China and seen the poorest parts, and the most affluent areas, I can assure you, that you are wrong.
The average Chinese person does not understand what the "Great Firewall" is. Those that do understand (which is a small percentage of the population), also know the ways around it. The firewall itself is largely ineffective against anybody with a reasonable level of skill. Personally, I think the firewall was created to maintain an image.
What is more effective, and instills more fear, are the government workers that are actively looking for undesirable (local) content and then "censoring" it. Of course, China's censorship can get pretty hands on.
Even with such hands on censorship being performed, the people are fighting back making sure the information is getting around. The milk contamination is a great example. Not only were people still able to get their hands on foreign articles, but there was movement inside the country to disseminate the information and confront the government. It took time, and you most likely did not hear much in the foreign news.
The Chinese people are not willing to "tolerate anything". If anything, the tolerance you speak of is just ignorance. Those that understand they are being censored, are by no means taking it lightly.
From my experience, for every regulation or law in China, there are 10 different ways to get around it. 100 ways if it involves bribes.
Re:A couple points to consider (Score:2, Interesting)
Paying $/Gig is all well and good, but that usually isn't what tiered pricing is. Tiered pricing usually involves a minimum price that's unreasonably high for the amount of data included, and then very expensive chunks of overage. (Just like old cellphone plans, or the texting plans that are widely being objected to). Now if someone offered me unfiltered, unfettered, (meaning I can serve whatever the hell I want, for example) internet access, at 20/20 or better speed, with static IP, for $2/Gigabyte transferred/month, I'd be signing up right now. If I'm going to pay per use, than when I go on vacation and use nothing, I damn well better pay nothing.
Re:Just keep competition alive (Score:4, Interesting)
You think that's bad? Some of us have to use string and cans you insensitive clod!
In all seriousness though, some areas don't have real broadband at all, besides satellite. And in some of those areas the phone lines are so old and degraded they max out at around 24kbps down. (And of course, we can go really extreme and bring up the places that don't have any communication lines at all, but then those places usually don't have any other modern amenities either so they really don't count.) But sadly, the max 24kbps down is more widespread than you might think. In fact, where I call "home" right now (about 20 minutes from Columbus OH) up until very recently that was precisely the case. There's still no DSL or cable available, but someone was nice enough to set up a short-range (signal reaches up to about 3 miles or so) wireless ISP that is passably good.
Neutrality in the early days of the net (Score:5, Interesting)
In 1994 I worked for a company setting up an ISP. We called in the phone company to order 50 lines. (Dial up was all there was then ). The company was not happy, especially that we were ordering business lines, with a low cost, 15 cents for each outgoing call but no cost for incoming calls .
As an ISP we only had incoming calls. They had no choice, since phone systems had to sell lines to anyone ( oh the joys of regulation! ). Had the phone version of net neutrality not been in place, the phone companies would have throttled or taken over the internet - and we would not have the open net we have now.
Bookwormhole.net [bookwormhole.net] -- over 11,000 published book reviews.
Re:Dirt Rental (Score:4, Interesting)
Uh, no.
See several projects, including http://www.llccp.net/asp/Site/LLCCP/AboutLLCCP/Introduction/index.asp [llccp.net] among others.
And personally, I believe the 'free market' is a sham for 'do what I want cause I got the gold'. Utilities were granted many qualities in exchange for a monopoly. Now that monopoly has turned against us, almost uniformly.
Re:A couple points to consider (Score:4, Interesting)
I don't know how many games I'm going to download over XBox Live, PSN, and Steam (and yes, I use all three) in a given month, and I don't know how many hours of Hulu I'm going to watch in a given month. I also used to use an MSDN account quite extensively. So no, I don't know how much internet I'm going to be using. The ISP doesn't really give me a convenient way to find out, either (since they'd rather hit me with overage fees).
My problem with tiers is that they're inevitably structured so that its inconvenient or impossible to use my connection for entertainment without hitting their overage fees. In other words, the point of the tiers always seems to be to prevent or discourage me from using services that compete with the cable companies', and that justifiably pisses me off.
Re:Not that I'm against net neutrality (Score:3, Interesting)
At the same token, if government (or corporations for that matter) fail to provide for more than a single lane of traffic, then there are going to be traffic jams. However, if the road is wide and broad, then the line of long haul truckers are no longer an issue. Likewise, if there is fiber to every home in the US, suddenly the packet hogs are no longer an issue.
The US has continuously fallen behind [slashdot.org] in broadband rankings, as corporations wallow in their greed [nytimes.com]. The fact is, government (as Cory starts to allude to) is no longer getting quid quo pro [wikipedia.org] from governmental entities. And, as we have seen from the recent bailouts here in the US, even demanding that the average taxpayer support their avarice. It's unfortunate that the notion of conservatism is being shredded as the Republicans seem unable to call corporations out for their dishonesty and lies, which is evident to anyone who looks closely.
Re:Fuck Republicans (Score:3, Interesting)
And prior to that the Repubs got more. Maybe business saw that there wasn't a chance in hell McCain/Palin was going to win, and wanted to put there money where it was more effective (which is indicative of the problem, just looked at the opposite way).
Re:"The Enemy of Democracy" (Score:5, Interesting)
Corporations are simply large businesses, structured that way for better profit and efficiency. While they can be powerful, they're no more an "enemy of democracy" than other large entities, including our own elected government. Furthermore, I'd like to see you live without corporate products for awhile. Come back and tell me what life is like for you when you can no longer buy cars from Toyota, computers from Apple, burgers from McDonalds, fly on planes from Boeing, or take antibiotics from Merck. You get back to us on what it was like to try and build your own cars, grow all your own food, and make your own clothing.
*Huge* corporations *are not* simply large businesses. They don't simply have just a bit more power, they are huge collections of money and huge collections of power, so huge as they change the gravity of the power of the country.
The governmental structure of the U.S. was just not intended to deal with huge pockets of power. U.S. society has a huge blind spot in regards to this, but the writers of the constitution did not. They saw the damage that was caused by the East India company and while they believed that corporations could be a positive force as long as they were limited. They believed in giving them *limited* charters (ones that actually expired!) and not allowing them to own other corporations or land that wasn't related directly to their businesses. That was all chucked in the mid-1800s because the rich wanted to get richer.
Corporations are useful for big tasks, but I don't think that any the tasks you listed here couldn't be done by a small or medium size businesses. With the Internet and the modern tech available to us there are damn few jobs that I know that couldn't be done by a small business, and just about anyone and be an international player. Sorry... I doubt the modern corporation is necessary to maintain life as we know it.
Re:"The Enemy of Democracy" (Score:4, Interesting)
We need more private money in elections. We should be able to give whatever amount we damn well please to candidates and causes as long as a donor's list is publicly available.
What's that supposed to achieve? I can already see a lot of publicly available information about who donated what to whom, and when that same whom turns around and bends the rules or entirely breaks them in order to benefit the who, no one does anything about it. We already have huge amounts of very open corruption. I don't see why we want, as you say, more.
Re:"The Enemy of Democracy" (Score:2, Interesting)
Come back and tell me what life is like for you when you can no longer buy cars from Toyota, computers from Apple, burgers from McDonalds, fly on planes from Boeing, or take antibiotics from Merck. You get back to us on what it was like to try and build your own cars, grow all your own food, and make your own clothing.
Spoken like a true serf. That's almost exactly what the royal elite and their loyal serfs said to all the people who came to start this Great Nation almost 300 years ago. And now look what we've become. Slaves. So which do you prefer, the whip or the boot heel?
We need more private money in elections.
Hell, yeah! How else are our greedy corporate overlords supposed to control us slaves? We don't need no stinkin' rules. Hell, let's just legalize outright bribery!
Re:Fuck Republicans (Score:4, Interesting)
In the present context, it means towards more socialism and away from absolute rule.
Kinda hard to have it both ways.
Socialism works in this case. . . (Score:5, Interesting)
In Canada, back in the good ol' socialist days of a Single Phone Company, if Bell did something greedy and stupid, all you had to do was call up the CRTC, (the Canadian Radio & Television Commission) and lodge a complaint. I'd done it a couple of time, and the problems magically vanished. That was back when I didn't mind paying taxes quite so much, because my government was actually doing something useful.
Then the Public Relations people for some greedy corporate start-up told everybody that a single phone system wasn't competitive and that we were in danger of all becoming communists or some stupid air-head shit, and the idiot masses were manipulated into pressing for Bell's system to be opened up to the glories of competition. And because people are fucking stupid in large numbers, easily swayed by emotional messages, I now have several awful phone services to choose from all of which charge too much and calling the CRTC no longer holds the kind of wonderful powers it once did.
Overarching governmental powers don't fit well for every situation, and in some cases they are downright bad. But when it comes to vital systems, like communications and medical care, I want a really big hammer to smash greedy, lazy, stupid assholes with. I USED to have that big hammer AND an efficient, affordable phone system, and now I don't. So thank-you very much for making my life that much more crappy with your stupid social experiment which I told you was going to fail back when you first jumped on the bandwagon in the heady, wide-eyed days of your first year at some ass-hat university where your young minds were molded. You know who you are.
-FL