House Passes Amendment To Block Funds For Net Neutrality 393
Charliemopps sends this quote from the National Journal:
"The House passed an amendment Thursday that would bar the Federal Communications Commission from using any funding to implement the network-neutrality order it approved in December. The amendment, approved on a 244-181 vote, was offered by Energy and Commerce Communications and Technology Subcommittee Chairman Greg Walden, R-Ore., to legislation that would fund government agencies for the rest of fiscal year 2011. Walden and other critics of the FCC's net-neutrality order argue it will stifle innovation and investment in broadband. "
whores. (Score:5, Interesting)
wait. it did NOT. it was de facto rule of internet up till this day, until you corporate whores had been instructed to kill it.
land of the !free! *rich
a proposal (Score:5, Interesting)
There is an interesting proposal in an essay in the latest Scientific American: allow differential charges on the basis of quantity of traffic, but not on the basis of content.
That would all the (IMO) reasonable approach of charging the heaviest users more and/or throttling their bandwidth, but wouldn't allow Comcast to put competing Netflix out of business.
How many of you wrote to your congresscritters? (Score:2, Interesting)
Obviously, he must be a communist loon..... Wait, what does that make me?
Re:Seems Legit (Score:5, Interesting)
... lurking in the back of everyone's mind is the simple possibility that it might not be possible to pay for a non-tiered, flat-rate, uniform quality-of-service internet of sufficient capacity to deliver on-demand HD video or SIP telephone from any particular content provider in the US, independent of geography and service provider, to every terminal in the United States with flat monthly or even per-byte pricing on either end. The costs of building and maintaing the system simply don't map to consumption of the system's resources....
Well than that thought needs to be purged from everyone's mind like puss from a zit on a HS kid's prom night. It is not impossible to build and deploy a nation-wide infrastructure capable of delivering high quality service to every part of this country. We've done it before. We've done it multiple times before. We managed to build and deploy a high quality (at the time) electricity network in this country that could reach every single home, rural or urban, that wanted it. We managed to build and deploy a high quality (at the time) water delivery infrastructure to every home and business in this country, rural or urban, that wanted it. We managed to build and deploy a high quality (at the time) interstate and state level highway system that could deliver transport goods to just about anywhere in the country. We build the rails before that and (at the time) they were very high quality. We built and deployed the telephone network, and managed to rig it to deliver high quality analog voice signals to every damn place in this country!
There was a time (there were multiple times) when the United States invested in developing itself. There was a time when we weren't piss scared to spend the money to connect every freakin' corner of this country to the latest technology of the period. We have the man power. We have the resources. We have the know how. We can and should build and deploy a high capacity, high speed network system of computer (internet) because it is the next great investment in the future. Internet access, hands down, is the world-changing infrastructure of our era. As the leaders of the free world (supposedly) and the premier technology power in the world (supposedly) it should not take this much politicking, bullshitting, and corporate cock sucking to deploy free (as in libre) and open internet access to the whole fucking country!
How the hell has our population been convinced that this is somehow acceptable or normal? America used to be capable of seizing upon a new invention (rail, steam engine, internal combustion engine, electricity, telephony) and deploying it, broadly and fairly, to the whole fucking population. And yet today we piss away one of the greatest infrastructure opportunities (cheap, open, frree (as in libre) access to the world's whole sum of knowledge) all because a few sacred telco monopolies have convinced us "It's just too hard, nigh, impossible to undertake such a large project."
Fuck That!
We built the transcontinental railroad. We built the interstate system. We let Ma Bell build the telephony system and then broke them up when they abused their monopoly powers. We have built nuclear power plants and the Alaskan pipeline. We built the California Aqueduct. We put a human being on the fucking moon for Christ's sake and we're going to accept the notion that we, as a country and society, cannot get fast, unfettered access to the internet like every other first world country?
Bullshit!
Will it cost money? Yes! Will it take a lot of hard work? Yes! Will it take time, higher taxes, and the spine to tell the multinational telco's to go fuck themselves? Yes!
But will it pay off in the end? Anyone who thinks it won't is stuck in the stone age, fooling themselves, or just downright lying.
You bet your sweet ass that we could build and deploy a strong, open access platform for the internet nation wide. The only problem seems to be that people are too chicken shit scared or stupid to push for it.
Re:Thank your neighborhood republican (Score:5, Interesting)
The funny thing about your statement is, there are grassroots and smaller parties who would fit 80 percent of Americans more than the Republicans or Democrats do but they seem to be totally unaware of it.
Time for a history lesson...
In a first past the post [wikipedia.org] two parties will always dominate. Doesn't matter what names or their policies are, but a 3rd party always has math against it.
Oddly enough the two oldest democracies that are still around today went with FFP because voting had never really been tried before (UK and the USA) while the more newer ones have gone with other forms such as proportional representation [wikipedia.org] (like Germany and Israel). This was that as new countries were being formed or overthrowing their old monarchies, they realized that the FFP was flawed in someways as they could see how it was in the countries that had it (usually looking at the UK) and being more modern times (1890 through 1950s) they went with PR, IRV or STV (single transferable vote) in which 3rd parties get a greater voice in government and the change of a 3rd party actually becoming a 1st or 2nd party is greater (like the German Greens or the Israeli lukid).
So if you want change... Real change with 3rd parties, you need to change the constitution. Of course the vested parties won't really be too keen on that but from my understanding a few states passed STV last year in some local elections so you'll start seeing 3rd parties on grassroots levels in some places.
For more info: http://www.fairvote.org/ [fairvote.org]