Net neutrality finished in the United States?

[Mozenwrathe]

http://badersbits.easystreet.com/cat...et-neutrality/
Net Neutrality Amendment Fails, Bill Moves Toward Passage (article)


http://www.evergreenpolitics.com/ep/...gnificanc.html
The Significance of Net Neutrality to America's Future (article)


http://www.huffingtonpost.com/josh-s...b_b_20951.html
Net Neutrality: Telcos' Big Lie (blog article)


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(manually retyped. all spelling errors are mine)

From: MaximumPC (July 2006 Edition)

Fast Forward: The Myth Of Net Neutrality
by Tom Halfhill


For thousands of years, people have been paying more money for faster communication. In ancient times, a king or successful merchant could hire a fleet-footed runner or fast-riding horseman to carry an important message at top speed. Even today, overnight FedEx costs more than USPS Express Mail, and so forth.

This long-standing tradition has me puzzled by the raging debate over "network neutrality," which is the insistence that all Internet traffic should enjoy equal priority. To hear some people talk, any alternative is an outrageous violation of civil rights, and an affront to democracy. They're fighting a communications bill in Congress that would establish "tiered service," which would allow network carriers to route some data at a higher priority for a premium price. Opponents insist that all network traffic must be treated equally.

But nothing has ever worked that way, including the internet. Dial-up service is available for less than $10 a month and is slow as hell. Regular DSL can deliver 1.5 megabits per second (Mb/s) and costs about $30 per month. High-speel DSL can deliver 3Mb/s for about $50. A dedicated T3 line gets you 45Mb/s and costs thousands of dollars a month. Everyone understands this basic concept.

Critics complain that without net neutrality, small online businesses won't be able to afford the same service as huge sites like Amazon and Google. That's like the owners of your neighbourhood thrift shop whining because they can't afford a storefront on Rodeo Drive in Beverley Hills. Actually, it's worse, because the pricing for tiered services won't be nearly as disparate as that. Companies like Amazon, Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo are fighting against tiered service, because they are the bandwidth hogs that will have to start paying their fair share for all the traffic they generate.

If Congress allows tiered service, nobody except the largest bandwith users will notice a difference. The Internet backbone has tons of capacity and keeps growing. Backbone routing plays a lesser role in overall packet throughput than your local Internet connection and the performance of the web server. In my opinion, vital network trafficshould be a higher priority than teenagers gossiping about K-Fed in AOL chat rooms.

[robertthebard]

If congress allows tiered service, my website will be closed. Will the typical browser notice anything, maybe not, unless they tried to log into Ironworks, and had to go through five minutes of ads sponsored by the "protected" sites. The ones that pay for high tier services. It's not all about competition after all. Sometimes it's all about communication, and no matter what, this should be protected. There should be rules limiting what these companies can charge for services, and for sites to remain online. As I have already said, I pay for my domain, why should I have to pay for it twice? I don't pay Mc'Donald's twice for that Big Mac I had for lunch. It' really easy to say it's alarmist, if your website won't be effectively shut down because you don't qualify for the bandwidth, just remember, that a lot of the message boards that we frequent will fall into the same category that I do, just barely floating, and will be effectively shut down, in the name of "competition", or ROI.
One interesting point, what happens to the pipe carriers, if the software designers pull the plug on the software that makes the pipes work? Perhaps, instead of pulling the plug, they should start leasing that software to the pipe holders, instead of selling it, and charge them. They'll be so glad they got their way when the cost of maintaining the control they fought so hard to decieve people into starts costing them Billions of dollars a month, instead of allowing them to rake in the dough.

[LennonCook]

Originally posted by John D Harris:The phone and cable companies want to be free to charge for new services and make more money,

'New services'? No. The service the ISPs provide is to allow access to the content. They do not provide that content - they provide access to it. What they want to do is directly equivelent to charging you extra for ringing someone and speaking spanish to them about what happened yesterday, as compared to ringing that same person and talking to them in English about what will happen tommorow. To do this, they need to listen to your conversation and find out what it's about - this is, quite clearly, an invasion of privacy. Therefore, privacy laws prevent phone companies from charging for new services and making money.

and they argue that it's not up to the government what they do with their networks."

Well, no. But it is up to the government to prevent certain business models that would endanger the free market.

HMMMMMMMMMM it seems that it's NOT ok for the phone and cable guys to make money, but is ok for MIRCOSOFT not to have to spend more money?

What the telcos want is to charge MSFT twice. They already charge them to make their content available in the first place. They already charge you to download that content. Now they also want to charge MSFT for your download.

"HALE" I'll bet dollars to donuts the writer of the article was several years ago piss'n & moun'n about microsoft and anll the money it's making, now he/sge wants to hold microsoft up as something to be admired?

That Microsoft is a convicted monopolist who overcharge for their services, aim to have complete control over how much 'freedom' people have, and constantly engage in unethical business practices to do this, is a completely independant issue to net neutrality. Just because MSFT are the enemy on several fronts doesn't mean they can't be an ally on this one.