The Internet: 1983-2006

[athelind]

Congress Sells Internet to Big Business

Everyone else gets a surcharge to access what their own taxes built

Oh, well. It was nice while it lasted. Back to being corporate serfs again.

Comments

[archteryx.livejournal.com]

This fight's not over, Athe -- in fact, it's only begun. Now it all moves to the Senate, and Harry Reid has announced extremely strong support for Net Neutrality. Surprisingly, some Republican groups are also coming down in favor of it.

It isn't dead yet.

[athelind.livejournal.com]

True dat. The fat lady hasn't even come on stage yet.

[archteryx.livejournal.com]

It could go alot of ways. I suspect the Senate will vote in a bill that contains a strong Net Neutrality provision. This isn't a partisan issue -- it's an issue of pure corporatism. Which matters more, noncorporate political activism (from everything from Daily Kos to Redstate to Free Republic to Democratic Underground), or telco campaign contributions?

Past history would suggest corporate money wins, and wins handily. Witness the Bankruptcy Bill. But this is going to be a much closer race, and may come down to what's done in the back room of some conference committee.

Fat Lady ain't on stage yet, and which side of the aisle she's going to sing at nobody knows yet either. But I'd call your Senators. Boxer is a pretty safe bet but Feinstein is a wobbly corporatist, and likely will be against Net Neutrality.

[tikaani.livejournal.com]

That's a bit of an exaggeration. Now, while I do not support endpoint providers charging content providers for prioritization, "what our taxes built", the NSFNET backbone, hasn't been in operation since 1995, and the NSF itself ceased all Internet activity in 1998. Granted, many of the protocols funded by NSF/(D)ARPA are still in use, but how can you easily put a dollar value on, say, UDP over a nationwide network of T3's and routers in 1990 (even one provided at a discount as was to NSF). In fact, the NSF was required by law to turn over the Internet. As was explained at the National Center for Atmospheric Research's Scientific Computing Division's 10th Conference:

Why did NSF decide to revamp NSFNET? One reason, (...), is that the agency is mandated by Congress to seed technologies and pass them on to the private sector. NSF initiates projects that would normally not be undertaken by commercial establishments; when the projects are successful, NSF transfers the technology. (In this case, the technology is a national research-and-development network.)

The commercial providers were required to build the 4 new NAP's, and we sure aren't running over those T3's from 1990 anymore. None of that money came from taxes.

[tprjones.livejournal.com]

Don't worry too much. If things go the way you fear, it may be a it difficult for a few months but pretty quickly the market will correct for it.

See, we've got the basic technologies needed to crate a truely distributed network that doesn't need their backbone. There've been some huge advancements in wireless broadband devices over the past few years, and some interesting new breakthroughs in routing theory. I think that having the big bad companies mess with everyone might be just the thing the market needs to have the right people get the right funding to do the right things to push us to the next plateau.

But then, I'm an Optimistic Capitalist.

[tikaani.livejournal.com]

The people who want to charge aren't the backbone providers though (Cogent v. L3 notwithstanding). The biggest proponents of the "content charge" way of thinking are Verizon and AT&T (nee SBC), owners of what would be termed regional/access networks.

[xylen.livejournal.com]

If it comes to that, let's all redirect all spam emails to congress's inboxes and block out their servers.