[Eug-lug] Mr Smith goes to Washington to address net neutrality

[Quentin Hartman]

On 8/3/06, Brian Gallagher <baggab at pacinfo.com> wrote:
> I actually heard back from Senator Smith, in writing, in response to the
> e-mail I was persuaded to send to his office about net neutrality.  I
> feel that the response was subtly worded to promote the aims of the big
> players in this debate.  I don't have the time to investigate the
> subtleties of the legislation and I was wondering if someone had a
> comment.  I wanted to know if he turned the argument in on itself, but,
> I don't want to slight him if he did not.

I'd liek to look at it, though I'd hardly consider myself an expert,
this is one of my pet subject areas.

> excerpt: "Some companies who plan to provide these [broadband] services
> want Congress to create Internet regulations know as "net neutrality" to
> protect them from paying more for increased bandwidth."
>
> I thought it was more like the creation of a two tiered bandwidth
> delivery system that would allow moneyed players to leverage business
> advantage that inherently establish monopolies.

Your understadning is one possible outcome. All of this has come up
because the FCC lifted some regulations recently that basically
allowed "common carrier" status to extend to data networks. This has
opened the door to the data carriers, allowing them to look at and
classify the traffic, and then charge different rates for different
kinds of traffic, or traffic with different destinations.

So, if they do this, the potential exists for all sorts of
fragmentation within the internet because of how the data network
providers have decided to treat different kinds of traffic.

At least, that's my understanding of it. This is a highly
controversial and mis-understood subject, and I've found getting to
the heart of the matter to be difficult. Espeically with all the FUD
and atro-turfing both sides of the argument are doing.

Leave it to the FCC to overregulate some areas and under-regulate
others. It saddens me that the FCC's goals no longer have anything to
do with the public, and instead are all about making things as easy as
possible for the big corporate players. Normally I favor less
regulation over more, but in the case where the entities being
regulated have proven over and over that they can't be trusted to act
ethically, it's neccesary. But that's another discussion entirely....

-- 
-Regards-

-Quentin Hartman-