[Sosfbay-discuss] [Fwd: Congress is selling out the Internet]

[Cameron L. Spitzer]

I've been hearing an awful lot of gobbledygook about this
recently.  The trouble is, what I've been hearing just doesn't
make any sense.  Maybe there is a real issue here.
Maybe it's being simplified beyond recognition to rile
up the populace.

I'd never heard of "Network Neutrality" until this publicity
campaign began, a couple of months ago.  Network users
pay for bandwidth, and they pay different rates depending on
where they are and how much they're buying, and the numbers
are all over the place.  The Internet is held together by
contracts called "peering agreements."  Network "peers"
agree to carry data from one place to another, even though
it wasn't generated by and won't be received by their customers.
It's *unfortunate* that peering has been completely neutral
for so long, because it means you can't convince a criminal
network's peers to cut them off.

I *suspect* we're hearing a muddle of two completely different
issues.  AOL and other consumer-facing access providers want
to charge "legitimate" (corporate) spammers to get past their
spam filters.  Well guess what, THEY'VE BEEN DOING THAT FOR YEARS.
They figure most AOL users are so complacent they'll
put up with a pile of spam as long as it's from Safeway
and Yahoo and not some Russian selling counterfeit software.

I'll bet they finally asked BIG TIME SPAMMER Moveon.Org
to pay what the other "legitimate" spammers pay, and Wes Boyd's
undies are in a bunch about it.  He's such a whiner.

So that's issue number one.  Issue number two is bandwidth
hogs.  Bandwidth costs money, and right now Vonage and
Tomatovine and Blockbuster and Apple Itunes are externalizing
their costs.  And they're using more bandwidth than email
and old fashioned Web browsing ever did.  Why should well
behaved email users pay those corporations' expenses?

Maybe there's really a grand plot to "privatize" routing
and give big media corporations some kind of advantage.
Well, "death of the Internet predicted, film at 11," as they say.
We've heard it before.  THE INTERNET ROUTES AROUND DAMAGE.
It's now well known that the Internet regards censorship
as just another kind of damage and routes around that too.
If there's an Internet that favors Sony's and Blockbuster's
packets over ours, it's damaged.  The Internet I use will
still be here.  It might take a few months or a year or
two to find those new routes, and (gasp!) we might have to
PAY WHAT IT COSTS TO OPERATE, but find them it will.
And if things work out right the spammers will be stuck
on the damaged side.

Show me an account of this crisis that hasn't been filtered
through Moveon.org or Democracy Inaction or some other
spamming operation and I'll rethink this.  But right now
I'm not impressed.


Cameron