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

[Andrea Dorey]

Cameron,
You might send this POV to KPFA who recently did a "chicken little"  
on this subject and got their listeners all in an uproar.

I also received a mailing from the media-alliance organization that  
is concerned about public access as the last bastion of free speech  
on TV.
The website for their POV on the issue you discussed is http:// 
www.media-alliance.org.
Andrea

On Apr 20, 2006, at 9:22 PM, Cameron L. Spitzer wrote:

>
> 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
>
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