[GPSCC-chat] Fwd: 74 Democrats sold you out to AT&T, Verizon and Comcast.

[spencerg]

Hi, Cameron:


       Have you shared this with Robert McChensey and groups like 
"freepress.net"?


       Do you agree that the costs of telecommunications including cable 
television, local and long distance telephone?  Do you agree also that 
the rates for any organization with a local, government blessed monopoly 
have been increasing faster than inflation -- while consumers have 
benefited where there has been honest competition?  Am I correct that 
this is how Southwestern Bell got the money to buy AT&T and how Comcast 
has gotten the money to buy this enlarged AT&T?  I think we could find 
collaborators to do the research required to show this.


       I don't think the situation is as hopeless as you describe.  With 
solid research establishing how much Comcast customers are paying for 
Comcast's monopoly, I think it should be feasible to get organizations 
like freepress.net refocused on activities more likely to be successful 
-- and have an impact if they are.  Local telecommunications monopolies 
and politicians from sea to shining sea are vulnerable on this issue, I 
think, especially if we can translate it into dollars per month that 
people pay Comcast.  And the activist groups don't want to waste their 
time tilting at windmills.


       Comments?
       Spencer


On 6/6/2010 7:31 AM, Alex Walker wrote:
> Cameron, your analysis of this issue is very important. You should submit it as an op-Ed. Since this is one of those rare instances where the Green position is on the same side as the "Silicon Valley" big boys, maybe even the "Murky News" would print it.
>
>
> Sent from my iPad
>
> On Jun 5, 2010, at 10:06 PM, cls at truffula.sj.ca.us (Cameron L. Spitzer) wrote:
>
>    
>> Corporations block Internet traffic every day.
>> Every millisecond.  It's a vital part of keeping the network
>> running.
>>
>> There's a torrent of "harmful traffic" blasting from hundreds of
>> millions of PCs and web servers worldwide.  They're infested
>> with every kind of malicious software.  Over half the
>> PCs in people's homes worldwide are compromised.
>> They're organized by the hundreds of thousands into botnets.
>> You can rent a botnet by the hour to commit any crimes
>> you want.
>>
>> They're sending phish spam, in hopes of stealing your
>> identity, your bank account, and your retirement savings.
>> They're guessing passwords in hopes of stealing your
>> email account, to send spam from it.  They're advertising
>> counterfeit drugs for sale through web servers they've
>> hijacked.  They're selling porn and mail-order brides.
>>
>> There are even hobbyists who trade and collect videos recorded
>> in the back rows of movie theaters or ripped from DVDs,
>> consuming hundreds of times more bandwidth than everybody
>> else, and degrading the service for the normal users.
>> One such hobbyist forced the San Jose Peace Center off
>> line until we encrypted its Wifi service and blocked his
>> harmful traffic.  That's why there's a WEP key there now.
>>
>> Everybody from *me* to Comcast and Time Warner America Online
>> do our best to block that crap.
>>
>> If we stopped blocking harmful traffic, most email servers
>> worldwide would crash within a few minutes.  Enough web servers
>> would be compromised that most people would be unable to
>> use the Web, because most people are using Microsoft,
>> and it's vulnerable to attack by compromised web sites.
>>
>>
>>      
>>> This appears to me that the corporations would grab immense power if
>>> they could "block internet traffic."
>>>        
>>      
>>> I signed the petition.
>>>        
>> I didn't.  Josh Silver, the promoter behind freepress.net,
>> may mean well, but he doesn't show much understanding of how
>> the Internet operates.  There *never was* "net neutrality."
>> Most of the Internet is private property.  It was designed
>> from the beginning to evade common carrier regulation, and that
>> aspect of the design has been successful.
>> It wasn't 74 congresscritters who sold us out last week,
>> it was thousands of city governments who granted local service
>> monopolies and free easements to the cable and phone
>> companies over the thirty years that the Internet was being
>> built.  This horse was gone long before the barn was built,
>> and now Silver wants the FCC to lock the barn door.
>>
>> The FCC tested Silver's half-baked theory, and Comcast took
>> them to court and cleaned FCC's clock, as anyone who understands
>> the issues would have expected.  Even a loony-tunes Fascist
>> court can figure out a simple case like that one.
>>
>> If they want to restore competition and guarantee fair access,
>> which is a much more reasonable goal than "net neutrality",
>> it's going to take thousands of eminent domain actions to
>> revoke all those easements.  That would be a good thing,
>> in my opinion, but it's not going to happen in a nation like
>> the US where property rights usually trump all other rights.
>>
>> A more reasonable approach would be to create a net
>> "above the net", where you bypass politically motivated
>> network outages by going through proxy services.
>> That's how the Chinese and Iranians use Youtube and
>> Amnesty International.  If you're too lazy to find a proxy,
>> you didn't want to see those sites that badly.
>>
>> It hasn't happened in the west
>> because there hasn't been much politically motivated
>> network interference.   There was one case where AT&T blocked
>> a site that criticized them.  The Internet routes around damage,
>> and it interprets censorship as damage.  I expect it
>> will just keep working that way.  Should politically motivated
>> web site blocking become a real problem, it will create
>> a market for user-friendly web proxy services, just as it has
>> in China, and hobbyists and entrepreneurs will build the net
>> above the net, a route around their damage.  I imagine that's
>> why AT&T and Comcast *aren't* blocking web sites they don't
>> like, because they don't want to stimulate the proxy business.
>>
>>
>> -Cameron in San Jose
>>
>>
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-- 
Spencer Graves, PE, PhD
President and Chief Operating Officer
Structure Inspection and Monitoring, Inc.
751 Emerson Ct.
San José, CA 95126
ph:  408-655-4567