Sunday, June 11, 2006

For my nerdy friends (do I have any other kind?), a new way to use their white coats and safety glasses. (Thanks to Dave H. for the link). 8:30:55 PM

Net Neutrality Kicked out of the House: What's Next and Why Should You Care?: Also worth a look is a fresh piece from today's Inquirer on the importance of network neutrality. This piece argues, appropriately I think, for the preservation of 'the democratic openness of the Internet' as 'a key to its world-changing power': As you sit at your home computer, the issue may seem arcane, the concern overstated. Your broadband connection is working just fine, so what's the problem? One way to think through the issue is to jot a list of the killer applications the Internet has spawned, such as Google's search engine, eBay's online auction, or the various Weblog programs. Did any of them emerge from the bowels of a phone or cable company? Nope, they were innovations that started small, but found huge publics thanks to the Internet's openness. (full text) (Via Philly Future - Philadelphia's Blog Community.) Not bad. But one thing that just about every pro-net neutrality writer leaves out is the fact that eBay, Yahoo!, or Google already pay their ISPs to send their replies to our HTTP requests. What the local access providers (cable and telecoms) want is to force them to pay twice, first for their access to the backbone, and then for our reception of the packets they send us in reply to our requests. No one is stopping the local providers from charging more to their local-loop customers, or from negotiating different peering arrangements with other providers, if they believe that they cannot cover their capital costs and return on investment. Meaning that their alleged problem with the cost of upgrading the local loop is not the real issue. The real issues are control, the ability to charge a toll on those that have successful businesses, and the ability to protect their own inferior offerings. 6:54:19 PM