Net neutrality: shaking the election-year money tree
It's becoming increasingly obvious that the net neutrality movement is not about policy substance, reality, or building a political consensus, but simply election-year opportunism.
The net neutrality fear-mongering and woeful lack of policy substance belie that the soul of the net neutrality movement is really about generating on-line political donations for the mid-term elections and the 2008 presidential election.
What better way is there to cheaply agitate potential online donors than sending them lots of free scary emails that the Internet is about to be ruined and that there are greedy lobbyists in Washington that want to make the Internet only for the rich.
The net neutrality political fear-mongering is so inaccurate, misleading and extreme, that the only logical motive that makes sense of it, is that it is not about actually achieving net neutrality, but about agitating activists and potential online donors to open up their checkbooks wide for the mid-term elections.
It's even worse
It's hard to say why politicians such as Markey, Lofgren, Sensenbrenner, et. al. are on the bandwagon for neutrality regulations, since the clearly don't grasp the issue. One thing that's apparent to me is that the fear groups like Free Press are exploiting it as fundraising issue, just as they do Supreme Court nominations and the like. The savetheinternet.com site is run by Free Press, with at least one paid employee, Tim Karr, doing the blogging. He claims to be an unpaid grassroots advocate, which is certainly good for a laugh. It's also not clear that he understands the issues.
Their number one hot button is the remark that Mr. Smith of Bell South made about offering faster service to certain web sites. So I asked Karr to explain why that's a bad idea. We know that Google, Yahoo!, Akamai, et. al. replicate content on server around the world to provide their customers with fast response time. You can see the effect of this with the little "ping" program that's built in to Windows and Linux to measure response times. From home, I "ping yahoo.com" and get there and back in around 10 milliseconds, but when I "ping guardian.co.uk" the response time is 180 milliseconds. (Is that what they mean by "neutral?")
Save the Internet would have no problem with The Guardian replicating their content on a server close to my home that's as fast as Yahoo's server farm, but they have a big problem with Mr. Smith giving them the exact same result from their central server with a faster pipe for a lower cost.
If the two methods produce the same result, how can one be virtuous and the other "stealing the Internet?"
Mr. Karr won't answer my simple question because it completely pulverizes his employer's agenda.
You folks don't get it
It has nothing to do with fundraising, helping the Democrats (who are almost as corrupt as the GOP), or the fate of Google, Microsoft (whom I have said repeatedly have the same business model as Verizon, Comcast etc). It's about what the Net--and the emerging digital infrastructure--has become. A place for discourse, cooperation, dissent, the arts, community, education, etc. Those applications--and the role digital media will play with civic engagement--must be protected. They are more important than the fortunes of a few companies. It's not a battle about the future of private enterprise online. It will do nicely. But it's about a media system for the U.S. where the soul of our democracy can grow without gatekeepers, interactive advertising giants, and pay-per-packet schemes always getting in the way. I think my side--the nonprofit groups--motives are clear. We want to ensure--as best as we can--the free flow of information; a place for serious journalism and free speech. Something, in my view, the country desperately requires for its future.
You're not fooling anybody
Give me a frickin' break, Chester. You people are only concerned about ensuring a free flow of cash into your special-interest coffers by peddling a fear and smear campaign. Your rhetoric about "gatekeepers" and "pay-per-packet schemes" is simply calculated to make your simple-minded contributors scared that something ominous is happening when the bottom line is simply a more capable broadband network with more consumer choice.
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Give me a frickin' break, Chester. You people are only concerned about ensuring a free flow of cash into your special-interest coffers by peddling a fear and smear campaign.
Fear and smear, sounds familiar. Well, the fear at least:
Across town, police on the beat suddenly can't reach headquarters on their radios. In an ambulance, the EMTs are trying to call in vital signs for a patient they are transporting to the hospital, but they can't get through.
And the folks on your side of the issue? HandsOff.org, DontRegulate.org - both funded by the telcos. Clearly, they stand to benefit as well. Their sites are full of smear (make sure you watch the movie) - as is this one. Claiming that Net Neutrality folks want to get "Special treatment" for bloggers and web services, then jumping straight to some unsubstantiated "innovation will suffer" claims, which implies a connection between them...sounds like smear to me.
Another on the anti-neutrality side invokes the "emergency services will be affected" argument. Something that the amendment we supported, the Markey amendment, made sure to guarantee would not happen.
Your rhetoric about "gatekeepers" and "pay-per-packet schemes" is simply calculated to make your simple-minded contributors scared that something ominous is happening when the bottom line is simply a more capable broadband network with more consumer choice.
So, when two hundred billion dollars wouldn't do it, gouging the very companies and organizations that have made the Internet a vibrant information commons will magically string fiber to every home in America?
And no, these aren't calculated to make us "simple-minded" afraid. They were said by the telecommunication companies:
"William L. Smith, chief technology officer for Atlanta-based BellSouth Corp., told reporters and analysts that an Internet service provider such as his firm should be able, for example, to charge Yahoo Inc. for the opportunity to have its search site load faster than that of Google Inc. Or, Smith said, his company should be allowed to charge a rival voice-over-Internet firm so that its service can operate with the same quality as BellSouth's offering." (link)
" "We have to make sure that they [application providers] don't sit on our network and chew up bandwidth," Seidenberg said. "We need to pay for the pipe." " (link)
So yes, they would act as the gatekeepers, if they're allowed to. And they do want to charge extra. This is all well-documented.