CHRISdotTODD

Daniel Berninger posted a great article on GigaOm about how Internet bandwidth providers would need to inspect your data packets to provide non-neutral routing. More importantly than having net neutrality, Mr. Berninger points out the privacy issue of this behavior -- something that telcos are forbidden to do with telephones. So why should they be allowed to with Internet data? I believe he makes a good point. In addition to being no different than telephone calls, it reminds me of the AOL mistake of publishing search data of more than 650,000 users. In the wrong hands, which they could not ever guarantee it wouldn't be, would provide data about everything you do, all your account information, your hobbies, and any other information you want to keep private. Remember that Thelma Arnold was the first person (publicly) found from the AOL data -- and this was only search data, not websites, account numbers, and other data you enter into websites. Perhaps it is time to use the sam

After recent concessions for net neutrality by AT&T, " Senators Byron Dorgan, a North Dakota Democrat, and Olympia Snowe, a Maine Republican, introduced the Internet Freedom Preservation Act Tuesday. " This is a repeat of the bill that failed last May in a republican controlled Congress. CNet describes net neutrality as, " ...the idea that network operators such as AT&T and Verizon should be prohibited from prioritizing any content or services that travel across their pipes... " If we are lucky, this will get passed this time through.

For nearly a year, the FCC has not approved the AT&T / BellSouth merger -- more specifically commissioners Michael J. Copps and Jonathan S. Adelstein . In order to break the deadlock, AT&T has put forth provisions to make the merger look more favorable to consumers. This is the second set of conditions that AT&T has put forth in order to get the merger through -- the first being in October . The most exciting part of the provisions this time around is AT&T's partial support of Net Neutrality. According to Nate Anderson of ArsTechnica , this provision means that all content of a particular type will receive equal bandwidth. What it does not provide is equal bandwidth across different content types. For example, AT&T could throttle back all VoIP, and give more bandwidth to video. The good news is that companies cannot pay AT&T money to deliver their content faster than another content provider. Other provisions include returning 3,000 BellSouth outsourced job

Bill Moyers, Moyers on America, has developed an extremely informative piece on the current risk to open access on the Internet call The Net @ Risk . Moyers and his team dig into big media, telco, cable, and government, and shine a spotlight on how we risk losing open Internet access for everyone. Let us not forget how in as little as two years from rule changes by the FCC , big media bought all the little radio stations, and now we have little to no local programming. That could just as easily happen to the Internet. Take a company like Google. Eight years ago, Google was two guys in graduate school -- the Internet has allowed founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin start their own company and compete against incumbents Alta Vista, Yahoo! and Microsoft. With net neutrality, telco and cable companies could make it more expensive to get Internet telephone companies like Vonage and Skype , then it would be to buy it from them -- they would do this by forcing Vonage and Skype to pay them hi

Michael J. Copps wrote a great article yesterday, America's Internet Disconnect , on the impact of not having broadband Internet access. Mr. Copps claims that some experts believe we could ..."add $500 billion to the U.S. economy and create 1.2 million jobs" with universal broadband adoption. In addition, we are being over charged by $8 billion. Here is a few more facts... the government is supposed to have universal broadband in the U.S. by 2007, yet we are not even close. The U.S. ranks 15th in the world in broadband penetration, while Europeans and Asians are getting 25 to 100 megabits to their homes. Oh, but "the FCC still defines broadband as 200 kilobits per second." Who knows, maybe we will see some changes with the recent election. CNet posted an article describing some of the possible benefits to technology with the control of the House and possibly the Senate going to Democrats. I would expect at a minimum that we finally get some support on Net Neutra

I listened to a wonderful podcast yesterday (you can listen online too), provided by Gigavox' IT Conversations . Michael Copps, an FCC Commissioner spoke about Network Neutrality, Broadband and Media Ownership . This guy really gets it. We need to find ways to support Mr. Copps, and find more leaders like him. I highly encourage you to listen to the podcast -- in particular if you do not understand the issues, I think you will once you have listened to Mr. Copps. Federal Communications Commissioner Michael Copps states that all is not well in Washington when it comes to technology policy. He argues that the continued trend in media consolidation, with fewer organizations owning more and more properties that allow them to control both content and distribution, will be further exacerbated by recent decisions by the FCC.

I found a great site in June, Public Knowledge , which "is a group of lawyers, technologists, lobbyists, academics, volunteers and activists dedicated to fortifying and defending a vibrant information commons." On the Public Knowledge site, Alex Curtis writes about Net Neutrality . August 30th he wrote about what it could be like if we did not have protection for a neutral Internet. In the future, we could be reading Consumer Reports for the ISP that provides interests that best match our needs. Curtis reminds us of the Prodigy, Compuserve, and (even) AOL days that did not stand the test of time. This looks like a good blog to follow.

This Week in Tech (TWiT) , hosted by Leo Laporte, had a great discussion on Net Nuetrality during show 60, posted July 2nd. Of particular interest was the playing of part of a speech from Senator Ted Stevens [transcript] [audio] (R - Alaska). According to Mr. Stevens, he wants business to pay data providers a tax based on savings throught the use of the Internet. His example was services such as NetFlix, and that if movies are to be delivered via the Internet instead of mail, that an additional fee should be charged (above the bandwidth fee already being paid to deliver the movie). Here are the comments I posted on the TWiT website: It was great that you gave so much time to Net Neutrality -- you really helped me gain additional clarity on the real issue, and I have been following it for several months now. I beleive the goal of the data providers is to tax content providers , it was never about the home user. The data providers see all the revenue being generated using their pipes,

Net Neutrality is continuing to get a lot press, so I have attempted to gather various sources of information that I have found and put it all here. Adam Livingstone of BBC Newsnight recently wrote an article, " BitTorrent: Shedding no tiers , " where he made several good points. First he starts with an analogy about driving your car down the road, and as you get closer to a place of business, your car begins to slow down. And if you turn around, it speeds back up. Later Mr. Livingstone puts a different twist on the analogy -- instead of losing speed going to the same store, when you go to a rival store, your car goes faster. From that perspective, as long as the speed to the first store is reasonable -- but it's not resonable to take my broadband speed and slow it down to dial up or worse. Mr Livingstone also introduced a new, interesting concept, Cachelogic, which is used to speed up content delivery in a P2P environment. I wont go into the details

I did some more research on Net Neutrality, and learned more about how big of an issue this is. The issue is that cable companies and telcos are pushing to charge more for premium services, such as video content. Further, they want to throttle back the bandwidth allocated to content not purchased or provided by them -- unless the content providers pay them for the bandwidth -- bandwidth they are already paying for. Consider this, content providers already pay for bandwidth every time someone downloads content off their servers -- this is how their network service provider collects revenue for services rendered. The cable and telephone companies want the content providers to pay them again for their content to travel over their network to your home or business, which you have already paid for too. Many folks also believe that without net neutrality, network discrimination would slow economic growth and innovation. Net Neutrality advocates include Yahoo, eBay, Microsoft, Google, Amazon,

I found this article by David Passmore, Net Neutrality Technical Challenges , very interesting. David does a great job in presenting the issue, some based on his own experience as a customer of Cox Cable. For those of us who use the Internet for business and pleasure, you should really care about this subject, as we could get stuck with prohibitive pricing schemes -- in particular I fear this sort of thing for people trying to start their own business, where every penny is important. David came to this conclusion for solving the problem, "A solution that strikes the right balance between these conflicting interests will likely require a mix of business, technical and legislative/ regulatory developments." Though I think he is probably right, I sure worry about any solution that requires government intervention, as they too often follow the money.