News Republicans trying to kill net neutrality

[gravenewworld]

What good comes out of killing it except more profits for ISPs? It would essentially limit the websites consumers have access to without more fees. It seems like we would simply be opening up Pandora's Box if we killed net neutrality since the already few ISPs out there would become even more powerful by controlling what content and information users have access to.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs...rality-killer/2011/11/10/gIQAdScC9M_blog.htmlAll 46 Republicans in the United States Senate voted for this legislation. Every. Single. One.Imagine having to pay extra special fees if you wanted to use a site like facebook or twitter or use google. If you didn't, those websites would be blocked. What are we try to turn into, China?Government and tax payer dollars paid for much of the infrastructure of the internet too, all of the sudden we should let private companies use it for their own benefits?

 

[Brandon_R]

With so many people on the internet and such powerful organizations i am suprised these things don't get killed the very instant they appear.

 

[MarcoD]

What good comes out of killing it except more profits for ISPs?

Nothing. In the future, computer applications for businesses (or games), are expected to also be founded on combined services: games or groupware which use teleconferencing, automatic billing, inline advertising, agenda's and more and all at the same time. So one application might typically use more than a dozen different services accessing the Internet in varying manners.

It might be nice for ISPs and Telcos, but this is incredibly bad for innovation. Imagine not being able to play certain games, install certain groupware, or have access to certain services because you live in the US, instead of Europe or Japan.

Apart from that, applications would probably start tunneling services over the channels of other services to bypass restrictions, so even if you try to throttle (or bill) certain kinds of access, the law itself would be reduced to a paper exercise.

So, it's both bad for business as well as not implementable.

 

[AlephZero]

Maybe the US should be more concerned that there are about 25 or 30 other countries in the world with a faster nation-wide internet system than it has.

That list includes countries like Lithuania, Latvia, Romania, Iceland, the Czech Republic, Estonia ...

Even at the level of individual cities, the number of US entries in the top thirty world wide is ... zero.

http://www.netindex.com/

 

[Evo]

Maybe the US should be more concerned that there are about 25 or 30 other countries in the world with a faster nation-wide internet system than it has.

The internet in the US is not wholly or mostly owned by a single monopoly as is the case with the countries you listed.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TeliaSonera

There are literally hundreds of independently owned internet backbone providers in the US. ISP's are not to be confused with companies (backbone providers) that actually own pieces of the data networks that comprise what you think of as the "internet". Almost all ISP's are merely companies that lease internet access from a backbone provider and resell internet access to end users. The amount of bandwidth, the resulting speeds offered/available to the end user are controlled by the reseller. It doesn't matter how fast the backbone portion is because end users don't have access to it.

OC 192 is the most common for backbones in the US, (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optical_Carrier_transmission_rates#OC-192_.2F_STM-64_.2F_10G_SONET) although there are still areas with less.