Friday, July 11, 2008

It's called 'Net Neutrality'

Comcast. AT&T and Time Warner are trying to limit your access to the internet. They're doing this in ways that may soon become industry standard.

Citing a shortage of bandwidth (much like the oil companies cite shortage of oil for charging us more), these internet providers are looking to charge users based on their usage. That means if you use a lot of bandwidth for downloads or playing games you will be financially penalized for going over your allotted usage.

In my opinion, this is really just a backwards way of fighting what industry power-mongers call 'piracy'. P2P (peer to peer) downloads are a fact of the internet. It's how people share files which is another way of sharing culture and ideas. Sure, some copyrighted material is violated, but that's part of the cost of having a FREE exchange like the internet.

How do I know the actions of Comcast an others is meant to limit file sharing? Because this kind of tiered charging only effects people who need high amounts of bandwidth. It doesn't effect the basic surfer of the Web.

It also can backfire since a lot of the industry media corporations are developing to catch up with the P2P culture are download services like Netflix and Hulu.com.

There's also this action from the FCC that tells me something is fishy... they're going after Comcast for another form of control which is limiting people's bandwidth without telling them.

"The head of the Federal Communications Commission said Thursday he will recommend that the nation's largest cable company be punished for violating agency principles that guarantee customers open access to the Internet.

The potentially precedent-setting move stems from a complaint against Comcast Corp. that the company had blocked Internet traffic among users of a certain type of "file sharing" software that allows them to exchange large amounts of data.

"The commission has adopted a set of principles that protects consumers access to the Internet," FCC Chairman Kevin Martin told The Associated Press late Thursday. "We found that Comcast's actions in this instance violated our principles."

Martin said Comcast has "arbitrarily" blocked Internet access, regardless of the level of traffic, and failed to disclose to consumers that it was doing so.

Company spokeswoman Sena Fitzmaurice on Thursday denied that Comcast blocks Internet content or services and that the "carefully limited measures that Comcast takes to manage traffic on its broadband network are a reasonable part" of the company's strategy to ensure all customers receive quality service."

Don't be fooled. These aren't the days of party lines where our internet is held hostage by the neighbor tying up the line. Bandwidth is for all intents and purposes a free commodity. Yes, the companies have to provide more cables, but that would warrant a one time price hike for ALL users. It's no basis for a tiered pricing structure.

Charging for bandwidth is like the banks charging you for using a foreign ATM. It doesn't cost them a dime to process that transaction since its all done over the internet.

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2 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

With FISA passing, and the bandwidth tag, Americans are at Farenheit 457 stage in America. They're worried about the government giving too much but they don't seem to be bothered with the government taking things from us.

10:52 AM  
Blogger FHW said...

Quite right. It's the same mentality that tolerates wiretapping because they feel they don't do anything wrong. "I don't do anything illegal. I should have nothing to worry about." With bandwidth it's, "I don't do a lot of downloads. Why worry about someone putting limits?"

5:23 PM  

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