The comment board spamming 3BM is paid to do.

making what too easy?

QED.

keep trying Josh Zeidner. you’re making this too easy.

a lot of people are making this too easy. alaska’s ted stephens opposes the bill, without having the faintest idea of what it means or how it will impact commerce. his opposition is an embarassment.

on the other hand, dems might “get it” (i.e., understand what the bill means) but that doesn’t mean that they are correct.

This whole discussion is about the net neutrality legislation sponsored by Markey, Sensenbrenner, Snowe-Dorgan, and Wyden. It seeks to prohibit ISPs from offering Quality-of-Service plans to customers and third parties for fee.

what legislation?

avoiding the question, Josh Zeidner?

it seems Richard Bennett is making a fair point.

can you identify even one significant PRESENT problem that this legislation solves? this legislation (paid for by google ads) seems to be chasing windmills that it has made out to be giants.

why do so many shill for google?

btw, “telcos” is such a quaint term. it is sad that america is so far behind the rest of the world when it comes to internet connectivity. america isn’t the leader here. it’s not even in the quarter finals. the leaders are finland, south korea, sweden where “telcos” compete with “cablecos” and “wirelesscos” for business.

to our knowledge, there is no such legislation in sweden – and absolutely no need for it because of the choices available to consumers.

instead of fighting to keep your dirt roads “neutral” shouldn’t you be asking yourself why you only have dirt roads?

Wow. In the first place, the Telcos (plural) are no longer monopolists: none of them has anything near the market share Google has.

In the second place the entire net neutrality regulatory orgy isn’t based on real problems anybody has today, but on supposed problems that might happen someday if we don’t quickly make BGP obey common carrier law.

That whole Craig’s List thing was a lie.
Dude, you need to sober up.

You are looking for some kind of totalistic resolution to this argument. As many experts know, telecom is a neverending struggle between centralization and market economics. Do I suggest that the above proposal is the last and final piece of telecom law we will ever codify? Not in the least. I say this is what is appropriate at this point in time. You cannot deny the problems that these monopolists are causing. I want balance, not the apocolypse.

I think once the Dems get some clarity here they will seize this issue, this is clearly a concern of at&t.

as far as technical details go, there are plenty of forums on these topics. If you want hard-core techie and politics stuff I recommend:

http://www.benton.org

bring it on. let’s not pretend that the technical details are so complicated (they aren’t) that a “non-technical audience” can’t grasp them. lurking in this blog are more than a few people who are quite comfortable with whatever level of technical detail you want. don’t be shy.

let’s take network stupidity to the applications themselves. google is a good example. the google search engine is an application using TCP. a user types in keywords and google returns “search results”. google is, of course, anything but neutral. instead of returning the results we want, google gives us the results advertisers and key word owners pay for. google makes money from providing biased search results and the public suffers enormous pain because of this.

try to use google to find the URL of a hotel in paris…. you are forced to sift through hundreds of “paid for” placements by travel agents and hotel booking sites searching for what you really want. (which is why google as a search engine is becoming increasingly worthless… but that’s our own opinion.)

let’s extend the “network neutrality” to the application itself. let’s make it illegal for google to present biased results. after all, it’s not fair that rich corporations buy up all of the key words after all. instead of receiving the search results we want, google gives us what rich corporations pay for us to see.

let’s say the RIAA buys the keywords “lessig blog” so anyone using google to find the professor’s blog isn’t able to find it. is this fair? wouldn’t it be better if google were forced by law to be “neutral”? this would no doubt make google a better search engine, but it would also rob google of revenue and possibly drive them out of business.

now let’s apply john kerry’s statement at the applicaiton level: being equally visible to search engines is something all americans should enjoy, regardless of what financial means they’re born into or where they live.

hopefully, we all agree that this is absurd and that such a law would hinder the growth and buildout in applications.

now take it down to the next layer in the OSI stack and see if it is any less absurd.