Category Archives: Net Neutrality

Has YOUR Free Speech Been Infringed?

As the law firm for an English soccer league puts it in a letter about their lawsuit against google:
“HAS YOUR COPYRIGHT BEEN INFRINGED BY YOUTUBE?”

— YouTube class action lawsuit: Has YOUR copyright been infringed?, by Donna Bogatin, Digital Markets, zdnet blogs, May 5th, 2007

Well, I write books, so I should be concerned about copyright.

What else do they say?

The Defendants (Google, YouTube) have willfully violated the intellectual property rights that were created and made valuable by the investment – sometimes the life-long investment – of creativity, time, talent, energy, and resources of content producers other than the Defendants. The complaint asserts several legal claims against the Defendants, including direct copyright infringement, contributory copyright infringement, and vicarious copyright infringement.
Well, who could argue with that? Continue reading →

Control to Pay for Capacity?

Save the Internet found a recent quote by new AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson
We’re going to control the video on our network. The content guys will have to make a deal with us.”

— AT&T’s New Boss Wants Your World Delivered to Him, Save the Internet, 27 April 2007

Some say this is necessary to pay for infrastructure. Continue reading →

Ramping Capacity

Hands Off the Internet notes that all major TV networks suddenly (since last year) stream programs over the net, and concludes:
But it’s also a timely reminder of how these deals are placing unprecedented strain on the web’s capacity. Internet traffic growth surged past capacity growth last year. Average traffic was up 75 percent while capacity grew only 47 percent, according to the folks at TeleGeography.

— Katie Couric, Expensive Date, Hands Off the Internet, April 20, 2007 at 12:55 pm

Poor telcos and cablecos; straining to keep up. Continue reading →

Framing Net Neutrality

As we saw in AT&T’s Internet Predictions from 1993, the telco view of the Internet is as a telco-provided service. This is radically different from the Internet we have grown accustomed to, but it is what we are likely to get without net neutrality. Doc Searls gets to the gist:
The short of it is this: As long as we understand the Net as what Jay Sulzberger calls “some bundle of services delivered by the Telephone Company and/or the Cable Company”, we’ll not only never have Net Neutrality, but not even a conclusive conversation about it.

We also can’t have a productive conversation about it if we start with a regulatory conclusion and work our way back to businees from there.

Here’s a frame that may help: The Net is the best platform for free enterprise ever created. How do we help get that built out for everybody? I suggest that we’ve barely started, and that what Cringely gets from Comcast (and what most of us get from whatever company provides it) is still just an early prototype.

— What Net do we want? Doc Searls, 17 April 2007

If the big-telco-provided Internet were actually a free market for Internet service provision, we could maybe leave it to the market to protect Internet participants by providing open access among them. But it’s not; it’s at best a duopoly (telco and cableco) in most places in the U.S. So we need laws to provide for open access. And it would be nice if we also had more service providers, so there would be some semblance of competition.

-jsq

AT&T’s Internet Predictions from 1993

In 1993, several years after the commercial Internet was started by non-telco ISPs, AT&T produced the video “AT&T’s vision for the Internet”:
Picture phones on the ground and on airplanes. That’s in part 1 of Paleo-Future’s six part (OK, 9 part) series showing clips from the AT&T video. Watch the rest for a voice-actuated video-still-CAD phone tablet, plenty of virtual reality, and online shopping. In other words, a sort of visual AOL. Plus artificially intelligent agents and real-time voice translation with subtitles. Continue reading →

Telcos vs. Founding ISPs

Hands Off the Internet conflates more things that just aren’t the same. First, they quote a recent story by a college physics sophomore:
Proponents of net neutrality would like you to think that large service providers had nothing to do with inventing our modern Internet, but this notion isn’t true. Even though explorations into the Internet began at major academic universities for the purpose of research, it is highly unlikely that private companies would never have entered into the market of Internet services. Companies eventually moved into the Internet communications market, albeit backed by government protectionism through such policies as the Communications Act of 1934.

— Net neutrality not for ‘the little guy’, The only ones who would feel the burden of varying price increases would be large content providers, such as Google, Yahoo and Amazon. By Christopher S. Gordon, Daily Texan, 13 April 2007

Nope, what we want you to know is that the big telcos that are the primary Internet Service Providers (ISPs) in the U.S. these days had nothing to do with inventing our modern Internet. They also had very little to do with commercializing it. The first two geographically distributed commercial ISPs were UUNET and PSINet, back in 1990. AT&T, MCI, Sprint, and all the other telcos horned in on the party years later. Continue reading →

Net Neutral Musicians are Pirates?

I wondered how long it would take for somebody to try this:
“To what extent are supporters of net neutrality also tacitly supporting piracy?”

— Get Real – The Net Is Not Neutral, By Sonia Arrison, TechNewsWorld, 04/13/07 4:00 AM PT

Speak up for open connectivity and free speech, as Rock the Net is doing, and you’re a supporter of piracy? Continue reading →

Musicians Rock the Net

Rock the Net Some artists get their facts straight:
Musicians, including well-known bands and smaller independent artists, have joined together in supporting Net Neutrality . On the actual website, Rock the Net, you can quickly get a list of the supporting artists and a list of upcoming concerts.

— SimpleTEXT creates a visual symphony, Ben Woods, WHAS11.com, 03:54 PM EDT on Monday, April 16, 2007

Or several different lists, but still, it’s quite a few bands (362 bands so far, and 105 labels), some of them quite well known; others obscure (as yet). Continue reading →

Competition Would be Better

Some quotes from Rep. Henry Waxman (D-CA) from 7 Nov 2006:
“Sometimes I think Net Neutrality, who knows about it?,” Waxman said at that meeting. “What’s going on now in the communications area is we are moving to a duoplet. We’ll have the telephone companies. And we’ll have the cable companies. They both have wires that go into the home. You’ll have a choice of one or the other for your telephone services, cable services, and Internet services. Those are going to be provided by one or the other.”

— Silenced: Progressive Sites Censored, by Kriss Perras Running Waters, Malibu Arts Reviews, 8 April 2007

So there’s at least one elected representative who sees a duopoly. Continue reading →