

If you don’t believe me, listen to Mythbuster Adam Savage.
Here’s a technical explanation. And here’s a letter of objection many of the engineers who built the Internet.
Here’s where the anti-SOPA blackout started: Continue reading
If you don’t believe me, listen to Mythbuster Adam Savage.
Here’s a technical explanation. And here’s a letter of objection many of the engineers who built the Internet.
Here’s where the anti-SOPA blackout started: Continue reading
The simple fact is that
net neutrality was the condition under which
the Internet grew to be what it is today, which is the last bastion
of free speech and a free press in much of the world, especially
in the United States.
The only reason net neutrality is an issue is that the duopoly
(telcos and cablecos) succeeded in their
regulatory capture of the
FCC during Kevin Martin’s term as chairman and did away with much it.
The U.S. used to have among the fastest Internet speeds in the world.
Since the duopoly got their way,
the U.S. has fallen far behind
dozens of other countries in connection speeds, availability,
and update.
While the U.S. NTIA claimed at least one user per ZIP code counted as real service.
We can let the telcos and cablecos continue to turn the Internet into cable TV, as they have said they want to do. Under the conditions they want, we never would have had the world wide web, google, YouTube, flickr, facebook, etc.
And left to their plan, the duopoly will continue
cherry-picking densely-populated areas and
leaving rural areas,
such as south Georgia, where I live, to sink or swim.
Most of the white area in the Georgia map never had anybody even
try a speed test.
Most of the rest of south Georgia had really slow access.
Which maybe wouldn’t be a problem if we had competitive newspapers
(we don’t) or competing TV stations (we don’t).
Or if we didn’t need to publish public information like health care
details online, as Sanford Bishop (D GA-02) says he plans to do.
How many people in his district can even get to it?
How many won’t because their link is too slow?
How many could but won’t because it costs too much?
John Barrow (D GA-12) has a fancy flashy home page that most people in his district probably can’t get to. Yet he signed the letter against net neutrality.
I prefer an open Internet. How about you?
Why did the 73 Democrats sign the letter?
Could it have to do with the duopoly making massive campaign contributions
to the same Democrats
and holding fancy parties for them?
The same lobbyists are after Republican members of Congress next.
Call your member of Congress and insist on giving the FCC power to enforce net neutrality rules.
-jsq
But in Japan cable Internet service is of declining popularity, because 30 or 40 Mbps for $50 or $60 per month is not really fast there.
DSL in Japan goes up to 50 Mbps for also around $50-$60/month.
But for actual fast, cheap, Internet connections, people in Japan buy Fiber to the Home (FTTH), which actually costs less and delivers from 100Mbps to 1Gbps.
Meanwhile, back in the U.S.A., EDUCAUSE has proposed 100Mbps national broadband using a funding method that already failed in Texas.
Japan didn’t get to 100Mbps by a single government-funded network. It did it by actually enforcing competition among broadband providers. Why did it do this? Because a private entrepreneur, Masayoshi Son, and his company Softbank, pestered the Japanese government until it did so.
Thus it’s refreshing that these graphs laying out how far ahead of the U.S. Japan is come from the New America Foundation. Chair? Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google.
NEW YORK (AP) — Google is closing three engineering offices and cutting 100 recruiters from its work force as the recession dampens hiring at the Internet search company.Hm, looks like that Austin office lasted all of one year.“Given the state of the economy, we recognized that we needed fewer people focused on hiring,” Laszlo Bock, a Google vice president, wrote in a blog posting late Wednesday announcing the layoffs.
The moves follows news last week of a government filing from Google showing a significant cutback in temporary employees aimed at trimming costs. The company acknowledged in November that it would be looking to reduce contract workers while retaining full-time employees.
—Google to cut 100 jobs, close engineering offices, AP, USA Today, 15 Jan 2009
-jsq
Rogers, a huge cable internet provider in Canada, has decided to hijack all unregistered domains, and replace them with Yahoo! advertisements. This means Rogers users who type in a domain that doesn’t exist, are now getting Yahoo ads instead of the normal “not found” error.The author points out that this essentially the same thing Verisign did in 2003 until they stopped due to massive backlash.Interestingly, Rogers also decided to do this with subdomains. So for example, example.google.com now takes you to the following advertising:
— Rogers Hijacks Domain Name System, Puts Yahoo! Ads on Google’s Subdomains, John, Blamcast, 20 July 2008
-jsq
It’s Google’s involvement in the deal that makes the new coalition something to keep an eye on. The company has expanded its Washington DC lobbying group significantly in the past few years.Access, choice, openness, innovation: yes, those are the points (plus speed), without being weighed down by the albatross of the clunky “net neutrality” malnym.“When you have a public interest community up against a massive industrial sector like the cable and telco companies, you’re going to likely fail because of the corrupted political system where money buys influence,” said Silver. “However, if you can align the public interest with major industrial sectors that also have an increasing influence in Washington, then you have something formidable, then you actually can beat the cable and phone cartel, and this is going to how its going to play out.”
— Net Neutrality Advocates Call For Fast, Universal Access To The Net, By Sarah Lai Stirland, Wired, June 24, 2008,
-jsq
PS: Free Press: if you’re going to put a video up front, pick a fluent public speaker such as Robin Chase or Jonathan Zittrain to show first, eh? “Collective hallucination,” yes!