So the big telco ISPs keep pushing abrogation of net neutrality
on the grounds of having to build out capacity to handle video,
by which they mean TV and HDTV from the usual Burbank studios.
What if they're fighting the last war?
Jeff Pulver points out:
Back on August 29th I posted
a list of "TV Shows Only Available on the
Net." The following day,
Network2 was born. Today 232 shows can be found
in the Network2
guide.
Just as in the old days of USENET,
the net still interprets censorship and damage and routes around:
Psiphon works through social networks. A net user in an uncensored country can download the program to their computer, which transforms it into an access point.
They can then give contacts in censored countries a unique web address, login and password, which enables the restricted users to freely browse the web through an encrypted connection to the proxy server.
Rip van Pulver awakens from a European trip and opines:
To some extent, I had given up on America and the prospect that
it would develop a regulatory framework that might enable Internet
entrepreneurs. In my mind, other countries have been supplanting the US
as the havens for Internet innovation. The midterm election, however,
has reminded me that, in a democracy, there is always room for a rethink,
a do-over, an opportunity for a dramatic policy shift when the national
consciousness wakes up and recognizes that its policies might be leading
the nation down a backward-heading path.
Jonl quotes my blurb about the FCC's principles emphasizing consumers,
i.e., consumers of broadcast media,
while Internet growth is fueled by groups of participants;
I previously posted
a bit more about that.
-jsq
PS: Yes, despite how it looks in the picture, I am wearing a shirt.
Around Austin, there have recently been net neutrality panels or discussions
organized by IEEE and by EFF-Austin.
EFF-Austin had a discussion, which we're following up with a panel:
...in time all global telecommunications will become Internet Protocol (IP) based.
...
In his opinion, this industry has spent too much time and energy on creating rules and regulations to govern the use of VoIP as opposed to embracing the technology and developing it and making it available for wider use in the community. Pulver made the point however, that despite these objections, the use of VoIP continued to grow at a rapid pace, and the threat of this wide spread use resulted in telephone companies in the United States dropping to their overseas rates, particularly to
their major trading partners.
What does a repressive regime do to avoid free discussion?
TEHRAN (Reuters) - Iran's internet service providers (ISPs) have started
reducing the speed of Internet access to homes and cafes based on new
government-imposed limits, a move critics said appeared to be part of
a clampdown on the media.
An official said last week that ISPs were now "forbidden" by the
Telecommunications Ministry from providing Internet connections faster
than 128 kilobytes per second (KBps), the official IRNA news agency
reported. He did not give a reason.
Internet technicians say speeds of 256 KBps, 512 KBps or higher are
increasingly common internationally. Iranian surfers will now find it
much slower to download music or anything else from the Web. Businesses
have not been affected by the move.
If the Internet provides a way to get around the traditional,
and already controled, media, find a way to repress the Internet.
Slowing it down is easier than censoring it.
The big file is, well, really big. But, it's a 1280x640 24fps h.264
file. Maybe if the US infrastructure ever develops to the standards
of a modern country, we'd be able to download this easily. :)
The smiley face may hide that that's exactly why we need net neutrality.
This makes me wonder what would happen if the big telco ISPs
that are spending so much effort gaming the legal system
to prevent net neutrality instead spent the same effort
doing local market aggregators and filters they could sell as
value added services.
After all, they own the last mile.
Who better to do that?
The FCC's definition of net neutrality
is phrased in terms of consumers.
How does this fit with how people actually use the Internet?
Let's look at BitTorrent as a social network:
The parent sites are key to the process, where you can go and get
information about what has been made available. The other portion of the
socialability indexing is that the support sites, where you can get tools,
support, help, and FAQ's on the process is the second level or secondary
index of data.
Jared Diamond: Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed The author examines societies from the smallest (Tikopia) to the largest (China) and why they have succeeded or failed, where failure has included warfare, poverty, depopulation, and complete extinction. He thought he could do this purely through examining how societies damaged their environments, but discovered he also had to consider climate change, hostile neighbors, trading partners, and reactions of the society to all of those, including re-evaluating how the society's basic suppositions affect survival in changed conditions.
Here's
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