If anyone blabbers about how good Net Neutrality is...

[Gee]

Just point them towards new technologies like this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wireless_MAN

Aside from it being a "solution" which is in search of a problem, new technologies will soon offer plenty of competition to DSL and cable ISPs. So no monopoly could arise which would allow those "evil" TelComm companies to censor our internet.

[tsoldrin]

The monopoly will arise when this technology is suppressed. Big corps are buying up or already have bought up the channels. The parts left to the public are saturated.

It's just like the phone company... for the price of 3 months service, we could in theory all be a part of our own phone company and never have to pay anything more than a tiny maintenance fee. Why would multi billion dollar corps give that up without a fight though?

[Montana]

Wireless is at best a partial solution. It's almost completely inept in rural areas for one thing. It also can't compete with fiber. (Ditto broadband over power lines.)

The true problem is that government regulation has brought us at best a duopoly in broadband throughout the entire country. Consider that at this point the cable company and the phone company are effectively equivalent: They're data providers. Voice is data, internet packets are data and television is data. That's why you can now buy phone service from your cable company and watch TV over your DSL.

The entire problem we have is that we've given these two companies monopolies and then we want to come at it from a free market perspective and say "don't regulate them". That's ridiculous. We already did regulate them -- we gave them monopolies. Either we have to fully regulate them to account for the fact that we effectively legislated the free market out of existence, or we have to eliminate the monopolies and allow real competition.

Obviously this crowd would prefer the latter. The interesting thing is that we can do that now. The original purpose of granting monopolies was that there was previously no way to manage allowing two dozen companies to share the same right of way. Even today in many places, if you want to dig in the public right of way, you have to call the government and have the phone, cable and power companies come out and mark where in the ground their wires are. Why not just use a computer? Have a map at city hall describing where everything is for everybody. You want to add some wires? No problem, apply for a permit and then put the locations in the database.

The best thing about this is that by legalizing the free market, you still won't actually end up with 50 different fiber networks. If the incumbent provider is being abusive then a competitor will show up who is willing to treat customers more fairly, or the customers will come together and build a coop network. However, the incumbent doesn't want that by any means, and as a result they'll play nice. This as opposed to the way it is now, where if you don't like the phone company or the cable company, you're screwed, and they know it.

[LibertyEagle]

Well, it could be like one big MySpace, with all the added benefits (sic) of the filters. We'd have to be "approved" before we could post something, etc.

Man, the name they gave it is misleading... net neutrality. Regular people can't tell whether that's a good thing, or a bad thing. Reminds me a lot of how they referred to NAFTA, etc. as "free trade" agreements, when they were nothing of the sort. Also, the "patriot" act, when it's unpatriotic as all heck.

[kylebrotherton]

I was a strong supporter of net neutrality (pre-Paul). I thought all the opponents were in the pocket of big telecom. When I heard that Ron Paul opposed it, I was concerned. But I came to this conclusion:

Without statesmen like Ron Paul in office, bad laws get passed. Corporations collude with government to fleece the public. When that happens, we look for last-ditch safeguards. That what net neutrality is. Its a barricade to protect us against unfair corporatism. But with Ron Paul as President, bad laws will be vetoed. With Ron Paul in office, we wouldn't have to rely on last-ditch efforts to save us from corporate tyranny. The free market would be allowed to function, increasing innovation, competition, and consumer choice. Using net neutrality to fix a broken industry is like using duct tape to fix a broken arm. It might appear to work for a moment, but you're better off calling a doctor. We're better off calling the Doctor, too.

[denvervoipguru]

The RF spectrum is hardly a "wide open west" of bandwidth...
http://www.ntia.doc.gov/osmhome/allochrt.pdf

[kevinh-SD]

The problem is not that Ron Paul doesn't support Net Neutrality, the problem is that the bill was not what the title suggested. The real title of the bill should have been "Government Internet Management"

It is exactly the same thing with "Free Trade" Ron Paul supports free trade, but what is called "Free Trade" GATT, WTO, NAFTA, etc. is not really free trade; it is managed trade.

[Gee]

There is no way this technology will be suppressed. Big corporations have big pull, but this is still America, and innovation is still king (at least in IT). The big corporations are probably investing in it if they know whats good for them.

And yeah, I know it can't compete with land-lines at the moment. But like anything else, I'm sure it will get better. Just think about internet usage on cell phones. It doesn't even have to be all that great if each receiver can also act as a router:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wireless_mesh_network

The thing that made the internet what it is is its IP, or Internet Protocol. IP is shared across all mediums of transmission, so anything can be used to transmit the data (from satellites to carrier pigeons). While you can have a monopoly on a medium of transmission, it is impossible to have a monopoly on the internet itself, unless you control every single transmission medium.

Eventually the Internet is going to do a steam-roller over the status-quo, and there isn't going to be anthing the Powers That Be can do to stop it.

[Montana]

I agree with you that the Internet has the potential to shake things up, but don't discount the ability of well-heeled corporations with government monopolies to break everything. The reason wireless is not the answer is simple: It doesn't have enough bandwidth. You can get a certain number of megabits with a certain amount of spectrum, but you're deluded if you think they're going to allocate several gigabits worth of spectrum to wireless internet without someone paying billions of dollars for it. Worse, wireless is shared bandwidth. Even if you have 60 or 100 megabits worth of spectrum, you have to share it with everybody else in range. If you live in a densely populated city, that means potentially hundreds of people. And there is no real way to get more spectrum. You can't just run more wires in a particular area to account for the fact that more people live there.

Consider that the next step in the internet revolution is supposedly "user generated content". There are two ways for this to go: Youtube or BitTorrent. Now, I'm not bashing Youtube here, but let's face it, they're a single point of failure. If they decide they want to be censors, they can be. That's bad. The internet would be much better off to have a Youtube-like interface on BitTorrent. But the only way that can happen is by ordinary citizens having a substantial amount of upstream bandwidth. The only way that can happen is to have high bandwidth fiber connections to the home that the connection provider doesn't place content limitations on. There are two ways to accomplish this. One is network neutrality -- force the monopoly providers to do it at the barrel of a gun -- and the second is legalizing competition and dissolving their legal monopolies. You pick.

[tsoldrin]

The question is... will the technology get into our hands... and the direction things are going is no. WiMAX is looking corporate controlled. In theory though, a new generation of wifi could solve the problem and put the entire internet in the hands of the people. It would not be a case of competing for the limited bandwidth to get to the backbone, it would be that every person on the internet would BE the backbone. If you needed more bandwidth, you'd just add more routers. There would be a temporary overall speed decrease, but technology would catch up. We would need about a 2 mile range to make it viable. The problem though is who would stand against such a thing - big corporate interests would because they want out money (basically for nothing in return, we already use eachothers stuff when we use the net, they just tax the transit) and the biggest problem - the goverment, the intelligence community in particular - would never give up the CONTROL.

[Gee]

I agree with you that the Internet has the potential to shake things up, but don't discount the ability of well-heeled corporations with government monopolies to break everything.
In America, I could see that happening. But all over the world? I really don't think its an issue. You cannot effectively place content restrictions on IP traffic unless you control access every single node in the network; i.e. you'd have to cut one piece of the internet off from the rest entirely. I can't imagine why anyone would want to do this.


Consider that the next step in the internet revolution is supposedly "user generated content". There are two ways for this to go: Youtube or BitTorrent. Now, I'm not bashing Youtube here, but let's face it, they're a single point of failure. If they decide they want to be censors, they can be. That's bad. The internet would be much better off to have a Youtube-like interface on BitTorrent. But the only way that can happen is by ordinary citizens having a substantial amount of upstream bandwidth. The only way that can happen is to have high bandwidth fiber connections to the home that the connection provider doesn't place content limitations on. There are two ways to accomplish this. One is network neutrality -- force the monopoly providers to do it at the barrel of a gun -- and the second is legalizing competition and dissolving their legal monopolies. You pick.
The internet has always been user-generated. Most of the software the internet runs on was created freely by users without any profit motive (apache, linux, etc). But the reason most people don't have much upload bandwidth at home is because they don't need it, and don't want to pay for it. In most cases it would be silly to have the same amount of upload bandwidth as download bandwidth.

There is always satellite connectivity, though its latency can be high (so its not useful for playing FPS shooters, for example).

Also, there are currently something like 14 internet backbone providers.

[Mesogen]

Sorry if this comment is not in line with discussion, but I just want to point out that the telcoms were originally born out of the government in the first place, with monopoly power.

These same telcos should not be able to use that pre-positioned monopoly power toward their own agenda, and at the cost of the consumer.

I don't agree with net neutrality laws because the people who would write these laws would not be tech savvy enough to know what harm they might be doing.

But telecom companies should not be given free reign since they were never fully divested of the government.

[wizardwatson]

I have been a programmer for a few years.

My opinion is...don't worry so much.

Technology is changing so rapidly it is nearly impossible for anyone to be an expert at any one part of it. Every part is connected to some other part, and no one knows enough about the whole thing to effectively control it.

And my prediction should we allow the government in to protect us, we'll end up getting the same type of McCain-Feingold crap that we always get. They say it is to protect the little guy but just ends up making it harder for the little guy to get into the racket.

There are positive developments happening that I believe will change the internet as we know it in the next couple years. One of those things is something called OpenID which is pro-privacy, decentralized and is being embraced by companies like AOL and Microsoft. Imagine that? MS and AOL embracing a technology that at the root cannot be controlled by them.

The reason for this is that they have all realized that no one will ever trust one company enough to have them take care of all their private info. But at the same time we need a system where you log in one time for all web apps which use OpenID. Well this is the solution.

Imagine, no longer do you need 50 passwords, but at the same time, the company which handles your openID, should they piss you off, can be swapped out for a different company. You can have multiple OpenID's for your different internet presences.

Anyway, its worth checking out. Oh, and it exists and works right now, albeit on only a few hundred sites at the moment.

Gee, wouldn't it be nice if I had an OpenID that worked with all 10 of these damn Ron Paul forum boards, ARRRRRGH!!!

Anyway, here's a short video intro, for those of you who hate to read:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u9VAeegN_W8