[ale] OT: Craig Newmark of Craig's List on Net Neutrality

[James P. Kinney III]

On Sun, 2006-06-11 at 09:03 -0400, Geoffrey wrote:
> J. D. wrote:
> >  >On the other hand: for all everyone gripes about the USPS, they do a
> > 
> >> >great job delivering mail. For a measly $.39 I can ship a letter from my
> >> >mailbox to anyone in the US in under a week. In most cases, I can get it
> >> >from Atlanta to LA in about 2 days. But they do have a faster,
> >> >guaranteed service that costs much more as it gets special handling at
> >> >tracking. That's pretty cool. There are even private firms that can get
> >> >a package delivered even faster at a much higher rate.
> >>
> >>
> > Well after some digging around and reading your post I'm nearly doing a 180
> > on this one.
> > Thanks for the enlightening analogy. I am feeling a little better about it
> > now. ;)
> > I am okay with QoS if that is what we are ultimately talking about and 
> > it is
> > an important
> > part of networking performance.

But the mess is in the details. The last mile of wire crowd want to
change it to Qo$.
> 
> It's not a QoS thing.  It's 'whoever has the biggest wallet wins' issue. 
>   The bottom line is, Pizza Hut pays for a higher priority, thus local 
> Joe's Pizza loses out in the mix.

Absolutely. It got started as a QoS thing but turned into a blatant
extortion scheme.
> 
> This goes against everything the internet has done for the small guy. 
> It's leveled the playing field for many.  Individuals can produce their 
> own music, burn their own discs and sell them directly to their 
> customers.  Cutting out the bloat of the big labels.  People you would 
> normally never have heard of selling products you would never have seen 
> otherwise.

Viagra, etc...
> 
> Competition works in this world now.  Big companies can pay for higher 
> bandwidth and better technology.  Let them pay for ads on google and 
> yahoo.  Permitting them to intentionally slow down someone else's site 
> is not competition.  It's like Joe's puts up an ad in the local paper 
> and Pizza Hut pays the newspaper to NOT print it.

And that is almost the situation we are looking at without the net
neutrality. It would be a different story if they were openly discussing
a simultaneous change to IPv6 along with a QoS upgrade for fee. That
would solve many issues and make some big business ideas work better
(online movies on demand, eg.).  But as Daniel pointed out, what is
needed is legislation barring deliberate interference with the best
effort bandwidth. But that discussion will get so overly technical that
no one in congress will be able to make sense of it so they will rely on
outside help to write the bill and we can guess who that will be.

I think as long as net neutrality is tied to freedom of speech, it will
serve to keep the money-mongers from reducing the data flow  to the end
consumer to just a soda straw of info and a fire hose of ads. Think AOL
on steroids. Gah!
> 
-- 
James P. Kinney III          \Changing the mobile computing world/
CEO & Director of Engineering \          one Linux user         /
Local Net Solutions,LLC        \           at a time.          /
770-493-8244                    \.___________________________./
http://www.localnetsolutions.com

GPG ID: 829C6CA7 James P. Kinney III (M.S. Physics)
<jkinney at localnetsolutions.com>
Fingerprint = 3C9E 6366 54FC A3FE BA4D 0659 6190 ADC3 829C 6CA7
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