Monday, July 10, 2006

Scared yet


I realise there has been an awful lot of talk about Net Neutrality lately - driven by a telecommunications bill going through the American Senate at the moment. There is a provision being proposed for Net Neurtrality, that as I understand it, is about inserting some basic net neutrality provisions into the bill. The provisions restrict a provider from handling their content/traffic at a higher priority than similar content/traffic provider by another source. For instance the provisions would not prohibit an ISP from handling VOIP faster than email or FTP traffic, but would have made it illegal for the ISP to handle its own traffic faster than a competitor provider's traffic.

What scares me, is the person who is leading the defence. Senator Ted Stevens (alaska) in a recent speech, demonstrated his knowledge of all things Internet - NOT - in fact it showed to me that he is the front man for the telcos who are concerned about excessive unplanned usage of their cables. Unplanned - because the telcos didn't think anybody would be using more than a telephone over the cables when most of the infrastructure went into the ground - here they are with people demanding 8+Mb/s in both directions... and guess what? The infrastructure is creaking.

At least the net neutrality bill can be proposed again... it is just disappointing that we have moved one step nearer to the silo'd protected world of the revenue-paranoid telcos.



Wired (the 27BStroke6 blog) has a transcript of the speech, but it really is worth listening to.

Thanks to Public Knowledge who have hosted the MP3
As scared as me??? go to www.savetheinternet.com

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