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

[James P. Kinney III]

On Sat, 2006-06-10 at 19:38 -0400, J. D. wrote:
> On 6/10/06, Jim Philips <briarpatchkid at bellsouth.net> wrote:
>         Here's a real world example that shows how this would work.
>         Let's say you call
>         Joe's Pizza and the first thing you hear is a message saying
>         you'll be
>         connected in a minute or two, but if you want, you can be
>         connected to Pizza 
>         Hut right away. That's not fair, right? You called Joe's and
>         want some Joe's
>         pizza. Well, that's how some telecommunications executives
>         want the Internet
>         to operate, with some Web sites easier to access than others.
>         For them, this 
>         would be a money-making regime.
> 
> 
> 
>      That is a wonderful example of a nasty mess Jim. To me this
> should really be a no brainer. It isn't fair at all and is completely
> against what I feel the Internet is about. Not to pull a chicken
> little here but isn't it really going down the tubes if availability
> is controlled by companies that could/would have a vested interest? 

I think the bigger issue that I have not seen discussed on this is the
looming specter of censorship this affords. So imagine if <liberal left
wing group> or <conservative right wing group> were to acquire a
controlling interest in a backbone provider. They would be in the
position of, with no net neutrality, essentially blocking access to
content they deem to not have value on their network. A little throttle
here and there and someone gets their viewpoint on how things should
work out much faster than a competing idea.

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.

But with all of the delivery analogies, the sender pays for their
physical "bandwidth". In Internet terms, the sender literally pays for
their bandwidth. And so does the receiver. It's sort of like having to
pay a monthly fee to the USPS so they will deliver the mail the sender
paid for them to deliver to you.

The carriers all have either formal or informal link agreements. The
snafu over net neutrality has been from companies that want to also
offer content as well as delivery service.
> 
> Best regards,
> 
> J. D.
> _______________________________________________
> Ale mailing list
> Ale at ale.org
> http://www.ale.org/mailman/listinfo/ale
-- 
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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