(A letter to my representatives in government)
Network Neutrality: “in order to promote innovation, network service providers such as telephone and cable internet companies should not be permitted to dictate how those networks are used (i.e., not permitted to ban certain types of programs, to ban certain types of devices connecting to the network, or to favor carriage of traffic to certain web sites over others).” (from wikipedia)
If the above was a bit much for you, and I’m indeed hoping that this isn’t being read by some intern, watch a quick introductory movie on the issue. Here’s a link which is likely to be much more coherent then my letter; and here’s a whole collection of material on the issue.
The crux of things is that:
Right now there are laws against this. There’s a bill surfacing in the House, sponsored by Rep. Joe Barton, which passed through committee a week or two ago, and is headed for a vote in the house.
This centralization entirely contradicts the entire notion upon which the internet was founded and has flourished. In less then 20 years, the internet has left a bigger mark on our world than any other technology of recent invention. Allowed to continue to evolve and better itself, as it has done ever since it’s creation, only God knows what will come of it in the years ahead. Who could have foreseen just 10 years ago what it would be today?
This is bad, bad, bad. The only reason the internet has evolved to the point it has is that it’s a decentralized system which allows equal access to everyone with a computer and connection. The web as we know it has emerged from nothing but a conglomeration of research universities and government organizations, into a massive engine for learning, communicating, and commerce. Above all the internet embodies equality and liberty, and who would entrust such important values to any corporation?
In the past, the telecommunications lobby has been able to have it’s way with congress, to the detriment of the American people. In recent years our phone companies have been sloth compared to those of foreign nations: for the price of a 3-5MB/second connection to the internet in an urban area of the US (what we call ‘broadband’) an urban dweller in japan can get a connection of 100MB/second (20 times faster). In France, just to show that the japanese aren’t just technical wizards, and the rest of the world is back with america, the standard connection runs at 24MB/second, also toasting the US standard (by 5x). Most of the rest of the developed world is hooked up to the internet at a rate far higher then we are, and it’s because of the structure of our national telecommunications providers. Tell me that isn’t embarrassing.
The internet was designed as a ‘dumb network.’ That means that all of the information is just passing through the cables. Information is processed by it’s sending device and receiving device, given a ‘to’ and ‘return-to’ address, and sent on it’s way. In between the ‘client’ and ‘host,’ there will be a series of ‘routing’ computers, who’s job is to direct the unmolested information along the shortest path from source to destination.
In such a ‘dumb network,’ there is plenty of intelligence. It’s just that that intelligence comes from the edges, and not the connections of the web. A dumb network is analogous to democracy at it’s best: everyone has equal right to the system. Free speech, equal rights, all that stuff that we’ve been raised to hold so dear in the foundations of America, this time running on computers distributed on a massive scale throughout the world. The internet is enabling an unprecedented age in which communication and enlightenment between individuals comes at nearly zero cost.
The American telco industry wants to see all that gone, in the interest of their profits. They want to make some real money.
It might just be me. I’ve had a computer all my life, an internet connection for almost half. I’m not sure that I could see living before the internet age. I wouldn’t go as far as to say that my life revolves around it, but I’m also not sure that point won’t be arriving sometime soon. E-Mail and Instant Messaging are the phone of my generation, and younger generations are intertwined with the internet ever more the I am.
But not to digress, what the phone companies want the internet to be is irreconcilable with what the internet is now and was meant to be. Phone companies have held a a stronger monopoly then that which Microsoft has been persecuted for at home and abroad, and ever since god knows when the telephone began to be adopted. With the advent of the internet, the telephone network as we know it is on it’s last legs. Already, voice signals are converted from standard telephone electric impulses over standard wires into digital signals over fiber optic wires at a certain threshold of the phone system. Soon technologies will enter the mainstream to telephone entirely over the internet. You’ve probably heard of VOIP, which is a standard means of doing exactly that. It would move phone communication out of control of the current telco industry, and into the control of whoever is smart enough to figure out how to market such services. To give you a quick hint, that isn’t likely to be one of the current telcos.
The problem that phone companies have with the internet is the fact that it’s ‘dumb,’ as defined above. As much as I hate to say it, America isn’t so much a democratic nation as we are capitalist, our core and founding principles are quite often discarded, in favor of the greater economic good that comes from quick, easy, and oftentimes dirty, profit. It could be quite easily demonstrated that the ideal moneymaking schemes are less then egalitarian, generally following an aberration of the 80/20 rule: few people with most of the wealth, most of the people with little wealth at all. The same applies to power, which in the idea of a capitalist society, is succinctly tied to that of wealth. And quite unfortunately, the idea of privilege follows quite the same trend, throwing equality in any reasonable form right out the door along with it.
So these phone companies want to rake it in, so what. Could they do that while operating the internet in it’s intended form, as a dumb network? Surely. They’ve managed so far. But hey, this is (forgetting the ridiculous amount of government money going into subsidizing the telco industry) a capitalist, free market nation. The telcos should be able to do whatever the hell they want, as long as we the people are willing to pay for it. So rationally, the telcos see how much more they could milk out of us poor consumers and decide that by contravening the ‘dumbness’ of the internet, they’ll find not only a cash cow, but perpetuate their domination in the modern world of telecommunications. It’s a sure win for them.
But what about us? It would no doubt be profitable for me to find and murder all of my rich friends and their families, appropriate and sell their goods, and rend all their former belongings upon myself and my family. Something tells me that this wouldn’t turn out so well me, or for society. There are reasons that I’m endowed within these United States certain unalienable Rights. Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. Straight from the Declaration of Independence, pounded into my head since sixth grade. It’s a stretch to say that the decapitation of the internet would lead to a significant retraction of my above rights, but it surely would hamper my realization of each of them.
The government undisputedly has a place to regulate activities which would greatly disenfranchise it’s peoples. And selling off the internet to the likes of AT&T would greatly disenfranchise americans, not to mention anyone anywhere in the world who uses the internet. The resources available on the internet are unmatched by any public library, by any television network, even by any university system in the world. They are in fact largely the conglomeration of all those resources.
Taking my access from such a vast pool of knowledge won’t just make me a dumber person (and not like in the above defined network sense of the word), but it could prevent a second renaissance period in the history of the world. It’s not a stretch to say that the internet today would be the increased scholarship and thinking that led to the complete shift in the way the world was perceived by all of western society in the time of Leonardo DaVinci and Martin Luther with the invention of the printing press.
What the telcos envision doing is working things so that to get preferred treatment on the internet, you don’t just have to be doing something that people want (I’m saying preferred here, in the sense that such websites get traffic on orders of magnitude vastly exceeding the traffic that would go to average joe’s personal website, because they are better then the average joe’s website). They wish to have it so that to even get any treatment at all, you have to know who to pay, and be able to pay them the right amount.
The removal of network neutrality contradicts every democratic ideal in existence, ceding control of the internet to an oligarchy of profit mongering corporations. Retarding the brightest invention of our time into a mouthpiece for those who already control things. Taking power away from the people, and giving it to three or four CEOs.
Now just imagine how things would be if our Internet Service Providers (ISP’s) could manage and restrict the traffic flowing over the network cables they own. Not only do these cables connect people to the internet, but cities to cities and continents to continents. There are cables which lay across the bottom of oceans, interconnecting the entire world. The possibilities of the internet are endless, and only held back by the imagination of whoever has the vision to invent new applications. But insert a central force into the system of connections, built to be ‘dumb,’ and things change quickly. I no longer am an equal among those on the web, to the companies who mediate the flow of communications back and forth on the cables, I’m only worth what I’m paying the company. The same effect would be felt by each and every service operating over those cables.
Right now there are laws against this. There’s a bill surfacing in the House, sponsored by Rep. Joe Barton, which passed through committee a week or two ago, and is headed for a vote in the house.
This centralization entirely contradicts the entire notion upon which the internet was founded and has flourished. In less then 20 years, the internet has left a bigger mark on our world than any other technology of recent invention. Allowed to continue to evolve and better itself, as it has done ever since it’s creation, only God knows what will come of it in the years ahead. Who could have foreseen just 10 years ago what it would be today?
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