Glue-reed - that's a glue made from greed. But it's not Lou Reed, that guy is pretty cool.

Wait a minute. Suppose net neutrality is not legislated, and thus your current ISP makes certain sites unavailable to you. You would be pissed. You would look for another ISP. The ISP that will guarantee net neutrality will get your business. In fact, it will get all the business. Problem solved. No?

No, problem not solved. There are fewer and fewer ISPs these days, with the big telcos controlling most people's net access the same way the big cable companies control your TV access. Soon enough, many people won't have a choice of ISP, they'll have to go with what's available. Further, the companies who are doing this control the Internet's backbones, and they can limit the speed or performance of sites that don't pay their protection there, and your ISP won't be able to do anything about it.

There are still quite a few ISPs, and there would be a lot more of them if Comcast started screwing with your connection and outraged users demanded an alterative.

Net neutrality, on the other hand, is a give away to big web content companies like Microsoft. They end up benefiting from telco investments without paying for what they use - instead the costs get passed on to home subscribers.

Check out the flash at dontregulate.org

Spot the trend: govt effectively grants a monopoly or oligopoly, but of course protects the public by regulating said businesses. Then eventually the free money - oops market - folks come along and get rid of the regulations.

That's why gasoline costs so much.

Every time this happens it makes for a massive transfer of money from consumers to those who own and run these corportations.

Point taken, Anthony. And Peter, I was with you until I checked out that flash cartoon and followed their link to handsoff.org. When the telecoms try to represent themselves as a mother and child huddled over a laptop and a plate of waffles (see "About Us") you know something stinks. I hate that kind of shit.

I dunno, the more I look at this situation, the more complex it gets. But when I ask myself the simple question: who is more likely to bend me over, Comcast or Google, the answer seems abundantly clear. Thanks for the tip, Anthony.

That dontregulate.org flash cartoon is full of shit. I don't know what they are talking about when they mention the "2 blocked sites in Canada," but ISP's have been trying to block VOIP traffic from their networks for a while now (though without a lot of success, it's technically difficult). Services like Vonage and Skype compete directly with telcos, and these telcos run many ISP's. But this argument is really about what the big telcos are proposing to do, not what they have been doing.

As for the "big companies" using the next generation internet for free, these companies pay millions of dollars for bandwidth, and net neutrality won't change that. Consumers pay for the bandwidth they use. So every byte of data is already paid for twice, coming and going.

What the ISP's are proposing to do is charge companies like Microsoft or Google extra to give their data preferential treatment. If Google gives Verizon a bunch of money, Google search results will travel to your PC faster. Microsoft and Google have the money to pay up if they have to. What this does is screw individuals who set up their own webservers. Whatever the message they are sending out, be it something like "Badger Badger Snake" or Indymedia.org, unless they pay the big backbone companies, their data will get shunted off into the slow lane of the internet. Loading their pages will take much longer than loading the pages of Google or Microsoft.

The great thing about the internet is that anyone can set up a website and get their message out. It can be done very cheaply. That is why you see so much weird and wonderful stuff out there. Strange content doesn't have to make any money for people putting it out. But if net neutrality doens't happen, then only people who can afford to pay the backbone companies will be able to get their message out. That is what net neutrality is about.

Lark Hawk,

You say that ISP's have been "trying" to block voip traffic. Can you give offer some substantiation of this claim? (By the way, it is NOT technically difficult to block voip traffic.)

In any event, it's simply not a problem. There's only one documented case of that ever happening. And the FCC immediately went in and fined the small telecom in North Carolina that did it and it hasn't happened since. Even the "Save the Internet" campaign admits that.

There's one thing we agree on. You say this argument is about something that could happen in the future, not something that is happening now.

Do you really want the rocket scientists in Congress writing regulations for routing Internet traffic to solve a problem that doesn't currently exist.

I don't.

Poor reasoning, Bill. What the Net Neutrality bill does is set up rules so that the telecos can't do what they're PLANNING to do, not what they MIGHT do. This isn't about "regulations for routing Internet traffic," it's about regulations that PREVENT these companies from creating a tiered routing system for Internet traffic. They are planning to do this. They are already doing it.

Congress is considering major overhauls to the Telecommunications Act as we speak (HR 5252), and the big telecos are using all of their lobbying power to influence the law.

It should give all of us pause that the only organizations that are advocating "no regulation" (which is newspeak for "fuck consumers") are front groups for Verizon, AT&T, BellSouth, etc.

What Bill is proposing is basically that we should just wait until it's too late, and then do something about it.

Oh, and that cartoon is about the most sickening piece of propaganda I've seen in a while. Using an "oddtodd" style hand-drawn cartoon to try to get people to blog about it, the thing doesn't have a shred of factual information in it. Disgusting.