Oh, and the water company doesn't make your water "hotter". Your water heater does. Stupid analogy.

An ex-member of [redacted band name] was disappointingly tardy (often a no-show) at practices, mostly in favor of the never-ending tweak on the release of his debut Totentanz album Totentanz - 12 yrs in the making, i shite you not. I never even saw that word written or knew what it meant. I can safely steer away from Slog for the day, now that you've provided the impetus for this holistic reelzation. Props to POE! (have you seen his gravesite in downtown Baltimore, edgar a. that is?)

and yes to the topic at hand, boo boo on all that big corporate stuff

And leadership by the likes of whom? Well, Al Gore for one. Turns out the whole "I invented the Internet" distortion hid a critical accomplishment of Gore's. It's in the latest Vanity Fair:
Going After Gore

Skip to the second page, last paragraph.

Think about this. Al Gore got it long before just about any other leader got it on: global warming, the Iraq War, and the Internet. What a great man!

Obviously too great a man to get elected president of the United States. But hey, at least George W. Bush isn't dorky. Priorities, priorities!

But I also don't want to see a bill written so broadly that it prohibits any form of multi-tiered quality-of-service system. There are a lot of applications that will only become reliable if the Internet can favor time-critical applications like VOIP telephone calls or streaming video over non-time-critical stuff like web downloads.

Some of the proposals I saw last time this came up would have thrown the baby out with the bathwater. I'm not sure I trust Congress, which is full of people who have no clue how the Internet works, to decide which routing technologies should be allowed and which shouldn't.

Pardon me if I'm skeptical of the DOJ's objectivity in protecting net neutrality.

Right now, I could buy a super-expensive internet connection from Qwest and SlogCorp could buy the fastest Macs and thickest wires that money can buy, and I could re-load Slog to check for new comments every .5 seconds without problems. Without net neutrality, though, a few mega-corporations can slow down the tubes in between us so that it takes 15 seconds or whatever for me to reload new comments. The mega-corps would charge Slog a fee to speed up the tubes. Presumably, FoxNews could afford a higher tube fee than SlogCorp so their comments would load much faster. Real Change or my "13 going on 30" fan site couldn't afford a tube fee at all so we wouldn't get any comments.

I don't know if you can make a good real-world analogy to this because the Internet is kind of unique. Imagine if newspapers had to use special vacuum tubes to deliver their new issues to vending boxes and newsstands. Newspaper companies can already pay for glossy color pages and placement at vendors, but eliminating newspaper neutrality would make it so the vacuum tube companies could control newspaper distribution. The Wall Street Journal could afford the fastest vacuum tubes and get their newspapers with breaking news to newsstands immediately and in perfect condition. The Stranger could afford so-so tubes covered with graffiti and get their newspapers to vending boxes a little late and a little tattered. If I published a 9/11 conspiracy pamphlet, I couldn't afford tubes at all so I'd have to rely on the wind to hopefully blow my issues in the direction of the newsstands.

This is a freedom of press issue. Instead of the newspaper/pamphlet model, the Internet would follow the Cable TV model where a few megacorps control what channels you receive and how you receive them (HDTV? premium package?).

And what does the DOJ know about how the free market works? Their job is to enforce the law, not spout economic theory. Goddamn fuckers.