You mean Slog will be slower than it already is? Crap.
Oh, and the water company doesn't make your water "hotter". Your water heater does. Stupid analogy.
How is Mr. Feit supposed to know that if he can't afford a water heater?
How will this affect porn? That's what concerned citizens everywhere need to know.
Just like the market took care of things with electrical power in california.
Okay. Took out the "hotter" comparison.
Get it now?
No. Put it back.
Do the danse death macabre, Poe.
@6 LOL. Stickin it to the... child
Totentanz, ja?! Only with you, Mr. Feit. Only with you.
Glad somebody in the mainstream er...*alternative* took up this issue at last. It's been hanging over techno-savvy people a long time now, with some talk of ranking presidential candidates on their stand on net neutrality.
Kudos to you josh for making it simple to understand, though that's not quite the whole thing..
Totentanz!!? Poe, the sun must be in retro-grade again.
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
I have not seen his grave. I should, though. So I can piss on it. I've had to deal with "ARE YOU RELATED TO EDGAR A POE LOL" "POE LIKE EDGAR LOL" "LOL ANYBODY EVER ASK YOU IF YOU ARE RELATED TO EDGAR LOL" all of my life. Roar.
Just to give an idea of the influence the federal government has over the Internet... If it hadn't been for some real leadership in the federal government, we wouldn't have the Internet we have today.
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!
@3, straight porn will be as fast, gay porn though will be very slow if not banned completely. (Has anyone been on Manhunt.net the last couple of days??)
This is a tricky issue. I don't really want to see AT&T, say, favoring websites of their partners over everyone else's.
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.
It's not a big truck!!
@14, what about all the "strays" in federal government? The ones who rely on gay porn to get them through the days of their miserable repressed hetero lives? I'd say gay porn will probably do just fine.
Wait. The DOJ says the market will take care of it. Net neutrality isn't a problem. The DOJ says this? Is this the same DOJ that was until recently headed by Alberto Gonzoles? The Alberto Gonzoles who fired long term US attorneys so he could pack the DOJ with Bush/Rove cronies? The same Alberto Gonzoles who thinks it's okay to wiretap US citizens without warrant or oversight? The same Alberto Gonzoles who gave a big Fuck You to the Geneva conventions and thinks torture is good policy? The same Alberto Gonzoles who says we have no right of habeas corpus?
Pardon me if I'm skeptical of the DOJ's objectivity in protecting net neutrality.
People at home already control their internet connection speed by buying faster or more expensive internet connections. Net Neutrality affects the tubes in between the end user and the publisher.
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?).
@18,
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.
The Department of Justice, eh? Now, what's the name of the guy in charge of the DOJ? It'll come to me... I'm sure that he must be a brilliant legal mind. Now what is his name???
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