I'm an nnsquad lurker, as I'm sure many, many of us are. I read the debates
and the arguments, and for the most part feel much more educated on the Network
Neutrality issues than I had ever been beforehand.
My history with the Internet goes back to 1994, when it first started gaining
acceptance en-masse by the general populace. While most of my peers went the
AOL route, my parents (I was 13 at the time) went with local, "neutral"
providers. Then I worked for an ISP right out of high-school. Instead of
college, I spent 4 years in the industry moving from general tech support, to
ATM/Frame Relay circuits, a little routing, lots of server administration, and
even web programming. In short, the Internet has been my life.
As an idealist, I believe the network should be largely unfettered, and that as
demands increase, supply will too--they already have many times over. I
remember paying $80/mo. for ADSL at 256kbps 6 years ago. Today, I pay Comcast
$40/mo. for upwards of 5mbps. That was, until I read today's article in
Portfolio. I find myself quitting a really good service, over which I never
had a problem with bittorrent, Vuze, or really any large content provider's
service (ComedyCentral's site, the Pirate Bay, et al), all because of their
underhanded, sinister tampering of a public hearing.
Before this point, having not really been adversely affected (I really don't
download anything illegal), I was willing to entertain their notion of fairness
by presenting biased programs as methods of legitimate network management. But
then they tampered with the scales... and suddenly their lies aren't just
accidentally secret, they're enemy action. I hate overtly popular movies, but
sometimes I glean good ideas from them, and this one comes from "Wild Things":
The commissioner says, "I’ve spent some time in Military Intelligence, and we
had a saying there: once is happenstance, twice is coincidence, three times is
enemy action."
1.) they forged packets without notification
2.) they lied about it
3.) they rigged a public hearing about it
That's all the evidence I need that Comcast feels distinctly threatened by a
very simple concept: that tiering the Internet, and allowing ISPs to decide
that Google pages run faster than Yahoo pages--because Google might
theoretically provide more kickbacks--is fundamentally wrong.
Information wants to be free, and ISPs have started to move beyond simply
taxing access to it, and into the desire to tax specific classes of
information. All of this, while oppressing the representation of the people.
I'm throwing my tea overboard--who's with me?
-Dave
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