A lot of you probably just got the same e-mail I got from the CEO of Ebay, Meg Whitman. She’s encouraging us to write to our congressional representatives to keep them from…well, I’m not sure. Something about keeping the internet companies from creating a two-tiered system. To be honest, I don’t understand what she’s talking about, so I turn to you: what is the problem here, what’s the straight dope, and should I or should I not support this protest? Here’s the link included in the e-mail for more information. Thanks all.
As I understand it, right now, all the information on the internet is treated equally. If I send an email to you, it is transmitted in exactly the same manner that an email from bill_gates@microsoft.com would be sent, or data from government websites or anything else.
Now, again as I understand it, some companies who control some aspects of the transmission process (the wires or intermediate bits of machinery), want to create a two-tiered or multi-level system. If Amazon pays money, their information goes fast. If you or I don’t, our information moves to the back of the line.
I’m sure I’m missing nuances, but I think this is the general idea, and should suffice until someone who knows what they’re talking about comes along.
You’ve pretty much hit it, Garfield226. The only thing that I would add is that if the service providers speed certain types of data up, all other data slows down. That’s why companies like EBay and Google are against repealing Net Neutrality. They don’t want their service slowed in favour of someone else’s traffic. More to the point, they don’t want to pay more for the same level of service they get now.
Plus when you give a corporation the ability to decide which info gets through ,you can be sure it wont be critical of them. It opens the door to censorship. Read I.Cringley in the PBS site. He has written on it for a long time. He claims it is more about recouping what voip and other internet poviders can do to their phone profits.
This website is a great resource for all “goings-on” with the internet and digital rights.
Also:
Garfield226 has it in broad strokes, except nobody cares about email. Email is cheap to deliver. If the Internet were like it was back in, say, 1992, when the biggest files anyone moved around were images or (small) sound files, this whole discussion wouldn’t even be happening.
But it isn’t, so it is.
There are two huge (pun intended) things going on these days: Internet telephone (called VoIP, for “Voice over Internet Protocol”) and downloading movies (both legal and not). They both cut into very cozy business setups developed over nearly a century and they both stuff gigantic amounts of data down the pipes.
So there are two very powerful interests at work trying to split the Internet into a high-speed network and a low-speed network: The people who are threatened by the services the Internet provides cheaper than they do, and the people who have to face serving fewer people with the same amount of piping because the average person is now using much more bandwidth.
There are also powerful interests at work on the other side: The businesses who make money by sending data down the pipes but don’t own any pipes of their own. They don’t want to have to pay twice (or three times, or twenty times) just to get data to customers at a speed that doesn’t suck harder than a remora trying to hang on to a cruise missile.
This is, IMHO, one of the most interesting and important tech battles going on right now.
Where does Sen. Ted “Tubes” Stevens stand on all this hullabaloo?