“The U.S. House of Representatives definitively rejected the concept of Net neutrality on Thursday, dealing a bitter blow to Internet companies like Amazon.com, eBay and Google that had engaged in a last-minute lobbying campaign to support it. By a 269-152 vote that fell largely along party lines, the House Republican leadership mustered enough votes to reject a Democrat-backed amendment that would have enshrined stiff Net neutrality regulations into federal law and prevented broadband providers from treating some Internet sites differently from others,” Declan McCullagh reports for CNET News. “Of the 421 House members who participated in the vote that took place around 6:30 p.m. PT, the vast majority of Net neutrality supporters were Democrats. Republicans represented most of the opposition.”
“At issue is a lengthy measure called the Communications Opportunity, Promotion, and Enhancement (COPE) Act, which a House committee approved in April. Its Republican backers, along with broadband providers such as Verizon and AT&T, say it has sufficient Net neutrality protections for consumers, and more extensive rules would discourage investment in wiring American homes with higher-speed connections,” McCullagh reports. “Defenders of the COPE Act, largely Republicans, dismissed worries about Net neutrality as fear mongering. ‘I want a vibrant Internet just like they do,’ said Rep. Lamar Smith, a Texas Republican. ‘Our disagreement is about how to achieve that. They say let the government dictate it…I urge my colleagues to reject government regulation of the Internet.'”
“While the debate over Net neutrality started over whether broadband providers could block certain Web sites, it has moved on to whether they should be permitted to create a ‘fast lane’ that could be reserved for video or other specialized content,” McCullagh reports.
Full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: We don’t presume to know the best way to get there, but we support the concept of “Net Neutrality” especially as it pertains to preventing the idea of ISP’s blocking or otherwise impeding sites that don’t pay the ISP to ensure equal access. That said, we usually prefer the government to be hands-off wherever possible, Laissez-faire, except in cases where the free market obviously cannot adequately self-regulate (antitrust, for just one example). Regulations are static and the marketplace is fluid, so extensive regulations can have unintended, unforeseen results down the road. We sincerely hope that there are enough forces in place and/or that the balances adjust in such a manner as to keep the ‘Net neutral. What do you think?
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Related articles:
Google posts call to action on ‘net neutrality’ – June 09, 2006
For those of you that weren’t alive before the internet, please remember that this is a vast structure that government, education and industry all worked on. The government has a vested interest in keeping the infrastructure open. Latecomers like Comcast, AT&T, Verison, Microsoft, etc. should not be able to come in and throw their weight around to restrict bandwidth.
To Gengel, who said “leggo my internet” and that it’s not the government’s place to get involved: The government was involved well before you, my friend. It is their place.
I understand MDN’s stance on extra government interference. However, that has to be tempered. The government is also there to serve the people – not big business, and not corporate interests. It seems that the majority vote on this, as well as many other issues these days, is done with a big corporate interest standing their, hand-in-hand with the lawmakers. Big Business doesn’t need protected, and that’s not really the purpose of our government.
I’m sure that there are others here that have been using the internet for a long time – well before many people had ever even heard of it. We surfed with Lynx before IE, Netscape, Firefox and Safari, even before Mosaic. We’ve seen a great many attempts to limit the internet, to tax it, and to make money at it. If we don’t do something about these new possible limits by companies, we will feel it for a long, long time.
I never said I was in favor of this bill did I? I just simply said government regulation is bad enough as it is without making it even more excessive. I agree with MDN’s take, the less government involvement in this the better. That’s all.
As any knee-jerk Lib will tell you, it’s very easy to run around screaming “there oughta be a law!” It’s another thing entirely to craft and get a good law passed. Very rare. It only really works for 10 Commandment-type stuff in reality. Even then, it’s flawed, because people aren’t perfect.
Michael,
Bravo! Standing O.
I agree with you 100%.
“As any knee-jerk Lib will tell you….”
keep your short-bus drivel to yourself
Net neutrality isn’t about regulation, it’s about preventing consumer abuse by the very few companies that can provide “last mile” service to one’s home and/or business. The huge barriers to entry that limit competition legitimize government’s right to regulate in a limited fashion.
In one sense, huge companies like Google, Amazon, and eBay should be against net neutrality, because they can all afford to pay AND because that fact would limit competition. The fact that they are lining up in favor of net neutrality despite those facts should be an indicator of how troublesome continued non-regulation will be in the future.
1. What is wrong with net access as it is?
2. Exactly what changes will this legilation allow to the net?
3. Is this a step toward filtered internet access as it exists in China???
4. Total government control is ((IMHO) just as bad as a totally unrestrained free market (M$ is example #1 of tyranical, predatory business gone unregulated) Does this change open us up to “market controls” that will deny me choices?
5. Could reverting to a dial up access bypass some corportaion’s attempts to limit/affect my internet access?
Government in fact, gets a lot of things right and a lot of things wrong. Corporations get a lot of things right and a lot of things wrong.
This knee jerk government is universally bad way of thinking is more dogma than anything based on fact. My government does a fine job of getting roads built, providing health care (better health care than the US private system), running schools (separate boards), collecting garbage, maintaining infrastructure, etc, etc.
I’ve been in business long enough and seen other businesses in action to know that their level of competence or incompetence varies great from great to terrible.
Business isn’t in business to be fair and unless there’s laws to manage the inherent greed in all of us you end up with a doggy-eat-dog kind of society.
If Americans actually took time to look around, they’d see that there are many societies which feature heavy government involvement that are ironically much healthier on the whole than the US in terms of emotional, physical and economic well-being. There are some countries with heavy government involvement that are a complete mess just as there are some countries that are free for all Laissez-faire and are a mess as well.
Net Neutrality is just another example of the divisions in American society which leaves some living in Third World conditions and others living in mansions and middle getting relentlessly squeezed to the margins.
This is like cell phone providers selling you a phone then blocking some of the phones features so they can sell you workarounds to allow you to have equivalent features to the ones they just blocked.
This is a money grab by Internet providers, pure and simple.
I don’t understand these people against net neutrality saying “I don’t want the government to decide how much bandwidth I can have!” I don’t know how anyone gets the idea that that has anything to do with the question.
I pay for a certain amount of bandwidth into my home via broadband connection. What I want, and what net neutrality guarantees, is that I can use that bandwidth equally well to get data whatever site I want. Removing this protection means that my broadband provider now has the right to tell me, “We will sell you this much bandwidth, but only to get data from sites we approve”. Other sites (i.e., those that haven’t ponied up the extortion money to the telco) can be degraded or blocked entirely. How on earth is that a good thing?
And come off this nonsense about “Well if you don’t like it get a different broadband provider! Marketplace will reward those who give you want!” Where I live now I have, at most, a choice of 2 providers (both of whom are pushing the elimination of net neutrality). Where I used to live I was too far from a phone repeater, so I couldn’t get DSL and therefore had an option of only ONE provider. This latter situation is very common, especially in less urban areas of the country. So, if my sole area broadband source has decided that they ain’t gonna let me get data from my favorite video site at faster than a trickle because they have a contract with a competing site, what exactly am I supposed to do??
Magic word: “get”, as in “Do you get it, now????”
Oh great, after screwing up healthcare, power supplies and telephone systems with privatization scams now they want to get their greedy grubby paws on the internet, one of the last few places where there is a degree of freedom (a word Americans increasingly don’t understand). Net Neutrality is only a bad idea because there should be no need for it at all–Big business hates that which they cannot control.
I liked this post of mine so much, why not copy and paste it over here…
Wake up peeps, its You vs. the State, not Liberal vs. Conservative, and especially not DemoRats vs RepubliCons, they are fake divisions designed to play off of each other…. i.e., Nixon opened the doors to Communist China, and Clinton got NAFTA passed. Think about it. Oh yea, someone did make an interesting prediction concerning the North American economy(in a different thread)… I’m guessing the new currency will be called the “Aero”, replacing the dollar they are now destroying on purpose. Just ask Gates or Buffet who, over the past year, have cashed in their dollars for Euros, they know what’s coming.
Sometimes we need the government to help counter balance the weight of Huge/Big Business. Sadly the government is mostly filled with people who couldn’t get a real job, and who will gladly represent the highest bidder, who is very rarely an average constituent. Hell, with malleable voting machines, who cares what the average voter wants? Show me the money.
P.S Michael . . . .
As any knee-jerk Lib will tell you, it’s very easy to run around screaming “there oughta be a law!” It’s another thing entirely to craft and get a good law passed. Very rare. It only really works for 10 Commandment-type stuff in reality. Even then, it’s flawed, because people aren’t perfect.
Isn’t his whole discussion about some big corporate interests saying exactly “there ought to be a law” . . . .and getting it?
OK, for you “business knows everything best” types, here is how the “not neutral” internet will work:
COMCAST, TimeWarner, SPRINT, LEVEL3 or whoever will start a music/movie download store or a search engine, etc of their own brand or partnership. If you choose to use that service you will get priority access to those sites running on their pipes. High speed and great service. If you choose iTunes or Google or some competitors brand, you will get the slow as shit pipe full of contention and traffic and spam.
You will no longer get to choose the service you want without paying extra. No level playing field – it is all tailored thru the eyes of the infrastructure providers *not* thru the customer choice of the best providers of a particular service.
This is akin to having private ownership of interstate highways and letting only freight shipped on trucks owned by the highway owner on those highways. Everyone else gets to go the backroads.
infrastructure owners should never be allowed to be content providers – but the FCC has been kissing that behind for a long time
This is all about money. The infrastructure companies are about to double dip on internet service. First, the consumer pays them for service. Then the content providers have to pay them to carry their content, in addition to the charges they’re already paying at least one infrastructure company for their connection.
Why would the consumer pay the infrastructure companies in the first place if there were no available content?
The result will not be a two-tiered internet. It will be a fragmented internet, with infrastructure companies blocking, filtering and restricting content. How this is different from what China does escapes me. Actually, I take that back–China is completely open about the fact that they filter content. It doesn’t appear to be happening openly in the US…
Consumers should hope that these pending restrictions spur innovation. The only hope for a free and open internet in the US is a new delivery model that bypasses the currently entrenched infrastructure providers. Content providers should jump at the chance to provide services on a free “seperate but equal” network, even without the ability to reach the people on the current “captive” network.
Irony of ironies. MDN magic word is “dark”. As in the darknet is coming, and it will be a haven for the rest of us.
We have this problem because of the monopolies once granted to the regional telephone companies. Sins of the fathers, ya know? If you ask me, the best answer is to do nothing. We sure can’t depend on the Senate to fix this problem, and I’m personally disappointed in Pickering (MS).
These days the Republicans are hardly “hands off.” They’re “hands off of rich corporations” but they’d love to legislate your private life, right down to who you should love!
Typical GOP bullsh*t. Get people all worked up over non-issues like flag burning, civil unions while they pass crap like this to pay back their corporate and trade association contributors.
The last 6 years has seen an energy bill largely written by utility & oil companies, a prescription drug bill written largely by big Pharma, a bankruptcy reform bill authored of, by and for bankers and Wall Street. Why should you be surprised that the telecommunications industry wants to largely author the bill that is going to determine how you use the telephone, access the internet, get TV, etc.?
Forget left vs right & Democrat vs Republican, it’s way beyond all of that. The K-Street Boys (paid lobbyists) have been having a field day with this Congress and Bush is more than happy to go along. If you don’t have money to put in the till you will not be getting much love up on the hill. It’s that simple– monied interests have drowned out the voice of the voter.
You only have one recourse– election day. On election day you had better demand a paper ballot or a receipt, because the Diebold machines you will be using are running Windows and can very easily be hacked with no paper trail. After Florida 2000, tons of money was spent to replace a variety of voting methods with computer based machines (read Windows). Methods to quickly hack these machines without a trail of evidence has been widely distributed on the internet.
If your election officials will not offer you a paper ballot you can request to make an affidavit on the spot at your polling place. This is a legal document that puts on hard copy paper who you voted for. You are entitled to write one of these under the law. The deal should be this: no receipt on the machine means you request a paper ballot. If no paper ballot is available you request to make an affidavit on the spot. If they give you grief call your state government to report the incident.
Here is a link to a list of links of every state’s election laws.
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2004/11/1/162120/619
Know your rights, protect your vote and make your voice heard.
Regulation IS the way to go- Whether folks realize it or not, what we want is an unregulated portal to the internet. Does anyone follow that? It’s about regulation to make sure that the portal we use is not colorred by the service provider. Since service providers have monopolies in many areas, there will be little choice without someone seting rules in the end users best interest.
If I want to use iChatAV, I don’t want Timewarner degrading my signal to push me to some timewarner ShitVision service, what is what this is all about. It’s about a small business being able to have a website and not be extorted to have people access it.
slaves don’t need free and open access to the internet.
Whenever you allow a body to put some type of filtering on anyone’s means of communication, then you are allowing censoring.
A southern cable company, after pressure from their customers, slows the connection rate of all incoming sites focused on abortion or any other non-Christian views. A college professor using that southern ISP wants to create a website for helping the emotional needs of local gays, but is blocked completely.
Now, the large service companies can bring all Democratic, foreign, competitive or any other topic they don’t care for to a complete halt. It is analogous to AT&T monitoring your conversation and disconnecting the line if they don’t like what you are talking about.
A couple of decades ago when the internet was for military email and a novelty for geeks, then there would probably be no problem with such restrictions. But as it became more popular, the internet grew with the understanding that it would be a place for open exchange of information. It is now the most popular form of communication worldwide. With this law, the internet remains free but the vast majority of the “on ramps” will be privately controlled and regulated without government interference. The US government has NO RIGHT to effect world communication.
I agree that at times large government can be too intrusive, such as telling me that my love and devotion to my same-sex lover is not equal to someone else’s.
The government allowing private companies to regulate content IS government interference. If they would have said nothing, the internet would still be free and unregulated. The Republicans with their large corporate buddies CONTROL the internet. However direct or indirect, it is STILL CONTROL!!!
Why don’t we go burn some books at the public library?!
Let’s kick those black families out of the neighborhood.!
Refuse business licenses to gays.
If you do not want a country that cherishes LIBERTY, being able to be free from the oppression of the people in control, then go find another country.
LIBERAL is NOT a bad idea – IT’S THE AMERICAN WAY.
It’s the reason we separated from England.
It’s the reason we fought Hitler.
It’s the reason we fought Saddam Hussein.
DAMN REPUBLICANS! If you are not ready to defend the rights and freedoms of EVERY CITIZEN, the weak and the poor, the ones that disagree with your way of life, to be free from the oppressive companies and politicians, then you are NO AMERICAN! Don’t spread your Nazi ideas hiding behind MY FLAG!!
Hitler raped his country at gunpoint. Republicans do it with their AMEX cards and corporate jets. Rape is rape – forced control over another – regardless what type of threat or means are used.
It’s time the US citizens took their government back from corporations and their bigoted Republican minions!!! If we don’t do something NOW, we get what we deserve.
“Laissez-faire, except in cases where the free market obviously cannot adequately self-regulate”
Huh? So the governmrnt of the people, for the people and by the people is subverted to private ownershit.
“The free market obviously cannot adequately self-regulate” is how the statement should read—unless of-course you believe in the troglodytic notion “the free market is democracy” in which case voting is merely governemnt interferece in the flow of goods and people are merely chattel.
Darkness, I believe you are right on the money. When there doesn’t seem to be a clear-cut solution to a problem, look to the money. The infrastructure companies are wanting to double-dip because they are green with envy of the valuation of the Googles, Amazons, Yahoo, et al. They are like, “Why should these content providers be making more money than us?” Look at the public statements CEOs make about the situation. You’ll see that pattern of greed and envy in what they say.
What gets me is that they are acting like Google is connected to the net for free. Heck, my company’s bill to provide hosting to my clients is well into the thousands. That’s for several web and dns servers to be connected to a nice pipe provided by Sprint. My colleague’s hosting company is much, much larger than mine and his bill is a whole magnitude larger just to have internet access to be able to provide hosting. So just imagine how much Google pays these guys to keep their server farms connected. It’s insane. And now these same companies want to come back and say pay more. I don’t think so. Why can’t the infrastructures use the money the large content providers and consumers pay to invest in improving and maintaining the infrastructure.
It’s extortion, plain and simple. These infrastructure companies have some influential lobbyists. The public will just have to take whatever it’s served.
Last point, how much do you think it costs Sprint, Comcast, Time Warner and friends to provide you service (marketing and taxes included)? According to the last report I read, it was in the neighborhood of 79 to 99 cents per Mbps per customer. So if you have a 5 Mbps connection from your cable provider, it costs them about $4.00 to serve you but you get charged $45 per month.
Now digest that.
Read the bill.
This should not be about Republican vs. Democrat.
Although I am a Republican, I actually DID want this bill to pass.
I cannot imagine that we want the government stepping in to enforce a tax on sites such as Google even more than they already are simply because they are popular.
The bill would have prevented Comcast from having the right to block access to iTunes (and every other popular, or unpopular site) because Apple did not pay an extra tax to Comcast to grant access.
IF we had unlimited free choice in choosing a Broadband provider, then the forces of the freemarket would ensure that we get what we want and there would be no need for this bill. However, at least in my area, we only get to choose from a limited menu when it comes to broadband providers which skews the market in favor of the provider, not the consumer.
I want the freedom to both go wherever I want to go on the net without killing my choices through taxation.
Dems and Liberals don’t often seem to realize that Senators and Congresspeople are generally below-average intellects, not Gods.
The less government does, the better. Trust me. I’ve seen much over many years. The people in Gov’t are not the best the country has to offer – those people are making cash and taking vacations and playing golf in the sunshine, not begging Joe Six Pack for his vote every time election day rolls around.
Our goal as voters should always be gridlock in Gov’t. It’s the best situation for which we can ever hope.