Educate Me
So, I know it's not as exciting or sexy as Jamie's last post, but I was hoping for some education. There have been commentaries on NPR the last couple of days about net neutrality. I didn't exactly understand the issue and the arguments on both sides sounded good. Help me understand, because I have a feeling that some of you have serious opinions about the issue :) Here are the commentaries on each side:
Anti Net Neutrality
Pro Net Neutrality
p.s. Andrik, Eeyore was not slow. He was a depressed donkey. I should have written about him for that grad school project, but I diagnosed Oscar the Grouch from Sesame Street instead. :)
posted by Jen @ 4:30 PM
4 comments
4 Comments:
Well, I guess that was directed at me... although I haven't seen or read about the specifics of the bill (if it's even gotten that far).
I just started to type out my understanding of what the debate was over, but I realized halfway through that it didn't make much sense. So I'll read some more and get back to you. I'm sure wikipedia will be helpful.
I think generally this is a debate over whether congress should basically legislate the status quo, whereby the only variable in the reliability of your net connection is bandwidth (and infrastructure), or whether telecoms should be allowed to artificially provide you a better connection to content providers that paid them more.
Initially I'm on the pro-neutrality side here (although clearly I have a shaky grasp of the issue). While I'm not greatly in favor of legislation of the internet, I think it's worth preserving the (mostly) level playing field that's always existed; Craig Newmark is a good example of why that's good.
More to come, eventually...
Also, I was gonna say, I disagree with Scott Cleland's assertion that this would necessarily involve price regulation and lots of government monitoring; my understanding is it would just disallow certain practices and fee structures. And of *course* Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft are pro neutrality; why would they want to have to pay extra to ensure the fastest service. They already pay through the nose (can you imagine the amount of bandwidth Google alone must have?).
It's also interesting to note that this would obviously only affect the US infrastructure; I have no idea how things work in the rest of the world.
This wikipedia article looks dense (no, I didn't read it yet) but it's long. Which means there's lots of information there. And it must be true, cause it's on the internet...
If you want a good barometer of who you should agree with, look at it this way, and I'm sure you will see things very clearly:
Net Neutrality advocates:
People who want to be able to provide access to content for the least amount of money possible to the general public (ie. any person who publishes anything on the internet (outsidecontext inclusive).
Net Neutrality opposers:
Telecom companies (mostly) (ie. people who profit from providing bandwidth and infrastructure to the people in the first group).
By nature of the movement, the telecom companies only have one reason to put this much effort and money into an initiative like this: it makes them more profit. Say what you want about social blah, blah, blah, at the end of the day, higher profits (or a means to get those profits) is the way something like this could get so much attention from the telecoms. Personally, that is enough to make me distrust anything they say - they have motives that directly conflict with my preferences (to get inexpensive, reliable, adequate access to the internet).
The telecoms argue that they want the internet to be unregulated. But, the only reason that regulation would be put in place is to protect consumers against pricing actions that the telecoms are trying to implement. I never took a logic class, but isn't your position flawed if you are vigorously fighting against something that occurs specifically because you are trying to do something that you could stop? If you don't want the government to regulate the internet, don't try to remove the equal access that exists. It seems pretty simple to me. The sad thing is that this side of the argument is going a really long way simply by waving the "no regulation" flag that always garners support from people who are mistrustful of government and want them to stay out of everybody's business.
The Net Neutrality argument is based on the idea that everything on the internet is equal and that the user has the ultimate say in what is good and what is bad. Hardware and software systems don't differentiate between your delicately crafted love email and the Viagra spam. They don't care if you are downloading instructions for making apple pie or a dirty bomb. Everyone gets the same access to all information and no information has a higher ranking than any other.
Why this came up:
Telecom companies feel that some data is more worthy than other data. To them, more worthy means more valuable, and more valuable means they should be able to charge more for it. This leads directly to higher profits. Who gets to decide what is valuable? Well, it would be at the company's discretion, and that is TROUBLE.
Just like newspapers decide what they publish and how to provide it to you, the telecoms would be able to decide the value of data you want to download. So, just like the NY Times is skewed in one direction and the Wall Steet Journal in another, so too could the telecom companies skew their likes. But, if you have Comcast digital cable, and they don't like the ideas of Moveon.org, they can decide that your ability to access that site should be either 1) slower than www.family.org or 2) cost more to Moveon.org in bandwidth fees. Neither of these is acceptable to me.
There are also some arguments about infrastructure needs and the cost of providing bandwidth and junk like that. To me, the strongest arguments are these:
1. The internet was conceived to be an open network.
2. The internet is what it is today because of the existing net neutrality that treats all data the same way.
3. The loudest advocates of net neutrality that the same people that have provided what I consider to be vitally important improvements to the structure, content, useability, proliferation and access of the internet.
4. Having unequal access to data will damage the ability of the least advantaged to be able to equip themselves with increasingly important information (about whatever).
5. Information is vital in today's world. I want unimpeded access to it, damn it!
PS. considering the time I just took out of my work day, I sure hope that this gets posted and doesn't "time out". That would suck.
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