The Save the Internet Coalition held a fun panel on the Net
Neutrality campaign, including informative and entertaining comments by Tim Wu of Columbia University, Adam
Green of Moveon.org, Frannie Welling of Free Press, Matt Stoller of
MyDD.com, Scott Goodstein of Catalyst Campaigns and Azlan White,
campaign activist.
Here’s some quick notes from Tim Wu’s and Matt Stoler’s comments…
Tim Wu, Columbia University
The Internet is a network where you don’t need anyone’s permission to speak. It’s the other side of the first amendment. You have the right to speak. And now you have the ability to speak.
Cable is a permission-based network. You have to ask someone to get on it. This is in contrast to the permissionless nature of the network of the Internet.
The internet is an innovative network. You can plug in anything in and it works. It’s like the electric network. It’s non discriminatory. That principle has allowed so many companies to get started, i.e. Google, ebay. Neutrality means that there has to be a fair fight between a blog and CNN, Moveon.org and corporations.
We need to defend the internet from gatekeepers who have the power, means, and will to transform the way the network is.
Background on the Issue: Michael Powell saw that this is an outrageous process that the telecoms were engaging in. The FCC fined a local telephone company that blocked access to a VOIP competitor Vonage. Powell saw that this was an interference with the consumers right to access applications, services and content of their choice.
2006 was the year that net neutrality became a mainstream issue. AT&T was going to set up a system so that providers that paid would get better service than those that didn’t. AT&T had a plan to reconfigure itself into the Ma Bell, the empire of american telecom, to take control of the net, and charge companies for better service to the net. It was thwarted by a grassroots network.
Year ended with AT&T trying to merge with Bell South. Because of grassroots pressure, they had to agree to network neutrality for two years. That’s two years for Congress to pass legislation to protect Net Neutrality.
AT&T is waiting for the winds to die down. We can’t let that wind die down. We need to protect our free speech.
Matt Stoller, MyDD.com
The head of AT&T Ed Whitaker for fun clears brush and buldozes trees. I don’t want him in charge of anything.
The Net Neutrality fight is the first pro-regulatory fight that was won in the last 30 years. We had a debate on whether the government should regulate the internet. We convinced the public that the government should regulate something. We won.
We represent the mainstream public opinion. They are the weird elitists.
Through my blog I debated some people, including the former press secretary of Clinton. We got into an argument because I called him a liar. He got frustrated and went on Huffington Post and complained about foul-mouthed bloggers and people weren’t interested in substance.
Here’s some advice: Don’t go on internet and pretend like you know something about network architecture when you don’t because lots of engineers and software developers hang out there. Kind of a rule of thumb.
I’m good at baiting people. I’m a professional little brother.
Do you trust the guy in the Tron outfit who’s a network architect engineeer by day or do you trust the PR flack? I trust the Tron guy.
Re: >2006 was the year that net neutrality became a mainstream issue. AT&T was going to set up a system so that providers that paid would get better service than those that didn’t. AT&T had a plan to reconfigure itself into the Ma Bell, the empire of american telecom, to take control of the net, and charge companies for better service to the net. It was thwarted by a grassroots network.
Rik, I’m not getting this. I can understand if these big telephone companies were charging for ANY access to the Internet or content from it, but to charge for BETTER access doesn’t at all seem wrong to me. Why would it? If basic access is always there, then those who can pay more *should* get better service. Why not? Why is the
I don’t ascribe to the Soviet idea of uravnilovka, making everthing equal by taking away from some, giving to others, but basically suppressing any innovation or any effort to get ahead by making it equally bad for everyone.
I don’t understand why a company that is merely offering some add-ons would be guilty of suppressing freedom of speech which the customers in fact have, if they still have the basic access to the Internet freely. what am I missing here?
Who should pay for the Internet? It’s expensive when you get to parts of it like virtual words where the broadband, graphics card on the user side and the servers, energy, manpower, etc. on the company side all cost a lot.
It seems to me different countries would want to do this differently. Some might want governments to pay. Some might want a mix of user fees and government subsidy. Others might want the companies to charge fees.
I don’t see anything inherently wrong in a company charging not for access itself, but merely better access and I don’t see that the drive to stop them from doing that solves the problem of how better access *does* cost.
Hi Prok,
The issue is not whether ISPs can charge more for better access. They already do this, i.e. I pay almost twice what other customers pay for broadband access in my apartment because we do so much uploading and downloading of videos. And of course Google and YouTube and typepad have to pay millions of dollars for their own servers access to the net. So content providers and consumers are already paying for different levels of access to the net.
The question is, should we have to pay again for the “privilege” of accessing the customers of AT&T or Time Warner Cable, even after we have paid for access to the net?
It becomes a freedom of speech issue when ISPs start making plans to throttle traffic to sites, applications and content that they don’t want the consumer to access, and without informing the consumer that they are doing this. Do we really want our ISPs deciding whether or not we get faster access to the Fox News website or the CNN website or an indy media website based on which one of them pays for faster service? Do we want them throttling Skype because they want to offer their own proprietary VOIP phone service? For me, and millions of others, the answer is no.
The internet was built based on a packet-based bit transmission system that didn’t discriminate against different kinds of traffic — the “end-to-end” principle. By creating systems the start to discriminate and privilege certain kinds of content and applications over others, you break a fundamental principal of what makes the internet such a powerful communications protocol.