You might notice I altered the blog a little and there's now a pertty little picture on the right. It's about Net Neutrality. Essentially, Net Neutrality is saying that Internet Service Providers must treat all the internet the same. They can't favor Google over Microsoft, my blog over PvP. There is currently legistlation that will provide legal backing to shut down net neutrality, allowing ISPs to charge a premium to websites if they want full service. If sites don't pay this fee, ISPs can slow down bandwith, even possibly shutting it down. Now, there's always the 'vote with you dollars' method. I.e. you can drop all the ISPs that offer 'premium' service to websites. But for some areas (for instance my parents') don't necessarily have that choice. And there's only some many choices out there anyway. For more information, here's a pretty good article about it: http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/opinion/oped/bal-op.internet09may09,0,4559120.story
Now, what I did and what I'm encouraging others to do is 1) Call your congressmen 2) Click on the picture and send the petition to them. If the picture won't link you can go to http://www.savetheinternet.com
What you say is essentially true, ISP would like to charge more to people/groups/companies that use more bandwidth than others. What's wrong with that? Why shouldn't they be able to charge more to Google for consuming 100 times the amount of bandwidth as Ask.com? The ISPs should be able to price differentiate if they want to. It's like paying FedEx extra to guarantee the delivery of your package in 2 days; otherwise they guarantee 3-7 days, even if it might only take 2 days, you pay for the guarantee. Websites do this now: ever been to a download heavy site that offers you a "premium" membership to guarantee fast download speeds and no waiting queues (gamespy networks for instance)? That's no different What's more, the last thing anyone who uses the net is for the Government to start stepping in. When the government starts to regulating things, one thing leads to another and soon you just have a huge morass of rules. Finally, the legislation as is is so vague that even high-profile proponents of net-neutrality (Google, Microsoft) could be affected. I can just see lawsuits starting first against ISPs for "discrimination" in allocation of Bandwidth, and then lawsuits against Google for discriminating in search results! "Net-neutrality" is just a warcry used by those who don't to pay for something they use, even if it costs other to provide it.
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