Posted on 06/05/2006 3:51:43 PM PDT by yoe
Tell Congress to OPPOSE 'Net Neutraility"
ALERT: A coalition of mostly left-wing organizations, led by the wanna-be socialists at MoveOn.org, is helping to push legislation through the U.S. House that they're calling "Net Neutrality" -- but the effect that it would have would be to impose government regulations on the Internet!
They MUST be stopped -- before it's too late.
The new bill they're pushing, the "Internet Freedom and Nondiscrimination Act" (H.R. 5417), has been strongly opposed by advocates of free markets and a free Internet -- but it's been passed out of the powerful House Judiciary Committee, and is due to be voted on quickly.
Thankfully, there are some Congressmen willing to stand up to MoveOn and their cronies. Rep. Lamar Smith (R-TX) noted a number of his concerns as the committee was debating the bill, stating, "It is a well-intentioned bill that would certainly prohibit some anticompetitive conduct. The problem is that it would also prohibit a lot of conduct that is procompetitive."
Suppose, for example, that an innovative company wants to provide a new video service that requires greater bandwidth than most existing products. Suppose that a broadband provider has the capacity to provide that extra bandwidth to one company, but not to six companies. Under this bill's prohibition on any discrimination in the broadband provider's terms or conditions of service, it would not be able to offer the extra bandwidth to the one innovative company because it would then be required to provide it to all.
As Rep. Smith notes, "This is a regulator's dream, but an entrepreneur's nightmare."
Preemptively legislating new regulatory burdens can also have many unintended consequences. Stated Rep. Smith, "I am particularly concerned about the effects on intellectual property protection."
For example, the bill says that a broadband provider cannot block access to lawful content. How does that apply when users subscribe to a peer-to-peer file sharing network that is primarily used for infringing purposes, but may also include some lawful content?
It's also unclear how broadband providers would comply with some of the provisions. For example, the bill provides that a broadband provider must clearly and conspicuously disclose to users, in plain language, accurate information concerning the terms and conditions of its service. That is so broad and vague that you can't be sure how anyone could know what it meant as a practical matter. But if the broadband providers violate that requirement, they are subject to all the remedies of the antitrust laws, including treble damages.
As Jason Wright of the Institute for Liberty noted, "The leftist Moveon.org coalition claims that so-called 'Net Neutrality' rules are the 'First Amendment' for the internet. In fact, the exact opposite is true. The unprecedented regulation Moveon lobbies for limits innovation by restricting certain businesses from the option of seeking more reliable connections to support advanced services like VoIP or IPTV."
We need to STOP MoveOn.org and their liberal allies -- before they start a snowball effect of government regulations over the internet.
TAKE ACTION: The point is that it is very difficult to write rules for how the Internet should grow. So far, it's done a pretty good job of growing on its own. And it's the uncertain and unpredictable effect of the bill is what makes it worrisome.
Even a coalition of first responders has expressed their concern that the bill could potentially affect the development of new technologies to address interoperability.
Instead of writing proscriptive rules to solve speculative problems, it would be better to focus our efforts on preserving the application of current antitrust laws to safeguard against anticompetitive practices on the Internet.So-called "net neutrality" is anything BUT neutral. There's nothing neutral about the government: dictating one, and ONLY one, way to design networks; creating an innovation double standard where innovation at the edge of the network is encouraged but discouraged inside the network; or rigging the game by picking winners before the game is played. And THAT is what MoveOn.org and their friends are pushing.
The fact is, "net neutrality" is the epitome of a solution in search of a problem. Click "Go!" NOW to send a free message directly to your Congressman, telling him to OPPOSE the "Internet Freedom and Nondiscrimination Act" (H.R. 5417), and keep the federal government AWAY from the world's freest, fairest market... the internet.
NOTE: There are a lot of potential unintended consequences from "net neutrality" legislation that the far left doesn't want you to know about: it could hinder public safety and homeland security; complicate protecting Americans privacy; erode the quality and responsiveness of the Internet; limit consumers' competitive choices; and discourage investment in broadband deployment to all Americans. Let's "nip this in the bud" NOW. For more info:
http://www.handsoff.org/
http://www.netcompetition.org/
http://www.humaneventsonline.com/article.php?id=14435
BTTT
Here is what Tim Berners-Lee says about it --
Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the Web, has called for clear separation between Internet access and Internet content.
Speaking at the World Wide Web conference in Edinburgh on Tuesday morning, Berners-Lee gave his views on the growing battle over Net neutrality.
"It's better and more efficient for us all if we have a separate market where we get our connectivity, and a separate market where we get our content. Information is what I use to make all my decisions. Not just what to buy, but how to vote," Berners-Lee told journalists.
"There is an effort by some companies in the U.S. to change this. There's an attempt to get to a situation where if I want to watch a TV station across the Internet, that TV station must have paid to transmit to me."
Net neutrality is the concept that all Internet content should be treated equally by broadband providers without any kind of discrimination. It has become a hot political topic this year, especially in the U.S., amid fears that telephone companies may start blocking some Web sites or charge users extra to access them.
Companies such as Google, Microsoft and Yahoo have been lobbying U.S. politicians to introduce laws that would make Net neutrality mandatory. These moves have been opposed by broadband providers and some hardware manufacturers.
[This was from a 5/23/2006 article ...]
My fear is government involvement period.
Without net neutrality, the internet turns into corporate radio and cable tv, with good service for CNN and lousy web hosting for the rest of us. And FR ponies up a ton of money or drops off of the map and gets really, really slow.
I suppose you're saying that you do want to pay for extra services and have the Internet segmented?You know that the one does not follow from the other. And I want you also to understand that no one here thinks that you are a complete moron. Not in the least. We just want you to understand that net neutrality is the worst idea ever, and that people that favour it are deeply misguided at best, and slobbering, gibbering, knuckle-dragging idiots at worst.
This "no government regulation" is hooey. What the telcos want is to be avble to double charge-- you for your connection and the person providing the web page for providing it to you. How long before we have exclusive deals--"We have signed an exclusive arrangement with the New York Times as a news provider so you will get only the best news on the internet..."
"We have signed an exclusive arrangement with the New York Times as a news provider so you will get only the best news on the internet..."Dude. That's when you find another provider. That's how the system works. It's called a free market. Look into it. You may discover that you like it.
Without net neutrality, the internet turns into corporate radio and cable tv, with good service for CNN and lousy web hosting for the rest of us. And FR ponies up a ton of money or drops off of the map and gets really, really slow.What a rich fantasy life you enjoy. Too paranoid for my tastes, but whatever.
Net neutrality is essential for the right, which has been able to use the Internet on an even field with big media.Precisely the opposite is the case. Net neutrality is the internet version of the so-called fairness doctrine used for many years to silence the right. The principle of "neutrality" can be used as prior restraint to free speech. Read the argument and weep bitter tears: http://www.opinionjournal.com/editorial/feature.html?id=110008391
And that's when you discover that it doesn't help. This has more to do with the content provider than your provider. If they're effectively speed-limited in what they can give you compared to some big company that can afford to spend whatever is necessary, who do you think will dominate the Internet?Who does the speed limiting if not the providers?--so you find another provider. And who dominates the internet now?--a very few players (google etc.), as the web specifies as a so-called scale-free network. But whether providers of richer content or more bandwidth hungry sites should pay more is not the point: the point is that government regulation is not the answer. The market place will sort this out.
For those of you who say "get another provider," I'd say that would be great except there are none in some areas. The government has seen fit to give one cable company a monopoly in my area, and therefore there are no other providers. Profoundly stupid, but reality.
However, having done that, the least the government can now do is prevent that monopoly from screwing me over.
The internet has been profoundly useful in expanding freedom and exposing statist bull---t for what it is. Don't mess with that by letting monopolists determine what sites they'll let load and which sites they won't.
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