I think that it is mighty important that the general public prevents the so-called “Old Media” to take over the Internet, according to their so-called “need” or should I rather say “greed”. They try to slowly maneuver this in under the radar through things like Net Neutrality, in order to “weed” the evil sides/sites out of the Internet, pay per click Internet, Internet 2 for the happy few, etc. etc. They already worked towards some success in the field of making P2P almost look as bad as smoking tobacco, and declaring it illegal where the Old Media could lobby enough to bring the legislation in. In my country only uploading copyrighted material is illegal, sharing is not, but one judge had another view on this in his jurisprudence, following EEC law which is more on the corporations’ side.
France for instance is much stricter and the U.K. goes now for the three strikes out option(3 x warning by your local ISP and you loose your account if you are find to download illegal stuff).
This is a good article: http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20080725-hammer-drops-at-last-fcc-opposes-comcast-p2p-throttling.html
Well the US Net Neutrality Laws are designed to keep corporations like comcast from out of the mix, to make then just a provider and nothing more. But the laws are facing a lot of resistance by, you guessed it, ISPs and have yet to be passed by congress.
Yes I have read about that too, but the biggest threat that ISP’s pose is endangering your privacy.
With the new tap rules they can also sell all your clickstream and profile to commercial third parties, and they are willing to pay for this data, so money speaks. So every ISP, the smaller firms also, will be in this eventually - they will spy on you for gain.
That is why some say that the ISP should also be checked on their turn from a higher authority, but because big commerce is the highest authority there is these days this cannot be easily be done,
In the UK before any mention of net neutrality most ISPs have had caps, some as low as 3GB a month, 5GB and BT (British Telecom) the main broadband provider or supplier (its their telephone network) has just updated its cap to 10GB, then you have to pay a higher monthly charge.
There are some that state unlimited in their marketing blurb, but the then come up firt a fair use clause in their T&C which effectively limits the ‘unlimited’ and they are the ones who decide what is fair use.
I guess that means that the regulatory agencies aren’t going to step in
and curtail Comcast’s restrictions on their customers.
If that’s the case, how long will it take till all the major ISP’s do the same and,
how long will it be till they lower the allowed bandwidth to fall below an acceptable limit ???
(IMHO) If this is allowed to go forward unchallenged, it will eventually affect all of us in a negative way.
Looks like you are in for a small taste of what we already get in the UK, I say small as when you compare 10GB monthly download limit for British Telecom broadband users (which is higher than many ISPs) 250GB sounds very generous.
Those UK ISP that still advertise unlimited downloads also have a get out of jail card in their supposed ‘Acceptable Use Policy’ and they are the ones determining what is acceptable.
I understand that they can’t have people downloading 1TB each month. But my view is that if you are selling 5, 10, 15Mbps service you should be able to provide that amount of service. Dont sell 10Mbps service when you can only provide 1.5Mbps, period. No throttling, no bandwidth caps, just sell only what you can actually provide. That way when people actually USE their connection you dont have to throttle the connection because you have oversubscribed the network by 5,000 people.
Google is given you the tools (three at the moment) to check on what your broadband company is doing?
The tools will give you an insight in what sense the broadband company is tinkering with your connection,
what traffic they are clamping on or blocking to an extent. And why they are not concerned with a bit of added user-anger?
