Time for you to remind Congress about the importance of net neutrality

The largest telephone and cable companies have a new vision for the Internet. Instead of a level playing field, they want to reserve express lanes for their own content and services -- or those of big corporations that can afford the steep tolls -- and leave the rest of us on a winding dirt road. As you would expect, they are spending hundreds of millions of dollars lobbying Congress and the Federal Communications Commission to gut Net Neutrality, putting the future of the Internet at risk. Independent voices and political groups are especially vulnerable. Political organizing could be slowed by the handful of dominant Internet providers that ask advocacy groups or candidates to pay to join the "fast lane." We need to make Net Neutrality the law of the land to ensure that all networks are open and free from discrimination. That’s why the Internet Freedom Preservation Act of 2009 (H.R. 3458) (introduced by Reps. Edward Markey (D-Mass.) and Anna Eshoo (D-Calif.)) is so important. Take action today to pass this bill and to make Net Neutrality the law. This is not a bill you should fear. It is a 13-page bill written in plain English and it will protect your rights. No need to trust me on the interpretation of this bill. Take ten minutes and read the entire bill yourself. It is loaded with protections for all of us who believe in the freedom to use the Internet without interference by a telephone or cable company. It's time to tell the telecoms that they shall not be the Internet gate-keepers. You can do this by signing the SavetheInternet.com petition. Tell Congress to pass Net Neutrality legislation today. Here are the FAQs regarding net neutrality. More than 1.6 million people have already called for Congress and the FCC to support Net Neutrality. It takes only a couple minutes to add your voice too. You'll be part of the team that is about to send a resounding message that Washington won’t be able to ignore.

Continue ReadingTime for you to remind Congress about the importance of net neutrality

Lack of broadband competition continues

Free Press recently published a report on the state of national broadband indicating that a central failure of our communications policy is the lack of broadband competition.

For nearly a decade, the debate over broadband competition in Washington has been an increasingly tortured game of pretending we have broadband competition in America when almost any consumer can see that we clearly do not. We used to have competition: In the Telecommunications Act of 1996, Congress implemented a system that required telecommunications network owners to share their infrastructure with competitive providers. But in the years that followed, the powerful incumbent monopolists used the courts and the FCC to kill this regulatory system. As the rest of the world was successfully adopting this competitive model we invented, our leaders were abandoning it. Instead, they bet that competition between cable and telephone networks using different technologies would work out just as well. It didn’t.

Now the world’s leading broadband nations overseas are enjoying healthy broadband competition that has triggered higher speeds, lower prices, and wider deployment. In the United States, we’re 10 years behind, and we’re stuck with a market structure that is very difficult to steer back to where we were before we went off course. The facts on the ground are stark. Here in the United States, the duopoly phone and cable incumbents control 95 percent of the entire wired and wireless high-speed Internet access market. Prices are on the rise, and the incumbents have executed a deliberate strategy to slow innovation and deployment, hoping to squeeze every last dime out of yesterday’s technologies.

What the FCC should do: First and foremost, the FCC should make a clean break with the policies of the past eight years and declare that our broadband competition policy is a failure.

Continue ReadingLack of broadband competition continues

In Which I Render God Speechless

Robots. Whilst not yet able to disguise themselves as innocent-looking assault vehicles which drive themselves, make ghastly jokes and lay waste to entire cities & provide fodder for truly reprehensible motion pictures, robots will one day be our oppressors. To attempt in some small way to understand our eventual machine overlords (and perhaps locate a weakness that can be exploited) before the inevitable enslavement of humanity, I recently went to this website: http://www.titane.ca/concordia/dfar251/igod/main.html and had a chat with a rudimentary AI which has been named God. I decided to treat it as the all-knowing all-seeing creator of the universe, whom you may have encountered as a central character in a series of very popular books.

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Continue ReadingIn Which I Render God Speechless

College classes free, for anyone

If you'd like to attend college classes over the Internet at a wide variety of prestigious colleges, consider visiting Academic Earth. According to the about page,

We are building a user-friendly educational ecosystem that will give internet users around the world the ability to easily find, interact with, and learn from full video courses and lectures from the world’s leading scholars. Our goal is to bring the best content together in one place and create an environment in which that content is remarkably easy to use and where user contributions make existing content increasingly valuable.
The participating universities include Berkeley, Harvard, MIT, Princeton, Stanford, UCLA, and Yale. I just finished watching an informative lecture on "The Origins of the Financial Mess." I'm wondering what I'm going to view next. Maybe I'll watch some more of Shelly Kagan's 26-part series on the topic of "Death."

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John McCain’s attempt to privatize the Internet

I've often written about net neutrality. See this post on the meaning of net neutrality and this post on the recently introduced "Internet Freedom Preservation Act of 2009." Today, Senator John McCain made it clear that he is not in favor of a free and open Internet. He believes that access to the Internet should be entrusted to the telecoms. As reported by PC World,

McCain's bill, the Internet Freedom Act, seeks to do the opposite of what its name implies by ensuring that broadband and wireless providers can discriminate and throttle certain traffic while giving preferential treatment to other traffic. Basically, those in power or those who pay more will have better access. Apparently we have different definitions of ‘freedom'.

What is McCain's rationale for this terrible bill? It's yet more free market fundamentalism:

"Today I'm pleased to introduce the Internet Freedom Act of 2009 that will keep the Internet free from government control and regulation," McCain said. "It will allow for continued innovation that will in turn create more high-paying jobs for the millions of Americans who are out of work or seeking new employment. Keeping businesses free from oppressive regulations is the best stimulus for the current economy."

Here's a bit more background on McCain's mindset, which consists of a war of misinformation (keep in mind that during the presidential campaign, McCain admitted that he didn't even know how to use a computer):

McCain was on the opposite side of the Net neutrality debate from President Barack Obama during last year's presidential campaign. During his White House campaign, President Barack Obama came out strongly in favor of Net neutrality, which is backed by companies such as Google, Amazon, Yahoo!, eBay and consumer advocacy groups, but opposed by telecommunications, wireless and cable companies.

In short, since U.S. citizens have retained such immense control over the television and radio airwaves (this is sarcasm and here's Exhibit A), we'll hand the Internet over to private corporations too. The solution to McCain's attempt to hand control of the Internet to big profit-hungry corporations is to require McCain to subject himself to cross-examination in real-time by someone like Lawrence Lessig, or any other rational person who is knowledgable about net neutrality. McCain would be one or two simple questions from being exposed as either naive or corrupt.

Continue ReadingJohn McCain’s attempt to privatize the Internet