A hotly contested Democratic bid to enshrine extensive Net neutrality regulations in the law books failed Wednesday in the U.S. House of Representatives.
By a 34-22 vote, members of the House Energy and Commerce Committee rejected a Democratic-backed Net neutrality amendment that also enjoyed support from Internet and software companies including Microsoft, Amazon.com and Google.
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what is net neutrality?
net neutrality means that ISPs can’t prefer traffic from one site over another ie they can’t make a deal with say ESPN to make their site load fast and disadvantage other sports sites to drive people away from those sites and to ESPN.
I suppose that it is the spirit of our free market to allow ISPs to do as they please.
And the most capitalistic thing us customers can do is to say “SCREW YOU” to all ISPs that do that.
hmm ISPs seem to have a hellava lot of power
It won’t end up being the ISPs so much as the back-bones who will really be making the mone. AOL-Time Warner one of the companies that wants to do this controls a major internet backbone in the US. If you have a fast enough internet connection you’ll notice that some backbones like Level3.net already put a cap on traffic crossing their lines. Any time I connect to server through the Level3.net backbone my speed drops to about 700KB/s. I’ve done traceroutes to different servers and as soon as the connection hits the Level3.net backbone the ping increases by 30-60ms.
This is very scary because we are talking about the flow of infomation on the internet. I dont even want to think where this will lead to if this really happens.
A bit paranoid aren’t we? Every company has deals with other companies. It’s how we all make money from one another. Be happy that you live in a society where information is available unlike the commies in China.
By the way since we do live in a capitalist society NOT in a marxist society–the scariest thing is telling companies how they must run them.
Infrastructure like this should be nationalised so that customers don’t get fucked over.