Memo 13: Net Neutrality

This is the last post of the semester, so lets talk a little about Net Neutrality and how it factors into the face of the internet as it is today.

Basically, whats happening is that at the moment, everybody who connects to the internet is given fairly equal treatment of how their information is passed across the internet. What the large ISP's have said is they want to divide the internet into a "High-Speed High Cost" version and a "Low-Speed Low Price" version or some other derivative forms based on the discrimination of Quality of Service. Now, what that basically means is that for a decent Quality of Service, we will now have to start paying money to the ISP's. They have the advantage of slowing development down, particularly at the last mile, in order to get the customers to start paying for those services that would require their faster connections for next generation services. So what has given them the right to such actions, hmmm, not much really, the idea sprung from individual creators, it grew, and then the large corporations joined the band to make it more widespread, putting down huge costs to build infrastructure which they would later use to force their own conditions of usage for. Its fairly easy to see how network monitoring can be extrapolated to degrade/deny services within a given network (P2P, File Shares, Torrents), the infringements across end-to-end packet flows however may be more of a concern to the internet community.

So what are the factors politically, and which of these factors are withing the sphere of influence of everyday citizens. Basically, as far as I see it, this is a direct threat by large corporations, telling the United States government and the FCC that they want things their way or no way. I think this is an opportunity for the US Governement/FCC to step up and let the respective organizations involved know that regardless of thier size and influence on the internet market, that there are some fundamental issues that they are not going to get the upper hand on. The reasons are fairly obvious, as has happened over time with TV, Radio and Newspaper, their pertinence as vehicles for unbiased communications have been overthrown, and have fundamentally become corporate broadcast mediums. This is a direct attack on a culture of open communications, do we want to live in a society where each individual is strapped with blinds?

I think whats important here is that, we as internet users understand that whether there are those who abuse the internet, and these abuses include internet fraud, copyright infringements through DRM loopholes, unethical pornography content etc. the internet serves a greater purpose. Once we as users understand that, we as users must exercise our right to choose internet providers with ethical integrity, collectively forming the views of a free market. By subscribing to any service that may have a bias for one packet over another, based on their liking and stated in their T&C's we have effectively said, that we as users, who are the most important aspect of a business are powerless and at the mercy of these large corporations.

Of course there will always be smarter people, for example those who know how to set up VPN's etc, who can now choose to select the routing paths that their packets can take in order to avoid paying for using a particular organizations network or to bypass a degraded service, but it is not the smart people that the corporations care about, it is the average citizen that is losing out.

In my view, given that we are well into the information age, consider the loss of net neutrality like losing your right to fairly and unbiased choose your preferred interactions on the internet, or more aptly it may be the dawn of a new age of information discrimination.

Article 10: Net Neutrality

http://www.masternewmedia.org/news/2007/01/13/network_neutrality_what_it_is.htm

This is a link with many multimedia add-ons describin "Net Neutrality", and is all you will need to get a good introduction to the problem at hand. See Memo 13, for a more insightful look into the issue of "Net Neutrality".

Article 1: FCC and EU Regulatory Reform

http://www.fcc.gov/Bureaus/OPP/working_papers/oppwp36.pdf

This paper is written by J. Scott Marcus from the FCC and it addresses the issue of dynamic reform in response to Networks converging at a faster rate than the regulation can follow. It is an observation of different silos, and their EU regulation in relevance to the United States.

Article 9: Sustainable Communities

This article looks at the issues of sustainability in practice, at a community level.

http://freshstart.ncat.org/articles/whatare.htm

Article 8: AMD Vs. Intel Anti-trust

An article on the AMD v Intel Anti-trust case. AMD's pitch on Intel's actions.

AMD Anti-trust Summary

Article 4: Triple Play Business Models

Triple play, changing business models.

Phone USA Mag

Article 3: VoIP Funding and Architecture

Mobile Radio Technology Magazine on Funding.
http://mrtmag.com/policy_and_law/news/senate_funding_911_041207/

IETF on E-911 Voip Deployments.
http://www.networkworld.com/news/2006/031306specialfocus-911-voip.html?page=1