Edwards Comes Out For Net Neutrality
Sunday, April 15, 2007 -    reddit
I'm not very keen on the issue. On the one hand I think the companies that own the backbones really ought to be able to do whatever they want with their property, yet it doesn't make sense in our society to allow one company to charge another for something when they have no active business relationship. It's kind of like a toll booth that not only charges cars to pass through, but also a company such as Dell, who owns the cargo in the back of a semitrailer that is passing through the booth.
The toll booth and Dell have no business relationship, but they want to charge Dell because their cargo represents 80% of the long haul traffic going through the gate. Yet they are already making money from the people who own those trucks, so how does such a wild idea make any sense?
Well, it doesn't, and that's what net neutrality is all about. AT&T can charge their own customers whatever they want, but they shouldn't be allowed to charge Google for sending traffic through their pipes when Google is already paying for that traffic with whoever is providing them with bandwidth.
Quotes from savetheinternet:
"Information vehicles like YouTube, the Internet at large, blogging, video blogging, all these things are ways for democracy to flourish. They're ways for ordinary Americans to participate in the process," he said.
Let me do a bit more explaining. You request a video from YouTube, which is sitting on their servers. Your ISP is Comcast, while YouTube is getting their Internet access through Level3, but your ISP doesn't have a direct connection to Level3, so how does the traffic find its way through?
Big providers like Level3 and AT&T have agreements called peering, where AT&T will say "I need to connect to you, and you need to connect to me." So long as the amount of traffic flowing between the two is roughly equal, they will make these connections and often will do it for free, because it benefits them both. That's the deal, they both win. Then they both have their own customers that connect exclusively to them, and that's where they get their money. But now they have this bright idea that if tons of traffic originates from somewhere else on the Internet, but must traverse their own pipes, they'll charge the owner of the traffic since they can't charge their own peers.
"This goes to the heart and soul of democracy. Because, if Democracy is going to work in this country, then we want people to be well informed and we want a wide variety of diverse voices to be heard. And that's what is at issue with these media conglomerates … We really have to stay on top of this because what we see flourishing at the grassroots can be stomped on if we're not careful."
That's not what I want to hear on the issue, but it's a step in the right direction. The integrity of the network must be maintained at all costs, or it'll stop working altogether.
Other posts from this blog: John Edwards, Internet, Net Neutrality, Savetheinternet
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