Whoa Whoa Whoooooa!!!

The US Republican party shot down a bill guaranteeing "network neutrality" in American information networks. This is bad.

The background here is that cable and fibre optic companies (Verizon, AT&T) want to have the power to have "preferred" content flow through their networks. And of course they would decide who's preferred. Now, the idea of network neutrality has really benefitted communication and technology since the inception of open software and open network protocols (SMTP, HTTP, etc). But if the email transfer protocol (for example) used by your ISP has some private hooks, then the whole concept of an open means of communication goes out the window. Your email has less priority than email from some protocol-described "preferred" sender. 

Innovations like HTTP that depended on the "network neutrality" principle will wither and die. For example, some VoIP data could be disallowed by your broadband carrier because it competes with their phone service. Anyways, better people than me have made a far more coherent case. This one actually scares me because now, small information and application providers like Democracy Now might have a more difficult time distributing information because they are not a "preferred" customer like ABC or CNN.

Posted by Timothy Washington on 2006.04.16| Original post

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