Thursday, July 23, 2009

Shut Up



And what sort of political regime/philosophy tries to silence its citizens? A guy wrote a book about it:

Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left, From Mussolini to the Politics of Change

Cross Posted at Classical Values

5 comments:

Indrek Mandre said...

You disappoint me, Simon. Why are you spreading this nonsense and FUD about the net neutrality?

M. Simon said...

Because I liked the rest of it.

In any case my ISP already has a two tier system. There is standard boroadband (nominally 10 MBs - actual about 3 MBs) and higher speed at 15 MBs. I have no problem with that.

And I would be fine to have similar plans for packet priority.

In any case it may be in the works any way due to the way servers apportion bandwidth per customer. I'll see if I can find the "Network World" article.

Here is a general overview:

http://www.tmcnet.com/voip/0207/feature_articles_enterprise_network_management_0207.htm

M. Simon said...

tmcnet

Indrek Mandre said...

The tools to butcher the current freedoms we have on the Internet are maturing. As the technology has advanced in recent years it has become much easier to do. Deep packet inspection, blocking, logging, etc. are now becoming possible and affordable to everyone.

And just because you're fine right now, does not mean that will carry on. These freedoms need to be maintained, protected.

I don't mind QoS based prioritization. That's just common sense. What is important is that all services of same type are treated equally.

As an example: if the cable company rolls out their own movie renting service they will degrade say competing websites off the Internet and so get a monopoly on this service. You will pay 5x the price you'd get with competition and not even realize it.

The telecoms industry are very much interested in getting a stranglehold on the consumer and monopolize the applications for themselves.

And it is much more profitable for competing cable companies to cooperate on this issue so regular competition and wild capitalism won't work that well here.

But if you're interested in walled gardens, stagnation and generating huge profits for the telecoms (meaning paying 2-3x than what would be an alternative), be my guest.

And one more thing. The battle is heating up especially now that mobile terminals are getting more capable. The cellular networks are desperate to keep any kind of VoIP applications off their networks. Guess what: voice just like images, text, video, is just bits. Becoming just a "pipe" would force them to entirely change their business model so they are desperate to get laws passed to block that development.

But as an engineer you should realize Simon - all they are is just a pipe.

Or will you say - I just use my cellphone for calls and even that very rarely so I don't care about anything else, whatever happens. You're an educated engineer. It's your 'noblesse oblige' to carefully think these things through.

M. Simon said...

I keep an eye on telecom industry news. The cell phone guys are already coming to the realization that they are just a pipe.

Of course they will not go quietly. And yes we will have to keep an eye on them. Still they are beginning to face the music.