So here's what's happening: The phone companies pretty much run the ISPs (Internet Service Providers). Recently, there's been this cool revolution in phones: VoIP (Voice over IP (Internet Protocol). This is where you can make a phone call to anyone in the world using a phone that's hooked up to your computer. Companies like Vonage do this and Skype to a lesser degree. These are not run by any of the Baby Bells (phone companies), which ticks them off to no end. So, basically, the phone companies are charging you like $24 a month for high speed internet and you're using it to make calls instead of using their service. This causes the phone companies to lose money. It turns out that their real income comes from phone calls. Go figure.
This business plan is not working out for them. So, they decided to break out the big guns. What they want to do is block certain bits of data, or at least slow them down. This is where it starts to get confusing.
Say you have Vonage and you want to make a call. Right now, when you make a call, the data that is sent from your service is treated the same as the data you send and receive when you're surfing the web or downloading a movie or chatting using AIM. It all travels using the same speed. Under the ISPs' plan, they would purposely slow down your Vonage data so that the quality of the call decreases and you'd be forced to use their phone service.
Recently, the movie companies have come out in favor of this plan as well. They have asked the ISPs to slow down movie bits too. That would include NetFlix' new service where you can download movies online. It might even include things like YouTube and Google Video. The ISPs would then return these bits to their normal speed if you signed up for a sort of premium service.
The crux of this is that this is not the way that the internet was supposed to be. The internet is a true democracy. Anyone can post, download, look at anything they want. Data is data. It should not be bought and sold. This is straight out big business greed.
So I thought that this would never go through. No way our politicians were dumb enough to limit something so revolutionary as the internet. And then I saw this. This is Senator Ted Stevens from Alaska. It's a little hard to read, but apparently, the internet is a bunch of tubes and his staff sent him an internet on Friday. Here's the digg story. At last try, his webpage at the Senate website is suffering from the Digg effect, but here's the link.
With people like this in the Senate, my hope is dwindling. But we need to mobilize. Get out the word. Write your congresspeople. Tell your friends. Save the internet.
- Wikipedia article
- savetheinternet.com [They have a good video here about it. Better than the ninja one!]
- John Kerry on net neutrality
- The bad guys
Comment on this. Tell me your thoughts. As always, have fun and have a good day.
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