George W. Bush sound-alike senator Ted Stevens is highly vocal against an amendment to the US telecommunications bill that would've meant all Net traffic had to be treated the same no matter who sent it, or where it was going.
Network Neutrality, "prevents companies like AT&T, Verizon and Comcast from deciding which Web sites work best for you - based on what site pays them the most," says SaveTheInternet.com.
However, Stevens must know exactly what he's talking about. After all, he had his very own Net sent to him, recently. And if he didn't know, he wouldn't be arguing against the proposal, mooted by senators Olympia Snowe and Byron Dorgan, designed to to make sure AT&T, et al, don't get what they want. Would he?
Alex Curtis has an mp3 on Public Knowledge that demonstrates the depth and extent of Stevens' Net expertise.
"It really is the Internet consumer Bill of Rights," declares Stevens, quoting the International Herald Tribune as his authority. "Many of the companies that oppose legislating the Net do so because they believe the speed and capabilities of the internet are being improved on their backs," and, "We demand that the internet not discriminate against consumers," he says.
Moreover, apparently, there's, "one company now you can sign up and you can get a movie delivered to you daily by subscription, by delivery service," says Stevens in an mp3 posted on Public Knowledge here, and mirrored on p2pnet.
"Okay," says Stevens. "And currently it comes to your house, it gets put in the mail box when you get home and you change your order. But you pay for that. Right?
"This service is not going to go through the internet and what you do is you just go to a place on the internet and you order your movie and guess what? You can order ten of 'em delivered to you! And the delivery charge is free. Right?"
Wowee!
"Ten movies streaming across that internet.!"
Woowee. heh
"And what happens to your own personal internet? I just the other day got ------ an internet was sent by my staff at 10 o'clock in the morning on Friday and I just got it yesterday. Why? Because it got tangled up with all these things going on the internet commercially.
"So when you want to talk about the consumer, let's talk about you and me. We use this internet for communication. We're not using it for commercial purposes. We're not earning anything by going on that internet.
"Now I'm not saying you have to discriminate or yeg, ech, er, ah, we want to discriminate against those people ..."
He goes on, "your approach is regulatory: it's regulatory in the sense that it says no one can charge anyone for massively invading this world of the internet."
And having made that clear, Stevens says for people who are, "streaming through 10, 12 movies at a time, or a whole book at a time for consumers' use - those are not you and me: they're not the consumers. They're the providers ...
"Enormous entities want to use the internet for their purpose to save money to do what they're doing now. They use Fedex, they use the delivery services, they use the mail: they deliver in other ways, but they want to deliver vast amounts of information over the internet and again, the internet is not something that you just dump something on.
"It's not a big truck. It's a series of tubes. And if you don't understand those tubes can be filled and if they're filled, when you put your message in, it gets in line and its going to be delayed by anyone that puts into that tube enormous amounts of material, enormous amounts of material.
"Now we have a separate Department of Defense internet now. Did you know that? Do you know why? Because they have to have theirs delivered immediately. They can't afford getting delayed by other people.
"The security of the United States requires a separate Net for defence.
"I think these people are arguing whether they should be able to dump all that stuff on the internet ought to build a system themselves. Maybe there is a place for a commercial net but it's not using what consumers use every day.
"It's not using the messaging service that is essential, I think, to small businesses, it's essential to our operation of families.
"The whole concept is that we should not go into this until someone shows that there is something that has been done that really is a violation of net neutrality that hits you and me."
Thanks, Ted.
Meanwhile, if phone companies, "could wave a magic wand they'd have the whole kit 'n' caboodle passed, and get to open a bidding war between large Net users - Amazon, Yahoo!, Google, all those XXX and online gambling services nobody ever actually hears about but which are by far and away the most profitable things on the Internet and which'd quietly get way, way more profitable for whoever owns the broadband," writes David Sims on First Coffee.
He continues, "The phone companies are grinning, cackling and drywashing their hands in anticipation. The Washington Post reported in December 2005 that William L. Smith, chief technology officer for Atlanta-based BellSouth Corp. told reporters and analysts that yeah, an Internet service provider such as his firm should, in fact, be able, for example, to charge Yahoo! Inc. for the opportunity to have its search site load faster than that of Google Inc. A law allowing him to do so is a license to print money.
"But they have to find some way to spin it like they give a crap about you the consumer, so in typical pretzel logic they're poormouthing about all the money they're having to invest - billions! - in upgrading everything to broadband, and who's gonna pay for all that? Of course you are. "It's noteworthy that this argument is so threadbare that it only takes two logical jumps to get back to your wallet.
And while Stevens and others of his ilk try to protect heavily vested corporate interests, the Net is, "increasingly becoming the dominant medium binding us," says Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the man who invented the World Wide Web.
"The neutral communications medium is essential to our society. It is the basis of a fair competitive market economy. It is the basis of democracy, by which a community should decide what to do. It is the basis of science, by which humankind should decide what is true.
"Let us protect the neutrality of the net."
Also See: treated the same - Net Neutrality versus $, June 30, 2006 Public Knowledge - Senator Stevens Speaks on Net Neutrality, June 29, 2006 First Coffee - Net Neutrality: It's Pretty Simple, Really., June 30, 2006
