Congress is talking about Internet Neutrality today, and the president of the Writers Guild of America, West, and other interested parties are giving their POV. A new bill, Internet Freedom Preservation Act 2008 (HR 5353), intends to “enshrine Net Neutrality,” according to SavetheInternet.com. It will place Internet Neutrality, “the longstanding principle that Internet service providers cannot discriminate against Web sites or services based on their source, ownership or destination, into the Communications Act.”
It also requires the Federal Communications Commission to convene at least eight “broadband summits” to collect public input on policies to “promote openness, competition, innovation, and affordable, ubiquitous broadband service for all individuals in the United States.
This makes sense to me, as far as I understand it. We don’t want a large corporate conglomerate to own certain web hosts or service providers and be able to deny or delete content critical of their leadership or companies. If that’s what this bill does, perhaps it is good law.
I am not an expert, but as far as I can tell, net neutrality is a bad idea. Although the name sounds good, it really ends up being a government regulation that could (I don’t know details of the current bill, so I don’t know how far it goes) inhibit further development of internet voice and video service or create a disincentive for the development of new technologies. For example, voice and video require a continuous stream of data at constant speed, so they are more easily interrupted by network traffic than mere text and picture transmission. Therefore, some companies want to create separate “pipelines” for different types of traffic, and charge different fees. At least some net neutrality proposals would prohibit this.
On the whole, I think it’s too early for Congress to try to deal with this.
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Truth, keep yelling like that and you won’t get any free cocktails at happy hour.
I see it as taking away an American freedom. Privately owned businesses should be able to decide whom they will do business with and whom they will not. Another example would be laws prohibiting landlords from discriminating against couples based on marital status, forcing a Christian to rent apartments to co-habiting couples. Such a bill would force internet service providers, even ones that are Christian, to host homosexual sites and other objectionable sites.
You may be right, but the description says, “based on their source, ownership or destination,” not their content. I think basic content laws would still apply, but what you describe below may be a point to discuss. Why should Christians in business want to reject immoral, but not destructive, clients? It may be a bad way to witness.
Still, you’re right that private businesses should be able to do business with whom they wish. In this case, these businesses are essentially infrastructure for the whole country. Would we want telephone companies to reject some customers for any reason, other than extraordinary cost of supplying the service (which they pass on to the individual customer anyway)?