Posted on 03/04/2007 5:40:13 PM PST by Tunehead54
Anyone over 40 can remember a time when you could count the available TV channels on the fingers of one hand. Now they come in the hundreds. But that's nothing compared to the Internet, with its millions - is it billions yet? - of sites that can do just about anything but wash the dinner dishes.
Online, you can find any fact you need, and any lie you'd prefer to believe is true. You can make new friends and keep up with your old ones. You can buy and sell anything, make phone calls, import and export photos and movies, tap into the thoughts of bloggers from Baghdad to the house next door.
Think of the Internet as a giant pipe connecting most of the world's computers, filled with free-flowing words, pictures and commerce. In the last 20 years, those pipes have changed our lives in ways we may not fully appreciate for a long time. It has germinated amazing ideas, products and services. It has also created a new generation of billionaires.
We consumers pay an ever-growing monthly bill to let that information flow into our homes and businesses. The people who own those pipes - mostly telephone and cable TV companies - happily cash those monthly checks. But they also hungrily eye the money being made by young entrepreneurs whose businesses depend on the Internet.
In 2005, the Federal Communications Commission lifted a long-standing rule that prohibited telecom companies from discriminating between Internet companies. Theoretically, that means a Verizon, Comcast or any other wire company could demand eBay pay a fee for letting their customers connect to the on-line auction, or they could limit the bandwidth available to YouTube, slowing down its streaming video, while giving preferential treatment to a similar site owned by a partner company. Scarier still, they could deny passage to news and opinion sites whose politics they don't like.
Would they do such a thing? Would they try to install tollbooths on the information superhighway?
Internet visionaries, fans and entrepreneurs shuddered when Ed Whitacre, CEO of AT&T told Business Week last year that the likes of MSN, Google and Vonage "would like to ... use my pipes free, but I ain't going to let them do that because we have spent this capital and we have to have a return on it.
"So there's going to have to be some mechanism for these people who use these pipes to pay for the portion they're using. Why should they be allowed to use my pipes?"
That comment sparked more than an uproar. It inspired some members of Congress to file bills that would require "network neutrality." Activists and lobbyists quickly took sides. "Net roots" activists scared Whitacre and other telecom honchos into disavowing any interest in limiting access to the Internet. Meanwhile, the Republicans controlling Congress deep-sixed the net neutrality bills.
The rhetorical lines are still drawn. Whitacre's comment was a slip of the tongue, a Verizon official told me this week. Why respond to something nobody's proposing to do, a cable TV lobbyist told me two weeks ago. Why regulate the Internet when its working so well as it is?
The proponents of net neutrality aren't buying that line. They have some heavyweights in their corner - Microsoft, Google and others who don't want to have to pay a carrier to move their bits and bytes from their servers to your laptop.
They also have friends in Congress who are suddenly more powerful than they were a year ago, notably Rep. Ed Markey, D-7th. The Democratic takeover of Congress returned Markey to the chairmanship of the House Subcommittee on Telecommunications and the Internet.
Markey's no friend of AT&T. During a recent visit to Framingham, he recalled a hearing back in the 1980s when he grilled an AT&T executive who was warning against replacing rotary phones with a radical new idea called "touch-tone" dialing. Markey said he'd tried these newfangled phones - during a childhood field trip to the Museum of Science. AT&T had developed plenty of new technology, he said, but kept it off the market because its monopoly on phone service was paying off handsomely with rotary phones.
"What has AT&T ever done for the Internet?" he asked last week. AT&T chose not to bid on the contract to build the World Wide Web. "What has Comcast ever done for the Internet?"
There's a reason the Internet has given birth to an unprecedented wave of innovation and prosperity. Running a radio or TV station takes broadcasting equipment and a federal license. Newspapers have to pay for presses and trucks and people who print and distribute the papers. But you can buy a domain name for $2.99 and have your Web site online in no time. You're a publisher, and any of a billion Internet users around the world can find their way to your words, video or virtual yard sale with a few keystrokes.
From that access grew myspace and YouTube and instant messaging and craigslist and so much more. Don't look at how much money Google is worth now, Markey says. Think back to 1996, when two graduate students in their early 20s, Sergey Brin and Larry Page, started building a new kind of search engine.
Page and Brin started Google in a dorm room. How far would they have gotten if they had had to pay a premium to Verizon, AT&T and Comcast to make their site accessible to Web surfers?
Thursday, Markey held his first hearing on net neutrality, with a single witness: Sir Timothy Berners-Lee, the MIT visionary credited with inventing the World Wide Web. He urged policy makers to make "sure the Web itself is the blank sheet, the blank canvas, something that does not constrain the innovation that's around the corner."
Berners-Lee didn't endorse a particular net neutrality bill, and even Markey says he's keeping an open mind about how to guarantee the forces of innovation have unfettered access to the wired world. But both are determined to protect the Internet from mega-corporations whose interest is in protecting their bottom lines from the next big idea.
Bill Moyers, a net neutrality zealot, recently reminded an audience that radio, television and cable were also once bright new technologies. Each "was hailed as a technology that would give us greater diversity of voices, serious news, local programs and lots of public service for the community," Moyers told the National Conference for Media Reform.
"Then the media lobby cut a deal with the government to make certain nothing would threaten the already vested-interests of powerful radio networks and the advertising industry. Soon the public largely forgot about radio's promise as we accepted the entertainment produced and controlled by Jell-o, Maxwell House, and Camel cigarettes.
"What happened to radio, happened to television and then to cable, and if we are not diligent, it will happen to the Internet," Moyers said.
Berners-Lee's testimony before Markey's committee was largely ignored except in the technology press. The issue of net neutrality deserves more attention. The "pipes" through which the Internet flows will only get more important to our lives and our economy. We all have a huge stake in who controls the flow.
Rick Holmes is opinion editor for the MetroWest Daily News. He can be reached at rholmes@cnc.com.
I need 5 survey answers BY ACTUAL PhD's to the following 10 questions. Once I have 5 responses FReepmailed to me I'll put a bad 3 letter word that begins with an "a", ends with an "s" and a moderator will pull the post (just ask Pokey78!) - so if its still up I still need more responses.
Sorry about the questions - they're developed in class and cannot be altered (sigh).
If you need instructions on how to cut, paste and FReepmail you're probably not really a PHD. ;-)
Your responses could save the internet from being destroyed by the "megacorps" or government bureaucracy depending on your point of view but regardless you'll be able to tell your grandchildren how you fired your two cents in when it really counted.
Yes, I'm pinging all the smart FReepers I know as this is a rush project - if I missed you - its not that I don't think you're smart its just that I didn't know you had a PhD. Honest! ;-)
Answers can be long or short but when you FReepmail your answers please give me a last name and first initial, the area of your PhD and your age.
Many thanks in advance!
Interview Questions
1) What is your definition of Net Neutrality?
2) What would government intervention do to the Internet in the US?
3) How does Net Neutrality impact the public?
4) Do you see taking away the neutrality of the internet as stopping the flow if information?
5) How expensive will these "tolls" be?
6) Was the internet intended to be a source of taxes?
7) What is the worst case scenario regarding Net Neutrality?
8) What is the best outcome?
9) How will Net Neutrality in the United States affect the rest of the world?
10) How does Net Neutrality relate to political beliefs?
Only if they lived in the provinces. In 1951 on Long Island, near NYC, we had seven.
ML/NJ
"What has AT&T ever done for the Internet?" he asked last week. AT&T chose not to bid on the contract to build the World Wide Web. "What has Comcast ever done for the Internet?"
----
lol, what has government ever done for the internet is the more pertinent question, IMO. Butt out Congress. :)
With entities like Ted Kennedy and Moveon.org championing net neutrality I'm comfortable on the other side of the fence on that basis alone. ;-)
I'm 52 and grew up out west - we had the big three and that was it as I recall - ABC, NBC and CBS. Saturday mornings were "big" as that was the only time they had cartoons on! ;-)
Why are you asking only PhDs?
Blam!
Whenever I run across threads on ancient history, odd facts etc. I always think of pinging you but then I see that you've already posted your thoughts or posted the thread itself!
Know any true Phds? A ping would be appreciated. ;-)
Blam
If I'd been a PhD I probably would have remembered to address you in the ping (sigh). Please see #8. Thanks. ;-)
Check. :-(
FReeper 'Charge Carrier', has a PhD in physics. I've pinged him.
FReeper Folks:
This is a one-time ping to a net neutrality article and a request which only applies to FReepers with a PhD:
I still need some PhD responses to a simple survey - short answers are fine - please see my comments at the end of the article.
I do not have a choice in limiting responses to PhDs - of course, if you really wanted to you could probably fool me - you know, not using "you know" a lot; using capitals appropriately, a little punctuation here and there ... ;-)
Anyway its late but some FR help would be great! Ping any PhDs you may know.
Thanks,
TH54
ShadowAce:
A net neutrality article for your review. If you think it warrants a Tech Ping please do. You'll see I have an ulterior motive but I'm just following the rules - note how requiring PhDs denies MDs, JDs, Seasoned Citizens; etc. a "voice" - sigh.
Thanks,
TH54
I know the correct answers to those questions - but I don't have a PhD.
Good luck in your quest...no PHD here, but do wish you the best. If you need an MBA guy someday let me know.
I'll take "Fund it from the beginning" for $500, Alex.
Thanks much. My own thought is that the PhD requirement almost guarantees a response - if any - from the education field - inserting a bias for no apparent reason. The PhD requirement eliminates large numbers of potential opinions from BA/BS holders and especially graduates of the School of Hard Knocks.
No "mere" college graduates, MBAs, Doctors, lawyers, or Hard Knockers ... Sigh. :-(
No problem. Thanks for responding and I sincerely wish you the best of luck on the project and your pursuits!!!!
They've both run thousands of miles of fiber and coax, employed small armies of technicians and linemen and spent tens of billions of dollars installing and upgrading their equipment to provide highspeed internet service to millions of Americans.
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