It might help some of your less techy friends and family understand how Net Neutrality works. I do have to apologize that the video won’t play on this website and will instead take you to foureyedmonsters.com, but it appears to be a fairly benign site.
Save the Internet | Rock the Vote
It’s a hard decision for the cable companies this year as both of the options, McCain and Obama, are critical of many of their practices. McCain has been outraged about cable channel bundling into packages for over 15 years now. Obama has taken a clear stance that he wants the FCC to impose restrictions that will prevent ISPs from modeling traffic in order to manage their networks. McCain seems to be willing to let the industry sort out itself when it comes to Net Neutrality.
Both of the potential presidents are to regulate content based on indecency, voting in June 2006 to raise the maximum FCC fine from $32,500 to $325,000 per offense. The main differentiation being that Obama has mentioned in many speeches that he finds violent or grotesque imagery to be just as or more offensive than some of the sexual content that is currently lightly regulated.
Things get a little bit fuzzier when it comes to media consolidation. It appears that McCain is okay with where consolidation currently stands, but is not prepared to allow further consolidation. Obama is currently not willing to allow further consolidation and has voiced concern that current news outlets are not fulfilling their obligations to their local markets to produce real and relevant content. It must be noted as well that they are not comparing apples to apples when it comes to media consolidation. McCain defines media more broadly as just about any voice that has influence and the medium is really irrelevant, be it cable, satellite, radio, newspaper, etc. Whereas Obama is more interested in defining media consolidation as being related to the areas of TV and radio ownership.
Multichannel has a much more in-depth article that you can peruse here.
I’m a huge Net Neutrality advocate for many reasons. I believe in, and spent time in America’s military, defending everyone’s right to free speech. For some corporate interests or religious interests to decide that they don’t want me to access something I find interesting is antithetical to everything I was raised to believe in.
There are many who feel the same way and we’ve all been talking online about it from our various perspectives. In fact I sparred a bit with Richard Bennett in the Future of Music Coalition Blog about it just last month. And there have been some bills presented in Congress but nothing has really come of the debates or the pending legislation.
Enter the idealism of Larry and Sergey of Google to help move the discussion forward. Apparently the Googlish Duo have set a team of engineers to work on this problem for two years now and what they’ve decided to do is make it easier for people to see if they’re actually being limited from using their internet access in any way they feel like. So, in line with that goal, they are developing a suite of applications that will allow individual users to monitor their ISPs.
This is a great ideal, because it takes this nebulous idea of Net Neutrality and puts it into concrete numbers. My grandfather may not care if he uses his full 6Mbps pipe, but tell him that he can’t actually use it even though he paid for it? He’ll be madder than a wet hen and he’s got all the time in the world to call up and raise hell.
It would also be wrong of me to not point out the obvious, that Google would actually be a huge winner even if Net Neutrality were not enforced. These guys are acting against their own interests and leaving open the door for innovative competitors because they think it’s the right thing to do. Not to mention, when a small startup has a great idea, Google tends to buy them out and them incorporate them, so why would they allow ISPs to destroy their creativity hatchery?
You can read more about it over at the Register.