posted
"It is better to remain silent and be thought a fool, than to speak aloud and remove all doubt"
Man, if only I'd watched this video while I was still in school, I'd have learned so much about the internet... Politicians should learn to keep their mouths shut when they don't know what they're talking about.
[Edited to fix UBB Code for the link]
Posts: 22 | Registered: Jun 2006
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posted
This from the moron senator who brought us the notorious Bridge to Nowhere boondoggle. I love the pipe graphic caption:"COURTESY: TED STEVENS' BRAIN"
Posts: 6316 | Registered: Jun 2003
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quote:Originally posted by Bob_Scopatz: I like the idea of my own personal internet. With tubes.
1. When I read the first post, my ignorance showed, and it reminded me of the coolio song which included that nugget as a lyric
"Better to be silent and be called a foo, than to speak, and remove all doubt Know what I'm talkin bout'?
my God this is funny. "Internet was sent by my staff 10 oclock on friday... I got yesterday... why??"
Posts: 9912 | Registered: Nov 2005
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posted
Yeah, but he doesn't know whether he has a good point or not.
I just have this vision of some poor staffer trying to explain (for the 100th time) how e-mail works and finally dumbing it down to the point where he's making analogies for EVERY aspect of the technology. And then having this bozo feel like he's has some sort of epiphany and could now make intelligent policy.
posted
I'm just imagining this guy asking some poor tech staffer "why were my Internets late?" And once the staffer understood that he meant email, he'd explain about SMTP routes and queues and the like, talking about filtering delays and total bandwidth and relay costs.
And then, in frustration, he'd say something like "You know, the Internet's like a tube. You put so much in, it can only come out so fast. So other stuff has to wait."
And then this guy has a lightbulb moment, thinks he's a network architect, and lectures the rest of Congress about it.
Posts: 37449 | Registered: May 1999
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quote:Ten movies, streaming across the Internet, and what happens to your own personal Internet? An Internet was sent by my staff at ten o'clock in the morning on Friday... I got it yesterday! Why! Because it got tangled up with all these things on the Internet commercially!
Who wants to put money on the fact that his Internets weren't late, but that his staffers just didn't send the e-mail until seconds before he received it, and lied to him about it? It doesn't sound like it'd be too difficult.
That said, what he's saying isn't entirely outrageous. The Internet has limited bandwidth, and the prospect of IPTV could hit current transmission limits. Of course, Stevens is a corrupt tool and even if he could, probably wouldn't bother understanding the solution; nor would he care about the fact that heavy government subsidation of fiber rollout has been swallowed by corrupt telcos to very limited effect -- but that what fiber has been laid, at heavy cost to the taxpayer, telcos now pretend is theirs to abuse.
What an idiot. I don't know if anyone's listened to the full transcript of his senility, but it's one of the worst arguments against net neutrality I've ever heard. I really wish the Democrats had won on this issue.
Posts: 3293 | Registered: Jul 2002
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posted
But seriously this country is in dire distress: This man is MAKING POLICY!!!!
"I didn't get them till yesterday!!! WHY????
Its like they're now mandating how dumb everyone has to be according to how dumb they have become, and then enforcing their idiocy by making policy based on an analogy about internet tubes. Fantastic.
Lets start making policy about stem cell research based on the Kare Bares, and then some censorship policy based on a Miss Manners column, and then maybe some foreign policy and Iraqi war policy with a combination of Rambo, Predator, and Chuck Norris jokes!
Why should we send 1 million troups to invade North Korea? Chuck Norris is busy.
Posts: 9912 | Registered: Nov 2005
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posted
Even if you accept his "tubes" metaphor, there's an enormous problem with Ted Stevens' logic.
He wants his Internets to get to him faster with no delay. And yet he votes against a plan that would guarantee fair treatment to all packets. Without fair treatment, some traffic may be prioritized and get "right of way" on the "information supertube," as filtered by the corporations that own the major networks of high-speed lines. Those corporations (ATT, Verizon etc.) want their own traffic prioritized so they may choose to deprioritize Ted Stevens' packets in order to speed up their own content delivery.
Now while it may be unlikely that the Verizons of the world would artificially slow down email traffic, there is another huge consequence to this that would result from a lack of net neutrality. It is this:
We want to move our Internet forward, by which I mean make it faster, with more redundancy and higher overall bandwidth. We want to make bandwidth as cheap as possible so that there is very little cost associated with the transmission of high quality content to a large audience. We aren't there yet, and we are rapidly falling behind countries like Norway, Korea and Japan in the amount of available bandwidth we have. We need a huge pile more tubes.
But how are we going to convince AT&T and Verizon to build more bandwidth? If they are not constrained by Net Neutrality laws and have enough bandwidth available to transmit the content they want to get through, there is no incentive to improve the network. Furthermore, this would actually create an incentive to keep the amount of available bandwidth low. First, these large media corporations would be able to deliver all the content they want from their own proprietary services uninhibited, while deprioritizing the content from competing providers. Second, they would be allowed to charge customers and providers for access to the lines. This discourages improvements because if bandwidth is a scarce(r) resource, they can sell it at a premium without spending the large sums necessary to improve their network. The only way to provide an incentive to improve the network is to enforce packet neutrality so that when the system reaches its limit, upgrades are necessary and can't be put off by simply delaying or dropping undesired content.
Simply put, voting against net neutrality will certainly not make Ted Stevens' Internets arrive any faster.
Care for an example?
We all love YouTube, but there's a good chance it won't be around much longer. It has burned throudh $12M in capital with no real plan to make money. For a company like YouTube to survive, the cost of the enormous bandwidth they consume must be reduced. Furthermore, without Net Neutrality, a small company like YouTube would be systemically disadvantaged compared to a "tubes & content" provider such as Verizon (which offers it's VCast service to mobile customers and could conceivably break into the bandwith-intensive viral videos market).
Imagine the possibilities for YouTube and other startups like it if we had a really blazing Internet, where bandwidth costs were practically nonexistant! (Of course, we're also going to need to seriously overhaul the DMCA and fair use laws to allow for a much freer development of content by smaller and smaller entities, but that's another thread for another day.)
Another thing is that if the major "tube" companies abuse their right to prioritize content and bandwidth becomes scarce or expensive, it WILL backfire on them. Municipalities across the nation are already building city- or county-wide WiFi networks, and this would only spur these public network efforts on. Personally, I think the federal government should start this sort of project immediately on the large-scale, running high-volume fiber-optic lines all over in a modern-day equivilent of the interstate highway program. We really do need some serious upgrades in the coming decade, and the free market is not providing companies the incentive to build it.
Posts: 1592 | Registered: Jan 2001
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quote:Today's cell phone system argues for retaining network neutrality Friday July 21, 2006 (08:00 PM GMT) By: James Glass
For now, Internet service providers are prohibited from discriminating against connections to particular sites on the Internet: they are required to treat traffic to Google exactly the same as traffic to Yahoo! or MSN. This principle of equality is called "network neutrality." However, large telecommunication companies are lobbying congress to scrap the network neutrality rules that have been in place since the birth of the Internet. We don't have to look far to see why this is a bad idea.
Net neutrality proponents foretell a grim future for the Internet if net neutrality is scrapped: one where technology stagnates because of high entry barriers and one where a small oligarchy controls what consumers can and cannot experience. Those who want to eliminate neutrality dismiss this as alarmist, and claim that net neutrality would remove the incentive for broadband providers to build the next generation of Internet infrastructure, which all agree is sorely needed in the US.
With such wildly divergent ideas about the effects of a simple policy, wouldn't it be nice if history provided some guidance from which to evaluate these claims?
It turns out that we have a privately owned and controlled network all around us, one that closely mirrors the technical functionality of the Internet, but where there has never been a requirement for net neutrality: the US cellular phone network.
Almost all cell phones sold in the developed world have the ability to send and receive SMS (short message service) text messages. SMS is gaining popularity in the US, but only as a way to send quick messages to friends. So why aren't there a wealth of amazing and interactive services available for mobile devices? Why is there no MySpace, Craigslist, Amazon, Flikr, or eBay accessible through this network? Why are cell phone payment systems and email systems nearly nonexistent? Why haven't charities raised money or awareness of their causes through this system?
It's simple. Because the cell phone carriers control what services are allowed to use their networks. There is no net neutrality on the cell phone network.
Imagine you want to create a user-moderated news service like digg.com that operates on SMS. On the neutral Internet, you rent a Web server ($7-$100 per month to start), register your name, and start programming. Total time required: less then two hours in most cases. But getting a service on the non-neutral US cell phone network would be a little different:
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