What the internet will look like if Net Neutrality is defeated

The website gizmodo.com, a blog about technology, illustrates the state of the internet if, God forbid, net neutrality is defeated:



link

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dFUm1PRxJOQ
and:
http://www.savetheinternet.com - this has an online petition - I actually got responses from my Senators! It works!

who's going to have any money left?

The little guy will loose his power to broadcast non MSM news, technologies etc. The internet will become as dumb as cable TV.

http://www.savetheinternet.com/

Help Us Meet a $100,000 Challenge

Dear Cha,

The FCC just proposed new Net Neutrality rules, bringing us closer than ever before to securing an open Internet.

But the closer we get, the more money phone and cable companies spend to derail our efforts.

To keep the FCC from caving to this intense pressure and failing to pass a strong rule, Free Press is organizing a massive public mobilization for Net Neutrality. We need your help to do it.

Can you contribute $10 to protect Net Neutrality?

Get this: There are more phone and cable lobbyists roaming Capitol Hill than there are members of Congress. Imagine the personal attention our lawmakers are getting from the phone and cable industry.

For every telco lobbyist, there are hundreds of thousands of people who support Net Neutrality. Your gift today will ensure that our lawmakers hear from these people -- including you -- not just from the special interests.

We’ll use your contribution to:

Rally 2 million Net Neutrality supporters to contact the FCC and Congress;
Research the facts on Net Neutrality and file detailed comments with the FCC, debunking bogus industry arguments, and making sure the FCC sticks to the facts;
Push back against industry spin in the media and on the Hill;
Lobby members of Congress to co-sponsor new Net Neutrality legislation;
Compile a database that lets activists track their lawmakers’ stance on Net Neutrality; and
Use social networks, viral videos and new online tools to connect activists to one another and spread the word that the public needs Net Neutrality.
If we raise $100,000, a generous supporter will donate a matching $100,000 -- but only if we meet our fundraising goal (we’re nearly halfway there).

Help Us Win on Net Neutrality: Donate Today

Net Neutrality supports everything we care about, from organizing for social causes online, to creating and sharing our own music and videos without permission from entertainment execs, to reading and producing news that offers alternative viewpoints.

Today’s FCC action is just the beginning of the final chapter in our fight for Net Neutrality. The industry pressure will only increase. Please, donate today and help us win. It’s now or never.

With thanks,

Josh Silver
Executive Director
Free Press

P.S. Of course, we welcome donations above and beyond ten bucks. Remember, every dollar gets us closer to the $100,000 matching gift -- and to an open Internet.

on the phone if the charges are wrong. The rates will creep up, year after year.

and most important

People with limited resources (a rapidly growing number) won't be able to connect politically.. which, along making buttloads of money, will be the BIG plus for CorpoAmerica.

You neighborhood charter school will pay the fees but the remaining public schools will not because of 'budget' constraints. I know many people who access the internet at their libraries - that too will be a public service eliminated for the same reason.

I have a question about the boxes at the bottom of threads that would allow you to share. What happened to the boxes? They are missing on all threads now. :-(

I haven't seen an announcement from Skinner about it.

in the AddThis! button/link thingy. They removed it because it was messing with DUer's access to the site.

:)

...because the old one was destroyed by for-profit gatekeepers, rest assured that it will have absolute anonymity built in from the very beginning.

I started on the internet back around 1983, but it was crude and incredibly slow and expensive. It started opening up when our provider, The Source, was bought out by CompuServe. We had to pay an minute/hourly rate to CompuServe to get into the various areas. The only place we used much were the online forums since there was an offline reader which reduced the number of minutes needed to access the forum messages. Without that online reader, many people paid a few hundred dollars a month to read messages. There were other areas, but those could only be used while online, which made them prohibitively expensive.

I now pay a premium to my ISP for fast broadband. I will NOT pay them additional for access to additional resources. If the most common resources become pay per view, like CompuServe used to be, I will stop using them. If my ISP tries to restrict my bandwidth, there will be some chunks hitting the fan since I am paying for unlimited time at a certain bandwidth.

and my friend gave me a free password for unlimited use. I didn't realize that CompuServe was an early ISP. Interesting.

Compuserve or CIS was really the first public ISP - it started out as a computer time share venture but moved into providing internet access for companies, then for the public. It was one of the first file sharing services, if not the first, and started real time chat with their CB Simulator. They also were the primary location for online forums, especially technical and support forums.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compuserve

Much of what became standard on the World Wide Web was pioneered on CompuServe. Then AOL bought it a screwed it up. I stopped spending much time there, though I was a moderator on some forums, when AOL started referring to the users as "product" and being more concerned about how many new "eyes" were viewing the forums rather than about the quality of content or the existing users.

AOL alienated many of the long time forum owners (most forums were operated by contractors, not by CIS) or simply refused to renew contracts. For instance, they jerked the contract for the company that ran a large group of craft forums and gave that concession to a magazine. They did the same to all the animal and pet forums. Some of those communities moved off of AOL/CIS onto the web and have maintained their identity, many communities dispersed and are gone.

AOL/CIS also upset a lot of the old time power users that were accustomed to using offline readers - even when the rates were more reasonable or the forums accessible via the web, the offline readers had a lot of advantages - when they changed the forum software and effectively killed the offline reader software. Think of having a way to only look for messages addressed to you and being able to easily keep threads and sub threads organized in a rational, compact way. Being able to completely ignore sections and threads that you do not want to read. Being able to mark trolls (in the offline reader I used, it was called a "twit filter") and never see them or their messages ever again. And downloading hours worth of threads in a few seconds, write your replies offline, and quickly go online to upload them. At 1200 baud, it was amazingly efficient. Even with 56k dialup, it was a vast improvement over reading messages online without those features.

This forum allows some of that but it is no where near as powerful as those old DOS based offline readers were.

Got on Compuserve via a long distance call. So we had to pay for Compuserve, the long distance connection, and an additional hourly fee for the features. I was 15 years old, got addicted to Megawars III, and I ran up the total bill to $500 in two weeks. Needless to say, it was years before I was on the "internet" again.

Then we found the offline reader for the forums and never paid over the base fee for the rest of the time we were subscribers. But those offline readers were no good for anything other than the forums, email and newsreaders.

Life on the internet was so much fun at 300 baud!

i seem to remember having 250 or less.

At one curve on the dirt road that went by the farm, the phone cables came up out of a mud puddle and the duct taped spliced was attached to a stick to hold it up out of the wet. Every single time it rained, we lost phone service and of course, internet.

We also waited until we didn't have to put the phone into a cradle for the modem - ours was one of the early Hayes modems with a direct phone line! Expensive piece of equipment, that.

And most will willing pay with no questions asked.

:shrug:

it might have to involve improving wireless technology, but we're too close, technologically, for this genie to ever be put back in the bottle. I hope.

Once a new technology (the internet) is introduced and integrated so deeply (and so quickly) I just cannot see people accepting the kinds of compromises that big money wants to impose.

The whole open source community has already sort of proven that.

I don't think the geeks will be able to keep pirate networks on air without being raided by the police.

I don't know what it will be, but we've got the technology and the momentum and the proof-of-concept with open source (and crowdsourcing).

The smart corporations will just learn to adjust after they spend massive amounts of $$ trying to sustain the status quo, which is unsustainable.

The internet is, de facto, already a crowdsourced project. It's appeal is the wide audience and reach. Tamp that down and it becomes counterproductive to the very forces who thinks it would benefit them. They just may not yet realize it.

Anonymous surfing servers and P2P servers are constantly being raided by the police.
Google for:
police tor servers raided

We can't budge on Net Neutrality.

Just sayin'

especially for the news sites. I think their only chance at survival may be to pool together as a co-op of sorts and charge a subscription fee.

That's if they don't block it all together.

complete control of the mass media. This, in turn, gives them complete control of our minds.

It'll be interesting to see if the corporate media can convince the RW teabagging crowd that net neutrality is a bad thing. If they can actually accomplish that, we'll be a lot closer to seeing the end of the internet as we know it.

I was just searching FR to see what the consensus was on net neutrality. It does appear that a majority voice is emerging which is very much in the vane of "if the government does it, it must be evil". The decades long RW media brainwashing has been effective. Corporate interests no longer have to make a cogent case for their wishes and desires. They simply say "the government wants to stop us and the government is bad" and hundreds of thousands of imbeciles happily swallow the kool-aid.

the teabag crowd of anything.

I mean, what happens when eBay and Amazon suffer huge drops in sales because people aren't going to go for that?

What happens when Google's ad revenues tank because nobody's clicking on their sponsored links?

No, I'm not sure that will happen. Sure hope it doesn't, because I enjoy my internet, and I wouldn't if it were like that.

Google would get some form of royalty as part of an Internet package bundled with the other major purveyors. No advertizing needed at that point, but it would still be there.

You are scaring the shit outta me

My family had Time Warner cable. We weren't happy with Time Warner so we now have Dish Network. Where do we go now that we aren't happy with Dish Network? Oh, I know, we can go to Direct TV!

The RW wants a monopoly on communications. For several reasons. Mostly they want to control the message.

They take away free porn, and they might have a revolution on their hands.

:evilgrin:

Thanks for spreading the word about Net Neutrality on DU!

:yourock:

All the services, sliced, diced and wrapped in plastic for your "total internet experience"

Chilling.

If all messages are equal, why stop SPAM?

If all web-pages are equal, why slow access to the ones that have virii?

Or you have gone stark raving mad.

However, as somebody who's been on the 'net since '94, I've seen this attack before.

Corporations and fringe elements want to stop "being censored" by private parties, they want the 'net to be more like the US mail, where anybody can send a bomb, child porn, junk mail, anything they want, without the private owners, of private networks, being allowed to say "uh, no, we don't want that".

I'm sorry you have such a problem with the internet being a free exchange of information. But that's how it was designed, and it was designed for everyone to use. If At&t wants to build their own internet and regulate what is on it, they're welcome to do so.

If this happens, say goodbye to DU. The corporatocracy will control the internets & you won't be able to find the truth anywhere.

The ability to stop them, however, will.

That's the problem.

Proponents might as well be screaming for "phone neutrality" to stop corporations from changing/charging different prices for receiving different phone calls... with the side effect of more telemarketing, more phone scams, etc.

It didn't come naturally - The telephone network is treated as a common carrier because federal law made it so. Otherwise, if the phone company had had it's way, whenever you made a phone call to your favorite pizza joint they'd re-direct your call to Pizza Hut instead, because Pizza Hut gave them money. And they could charge you different prices to receive different phone calls - or prevent you from making certain calls, or require you to make others.

The fact is the Internet is considered a common carrier NOW. The telecomm industry wants to change that. Getting rid of net neutrality wouldn't prevent spam & viruses, you'd just get spam & viruses that are approved by your ISP. And you'd be required to use an ISP-approved spam filter & virus program - even if they don't work. And you wouldn't be allowed to use anything else.

Say that I was handling a network.

One of the users was being attacked with a flood of traffic.

Before "Net Neutrality", I could stop it.
With "Net Neutrality", I could not, as I would be censoring traffic.

So, small time folks can be effectively, legally, shut down by deep pockets and big players, by overloading them. Legally.

Why?

Because "Neutrality" demands that network operators treat (for example) google, and DU, exactly the same. So, a few hundred FR folks can get together and start requesting 10 pages a second from DU, and "melt" the server. A network operator couldn't stop it..... By law.

your straw man doesn't work.

See also the Anonymous defense in their CoS battles, where millions of folks clicked on a link that melted servers, without intent, or knowledge, that it would melt a server.

But Net Neutrality would only establish that things need to stay as they are.

The proposed rules specifically allow telcos to go after net traffic that contains illegal content or could be harmful to the system.

To restrict the poor to sites only the elites approve of so we don;t get any "dangerous" ideas.

>> It's all about an excuse to censor, to control access to information.

No - it's about money. They see a freakin GOLD MINE in trying to charge access. They dont have to actually actively censor, the stupidity of the content for pay will take care of poisoning the whole thing.

Republican Web Sites = FREE

Say Good-Bye to Free Speech!

:mad: :grr: :nuke:

with their right-wing corporate propaganda they will have total control of media and access to truth and free information, two things the republicans and corporations despise.

Republicans have been trying to find a way to control the net since it's inception because many progressives use it so effectively and they hate this, the republicans want all info controlled by them (large corporations like Murdoch, Time-Warner, Disney, GE, Viacom in this case AT&T Verizon & Quest)....not unlike Fox news and 90% of talk radio being republican slanted.

The freedom of the net drives the republicans crazy, it even things out a and republican want a rigged game in their favor...they can't have power without it and corporations have always been there to help out and stop progressive liberal opposition from being heard on a even playing field.

The internet belongs to everyone! It was developed using DOD money--taxpayer money--so why are we even considering these "middlemen?" Enough of this fucking corporatism of the public sector! :grr:

You know, some days I just can't get any more abhorred...

Payroll.

Data transfer rates in the U.S. are much slower than those in other countries, such Japan and South Korea to name a few. If anything, the companies in the U.S. that are supplying internet access should be forced to allow us faster transfer speeds.

have a right to a fast internet connection.

Welcome to DU! :hi:

there always seems to be more room on the net for this stuff.

What could possibly be wrong with that? Just allow it all?

...what you guys are telling is to d/l as much porn as possible before this happens so i can watch it offline? got it...

Which companies want to do this? Where is the evidence that anyone is considering this? All I've seen so far is a couple of companies have blocked or throttled bit torrent traffic. Frankly, as a network administration, I completely understand. It's a bandwidth hog, resource inefficient, and users aren't smart enough to manage their upstream traffic so as not to slow their connection to a crawl and then end up calling my staff wondering why their internet speed is so slow or they can't connect to anything.

Excerpt:

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703816204574483674228258540.html

Block anything that is not a corporatist view from being distributed.


Say good bye to DU.

Has it happened?

Can you see this post?

So... if it hasn't happened, what other reasons would corporations have for demanding that they *not* be blocked, or charged, for flooding other people's networks?

Contact with the world would be cut off. The poor would lose even more access to the internet. Sales of computers would be down, and rich, white males would once again dominate the internet demographic.

The internet would look more like a warzone, as "Grey Hat" groups form up in opposition of the new plans, launching DDOS attacks and hackings every day to keep sites down.

People would be pissed. Congress in the next term after it happened would be completely different, as everybody who allowed the erosion of Net Neutrality would be ousted. Mark my words.

This is the equivalent to the MAD principle, or dropping 1000 1MT bombs on the internet. Due to high barriers to entry, companies essentially have a monopoly and could try to get away with it, especially with the government's blessing.

:rofl:

Or should I

:cry:

Hate to bust your bubble, but before the internet and the various protocols that came along with it, many of those businesses all flourished by putting out a quality product.

With all the free distribution that's come along as a result of the internet, many content-producing companies are struggling to get by, while others have altogether folded and/or been forced to consolidate into ridicule-worthy top-heavy organizations that are like ocean liners carrying no balast and no crew.

Before the internet, and free distribution, if reading a newspaper wasn't important enough for you to fork over .50, no one was fracking whining about not having it.

I know quite well that I'm sitting here, reading and (mostly) enjoying, but at least I'm not hypocrite enough to ignore the fact that no one has a right to sit at their computer screen and demand a business give me something, that's unnecessary for breathing, eating, or sheltering, for free.

It is inconceivable that the internet, representing the best access to free information that's ever existed, should be allowed to be censored by those who control the methods by which people access it. The infrastructure for the net was built, by and large, by public money. I feel sorry for the content-producing companies, but they don't have a fundamental right to a profit, particularly if it comes at the expense of the free dissemination of information.

I feel sorry for the content-producing companies, but they don't have a fundamental right to a profit, particularly if it comes at the expense of the free dissemination of information.

They do have the fundamental right to decide how their content will be distributed, in order to secure their profitability.

They aren't the only ones suffering: you, the consumer are right there, receiving a weakened product when newspapers can no longer afford to have both editors and reporters, let alone skilled ones.

The newspapers aren't going to be profitable because Comcast can now suddenly decide to axe all net content that's not willing to pay whatever fee they want to charge. The old methods of distributing media are dead: allowing private companies to censor what information people can access isn't going to bring it back. You also seem perfectly willing to throw many potentially profitable companies under the bus if they cannot or will not pay what the internet providers demand. Many of the internet giants today started out as tiny startups somewhere with virtually no audience. How would an up-and-coming Google ever arise if nobody ever sees it because its creators can't pay the fees to make their content accessible?

Particularly for the better news organizations.

It takes labor to make all the phone calls, run across town copying documents, file FOIA requests, sit in on meetings the average cube rat would be bored to tears with. And yet, you insist the fruits of that labor be handed over freely for anyone with the slightest casual interest. The last ten years have been a great ride, but it's going to end eventually, and in some places it already has. WSJ has a good portion behind a wall, Harpers has had one up for quite some time.

Likewise, for professionally-made TV & movies, it takes labor. People have to get paid. You can't demand a product on one hand, and insist its producers accept a zero dollar value assignation on the other. If the ISPs, who control the protocols, don't start working with content providers, they'll start ending up on the wrong side of lawsuits.

You're arguing against a strawman. Good content required people be paid, but that can be still be done without restricting the free flow of information to people. If a news provider wants to make its service pay-only, that's fine. This, however, isn't even really the issue. There's a vast amount of websites and information, provided for and maintained by private citizens, that would vanish if the ISPs filter content based on who pays. You're posting, right now, on one of those sites.

I pay good dollar for well-made movies, video games and music. If the makers of these types of media think a tightly-controlled communications network is going to somehow boost their bottom line, they're nuts. Rather, people are simply going to walk away entirely from such entities, and their ISPs, if their ISPs turn the Internet into a pay-for-play wasteland favoring those wealthy enough to set up shop.

edited for spelling.

"There's a vast amount of websites and information, provided for and maintained by private citizens, that would vanish if the ISPs filter content based on who pays."

Uh, maybe you know little about running websites, but every site on the internet pays for their data link. Links to fat, fast, backbones cost more. Much, much, more. Links to fat, fast, backbones *without* any QoS or filtering are very, very, expensive.

Links to lossy backbones are much, much, cheaper. There's no way that DU can afford a lossless connection for each user, short of requiring a $300-1,500 fee, per month, for each user.... to read/post. So they throw away a lot of bad traffic, and let it come in eventually, or be double-posted (etc), to make up for not charging a $300/mo entry fee.

The content the ISPs don't like, or who won't pay their fees, will vanish. Period. It's allowing the ISPs to determine what content the public will be able to access. You can go on and on about people being paid for their content, but you dodge the core issue: the net itself, built and maintained by the taxpayer (at some point) and representing the pinnacle of the free exchange of ideas, should not be regulated by those who sell access to the service. If you allow such a thing to occur, you're essentially approving the Internet wholly becoming the property of telecommunications companies.

"The infrastructure for the net was built, by and large, by public money" demonstrates that.

How many Tier-1 one backbones were built by the government? (None)
How many of the top-ten sites were government created? (None)

The Internet was built by using a mesh-routing technology spawned from ideas formed in Uni and Defense, but both forces checked out, for the most part, about 10 years ago. The private companies jumped in, and they're the ones who actually built the network in the last 10 years.

The government wasn't laying fiber, it was private companies.

What this is about is charging for access to other people's content.

Why do we have to pay more for other channels?

Can't we just pass a law, and make sure everybody can see HBO?

The internet is, by this point, practically a necessary public utility. I don't have to subscribe to HBO, or even own a television. However, accessing the net is becoming an integral part of the average person's everyday lives. It's expected at many jobs now for people to have net access to answer work-related emails or even to do work while at home.

I'm also not sure you really want the net to resemble the morass cable television has become. Most channels carry insipid programming, with a disturbing lack of alternate viewpoints given by any news channels. In addition, most channels are owned by a select group of media conglomerates who carefully monitor anything that goes out over the airwaves. If net neutrality isn't enforced, the net will become a mess of corporate-approved megasites whose content will be sanitized for the public.