Ok, first lets get the obvious stuff out of the way. Unlike how the cartoon depicts it, not having Net Neutrality doesn't automagically mean that they can add big fat pipes for voip and digital TV. Also, Net Neutrality wont cause everything to come to crashing halt, or even slow things down.
Two things did bother me though. They said that letting them sort through what is sent will make everything faster and that Net Neutrality stifles innovation. The first one was a down right lie. It speeds some things, like yahoo, at the cost of slowing other things down, like google. I don't really understand how they connected Net Neutrality to stifling innovation, though, so I can't point out how it is flawed.
The pipe analogy doesn't display the situation accurately. Forget it all together, it will only confuse the issue. Here is what will happen. Almost everything will probably follow the same pipe to and from the internet backbone. Then the ISPs will sort for packets coming from the backbone that came from someone who has paid, send them through the last mile, then send the data from whoever hasn't paid, unless they get more from the person who has paid. I don't know how much they intend to discriminate by.
Lack of Net Neutrality is bad for us. ISPs intend to charge content providers for favored service. The ISPs do not own this content, the content providers do. You are paying the ISPs to connect you to the backbone so you can see this content that anyone can provide if they are connected to that backbone. Before the net, freedom of speech was limited to who has the money to broadcast a message. This is a probem in democracies like Russia where things like T.V. channels are controlled either by the government or oil companies. By giving whoever pays the most the largest say, this will no longer be true of the net. It also a problem for little guys like hlp and bloggers, or just people who host their own personal website, who won't be able to pay anything close to what amazon could. It also hurst people who won't pay them out of moral integrity such as google. They gave voip as an example of something that it would be good to give priority. Giving voip priority is a bad idea. Voip currently doesn't work well because it needs to send a lot of data back and forth. Media takes a lot more bandwidth than the text that is used in html code, muds<my friend is hosting one with telnet>, IM conversations, and newsgroup threads. It
will clog things up.
I do believe that hands off is a good approach to the internet. To the ISPs and to the government. They provide the wires like we pay them to, we should be able to use them how we choose. Unfortunatly the republican party blocked this bill.
oh, we have a
stupid flash thing as well.
edit: Oh yeah, the
Christian Science Monitor is a great example of someone who would be hurt.
