The Internet Is About to Become Worse Than Television

[onehandle]

Last week, an obscure but potentially internet-transforming document was leaked from the U.S. Federal Communications Commission. It revealed that government regulators are considering rules that would give big companies a chance to make their online services run faster than smaller ones.

The proposed rules were revealed in the New York Times, and they would overturn the principle of "network neutrality" on the internet. Put simply, network neutrality allows you to use services from rich companies like Google and small startups with equal speed through your ISP. You can read a blog hosted on somebody's home server, and it loads just as quickly as a blog on Tumblr.

Without network neutrality, Tumblr could cut a deal with your ISP — let's say it's Comcast — and its blogs would load really quickly while that home server blog might take minutes to load pictures. It might not even load at all. You can see why people in the freedom-of-speech obsessed United States might not be happy with chucking network neutrality. It privileges some speech over others, based on financial resources.

At the same time, ISPs would love to end network neutrality because they want to charge more to major players like Netflix in order to support their streaming content. Now, it looks like the FCC is thinking seriously about letting ISPs have what they want.

http://io9.com/the-internet-is-about-to-become-worse-than-television-1569504174/+whitsongordon

[Xyzse]

1. This drives me nuts.

I can't even get a reasonable debate in NPR about this either.
I am stuck with a corporatist, a moderate, and a republican liar.

Ugh.

[Rosco T.]

2. Edison Carter, Live and Direct on Network XXIII

hope we have a few like him then.