This whole debate is silly. Destroy the legal monopoly status of telco and cable companies and see what happens to them if they adopt a policy that is hostile to openness. They will still have their fair share of "AOL" level users that truly don't understand enough to care. As for the rest of us, there would be a sound of a tornado of people moving to new providers and capital being investing into updating the data bone in this country. I say, bring on your net neutrality hostility big media, for with it, you walk hand in hand with your doom.

Hahahah, the FCC keeping the internet open, that's a funny joke. If it twice as open as radio or broadcast TV, then it will be 1 million fold more regulated than it is now. A better kick in the nads to comcast would be to abolish its legally protected monopoly status, same for phone and all other telecom crapola. Right now, the only REASON it is a problem is because people have no say in the matter. If comcast does some crap, many people have no alternative, as comcast and telco have enjoyed for countless years. This is another case of one bad law needed another. The deregulation of the communications business will have its own set of problems, but net neutrality wouldn't be one of them.

Makes sense to propose Net Neutrality legislation when you barely know what the bloody computer is for.

Oh, that's right... He's the biggest recipient of telco/ISP contributions. Who needs to understand subjects when you have other people to write the legislation for you?

Are you being deliberately obtuse?

The government provided the funding for the research at universities, etc. The government continues to provide a lot of money for research. Your premise is that private individuals and companies would have funded the research. The money "would have appeared." IBM and a few companies did form a nonprofit company for research. It would seem to support your theory; unfortunately, this nonprofit was formed at the request of the government. Have you just recently read Atlas Shrugged and read up on Ayn Rand? Your idea that the money would just show up reminds me of Ayn Rand's "field of dreams"-like theory that there should be should not be any government-sponsored charity, that private investors would fill that void. (Before any admirers of Ayn Rand jump me, great people can be wrong about some things. Just look at Einstein's life. And if you disagree, well, we'll just disagree.) I disagree that the money would have shown up in significant quantities for internet of your hypothesis to be as mature as the internet of today.

Legislation for the backbone? What a complete strawman argument. Sigh... Where did I ever say that legislation or policing of the internet was needed? I didn't. I said that the government provided the funding and direction. It was the government that told telco that if they want funding, they need to hook up lines to the major hubs that the government established. Again, you argue that private investors and organizations would have done this. I strongly doubt that seeing that they all got their money for research and physically laying of the lines and equipment from the government.

The military has had many more advancements than just the nuclear bomb. How can you dismiss the military's intelligence advancements by just saying that private companies could have done it? The simple fact is that private businesses use older military advances because the military got there first. You are ignoring the reality of the situation. It's like saying, "if only other organizations had sat still on their research, private companies would have been able to do the research eventually (once they found the money...)"

You want to argue your point while ignoring how things work in the real world. I am saying that without government funding and direction, we would not the internet we have today or one of relative equivalency.

My suggestion is to build an OpenBSD-based router network router running pf.

PF is what the United Arab Emirates use to block Skype use in the UAE (to force everyone to use the state-owned telco provider). It's extremely powerful, and while it may seem like overkill, I'm thinking that it would probably be the easiest way to get what you want.

OpenBSD is a open source, free-for-download BSD UNIX, originally branched from the FreeBSD code when one of the developers got an itch to audit the entire codebase for potential security flaws and exploitations. It's been called the most secure OS in the world. Every line of code has been audited for security flaws. PF was added to the kernel a couple years ago.

The PF firewall is extremely configurable.

But all this requires some requisite UNIX-hacking skills.

http://www.openBSD.org
http://www.openbsd.org/cgi-bin/man.cgi?query=pf&apropos=0&sektion=0&manpath=OpenBSD+Current&arch=i386&format=html

This is a very interesting debate, thanks guys, you're getting a bit bitchslappy now though.

As in many debates, you are both kinda right and you can't prove either way 100%.

Personally I know for a fact that humans don't behave as economists want them to, and freer markets would be terrible. Look what dark dirty shit companies try to get away with even INSIDE a heavily regulated industry like telco etc. But yes, on the flipside, I have seen governments wasting billions doing stuff that the private sector could do better.

However, when it comes down to it, I simply don't trust "the consumer" to buy the right shit, any more than i trust "the voter" to make an intelligent decision about the next president.

And I think fundamentally we are social apes, and the economic system should reflect and enhance that great fact, rather than pretending that a world of "healthy" competition would be a pleasant place.

Thanks for the promote, has made a fair difference to the votes so far

In reply to this comment by kulpims:
*promote

As long as there is a demand for unmetered broadband, there will always be flat rate ISPs, regardless of what Verizon, AT&T or anyone other telco does.

There is no physical way that a metered service is going to be any different from a flat rate service, it will still suffer from the same slowdowns and be plagued with the same traffic shaping and bandwidth throttling that all networks suffer from.

Half of Japanese internet users are using 100Mbps fibre straight into their homes and US telcos are looking at 150Mbps fibre networks.

The argument for metered broadband is about turning bandwidth into a marketable commodity. It's about turning each chunk of data into a product that you have to pay for to be delivered. It's about greed.

He who controls the intertubes, controls the world.

This guys description of that advantage of DSL over cable modem is whacked. You have no idea how the telco/isp hauls your stuff back to their place. If your DSL connects to a trailer 1.x miles up the road and is aggregated with other signals competing for the same connection back to the source, well? You cannot judge the two end access methods unless you know how each one gets back to the big fat pipe.

>> ^Trancecoach:
Yes, bye bye telco's. Unless they're restricted to data carrying (they have good infrastructure for that), they'll be replaced.


Yes, of course they will be replaced. Just like how we've gotten rid of the MPAA and the RIAA since they started illegal practices 10 years ago. Wait, we haven't? Ahh, crap.

Telco will never disappear because they will always be viewed as essential. They have one of the best business positions to be in (an oligopoly that has a start up cost, but virtually zero operating costs for each client) and they still serve an essential function that they can't be cut out for. Deathcow's right. Go improve BitTorrent algorithms because you're dead wrong, Bram.

Yes, bye bye telco's. Unless they're restricted to data carrying (they have good infrastructure for that), they'll be replaced.

Tags for this video have been changed from 'terror, democracy, undermining, criminal, bush, congress, telcos, love' to 'terror, democracy, undermining, criminal, bush, congress, telcos, love, mark fiore' - edited by calvados

After some digging around, the most I've seen reported (none scientific) is about 80mA. Also, I found a website that sells things that are made to run off the lines.
http://www.sandman.com/telco.html
If it's fake, I can't tell, but the prices are ridiculously high.

I'm no electrical engineer, though. Just had a license as an electrician for two years, but I only did some basic stuff. So you may be right, but I'm stikin' to my theory

The gov't keeps handing things to telco's - where's our fiber to the curb? Japan is kicking ass in broadband, because they have real competition:

"Now, 10 years ago Japan had slower internet than the U.S. So they looked to the U.S. to see how to do it -- and they saw that the U.S. had open access laws (where in the old days, companies could buy access to the lines at wholesale rates -- which is why there was an ISP on every corner in the 90s) and decided they were key."

Well considering Ted Stevens is the guy currently in charge of regulating it, no I don't trust the government owning the internet. But Large telcos are lobbying to the government to implement systems in which they have an advantage over the consumer.

AT&T can if they want limit their subscribers to AT&Tsift, by making access to videosift impossible, how does this help the free market? That is why the people should elect officials that will ensure nothing like this happens, if a law is needed to preserve what we already have, then so be it, times are changin' right.

What it comes down to is AT&T ownes the wires that hold the internet together, but they want to own all the content that travels through those wires, call it what you will, I don't support that.