so irritating

[solarbird]

Y'know what bugs me most about the whole attempt to quash network neutrality so that the telcos can fuck with your ability to get to websites that don't pay them extra in the same way that they fuck you over with ringtones you don't buy from them is that they are apparently too fucking stupid to recognise that network neutrality is what makes them common carriers, with all the legal protections that entails. As soon as they exert content control, they are de facto (and possibly de jure) exercising editorial control, which opens them up to fifteen billion lines of attack for legal responsibility over the content they do then relay.

Of course, that will presumably last about as long as it takes them to buy off Congress enough to get an exemption written into Federal law for that, too.

Comments

[(Anonymous)]

Count me in on that sentiment; it's part of my now-stock "Network Neutrality Rant".

Equally distressing to me, was listening to an NPR "debate" on the issue recently that had some dude from Verizon, Tom Ashbrook the moderator, and Lawrence Lessig. Not once during the whole hour of discussion, did i hear the word "packet", or "protocol", or "router". Nor was there *any* attempt by either side to explain to the listeners just what it is that an ISP actually *does*, and how that actually connects, eventually, several virtual layers up the stack chain, to them listening to their streaming MP3. There is no reason at all why this cannot be explained to 3rd-graders, but neither side showed any interest in doing so.

It was like having doctors and diet "experts" talking about the american obesity trend and what to do about it, and you never heard the word "calorie". Thats when i got really depressed, because we've been doing *that* for at least the last 30 years as well.

[solarbird]

It'd be funny if some of the broadcast "decency" regulation crap gets applied to people who have forfeited their common-carrier status by doing this sort of thing, next. Maybe two wrongs could make a right, like in Dilbert. "YOU MADE MY DESKTOP PRINTER A SHARED RESOURCE!" ^_^

[frobzwiththingz.livejournal.com]

Hmm. the browser seemed to have tossed its cookies. above "anonymous" was me.

[backrubbear.livejournal.com]

One of the disturbing things from a routing protocol standpoint is the current routing system can't handle best-path/best-effort. In order to "route around" the crap of "bad qos", we'll at least octuple the amount of data in the routing system.