Breaking: Big Win For Net Neutrality
The Washington Post reports that FCC Chair Julius Genachowski will announce ‘new so-called net neutrality rules’ on Monday. The rules would “prevent wireless companies from blocking Internet applications, according to a source at the agency.”
In addition, “one principal would clearly state that operators of networks — including wireless firms — cannot discriminate what services and applications run on the Web, the source said.”
Sounds like good news, but I’ll rely on my fellow webheads to explain what this means.
Tags: FCC, The Internets
El Som, although this may be a “win” for Internet users, I think the bigger future issue will be the”hard” bandwidth caps on cable/FIOS customers. Presently, Comcast has a 250GB per month cap. For instance, if I just got Comcast or Verizon for Internet and streamed my TV shows from Netflix, Hulu, etc. I’d end up busting the monthly cap that Comcast/Verizon may have. The Cable companies have defended their caps by saying that the only users that would go over those caps are “pirates”. That’s not really the case anymore. Considering that every movie (in HD) that I stream from Netflix probably uses about 7GB for each movie, that would limit me to about 50 Movies/TV shows a month. Although that may seem to be a lot on the surface, I have a large household that uses this service and we could knock out 10 movies (and a few Dora episodes) in a weekend 🙂 . That doesn’t include all the rest of the internet surfing that my family of 5 uses.
what about vonage users?: wooo hooo, woooo hoooo hooooo!
all is not rosey on the net:
White House collects Web users’ data without notice
Washington Times ^ | 9/17/2009 | Audrey Hudson
The White House is collecting and storing comments and videos placed on its social-networking sites such as Facebook, Twitter and YouTube without notifying or asking the consent of the site users, a failure that appears to run counter to President Obama’s promise of a transparent government and his pledge to protect privacy on the Internet. Marc Rotenberg, president of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, said the White House signaled that it would insist on open dealings with Internet users and, in fact, should feel obliged to disclose that it is collecting such information. “The White House has not been adequately…
Bandwidth Gluttons may force the ISPs back to the bad old days. Or we may see charges for all users escalate.
There are ‘all you can eat’ restaurants that manage to make money.
Yet could we expect a fine restaurant to offer the same deal to its patrons at a bargain price?
The cost of providing bandwidth is substantial. Some would like to use a T-2 capability while paying unlimited dial-up prices.
People in Hell would probably like air conditioning and ice water.