I have never tried to understand the whole deal behind classic phone companies, cable companies, et al. Would just piss me off more. Just reminds me how intelligent of a society we are doing stupid crap to “defend our turf”. Wonder when the Jets and Sharks will dance, i mean fight it out. You hear snaps?

And *IF* the bandwidth crunch is actually real, I still have a hard time feeling badly for providers in light of the fact that (I think) AT&T was given billions of taxpayer dollars to build out fiber that they failed to do and just pocketed our money. In the end, I think what is really needed is more competition perhaps coupled with some publicly funded infrastructure buildout that actually provided consequences for failure to deliver. But who am I kidding..? We’d just have telecom immunity part II, right?

Here’s a link for sending the petition to the members of congress for the net neutrality. https://secure2.convio.net/free/site/Advocacy?cmd=display&page=UserAction&id=162
Let’s join hands to save internet.

1. Internet vs. Web. Right now these two things are so very tangled up; witness the fact that Comcast was slowing down internet access for a specific application, the concern about the AT&T merger, etc. I think that strengthening the distinction between the internet layers and the applications that run over the internet (web, email, etc.) might make it more clear why people are concerned.

Perhaps the “superhighway” metaphor might be useful here: we have different speed limits for big trucks and we have curb-right-for-sirens-and-lights kinds of things, but we don’t largely have different speed limits for different vehicles (aside from profiling, etc.). If this is keeping the ISP’s from staying in business, then maybe we need to find some way to convert from private toll roads to a U.S. highway system.

2. The second issue is related: what kind of medium is the internet? What does the web “do”? One of the articles noted that cable internet got classified as an “information service” rather than a “telecom” service. What this means to me is that the companies have managed to frame the internet as kind of a broadcast medium, kind of a subscription library. I am thinking partly of being able to dial up to Lexus Nexus or something–the service gets to pick what information you need or have to pay extra for, etc. That class of things is centered on the provider. This is in contrast to a communication medium, like postal mail or signs or telephone, which should, I think, link into ideas like freedom of association and be centered on the users.