Amateur Megalomania

For the life of me, I can’t understand this.

The proposed House legislation, the Communications Opportunity, Promotion and Enhancement Act (COPE), offers no protections for “network neutrality.”

Currently, your Internet provider does not voluntarily censor the Web as it enters your home. This levels the playing field between the tiniest blog and the most popular Web site.

Yet the big telecom companies want to alter this dynamic. AT&T and Verizon have publicly discussed their plans to divide the information superhighway into separate fast and slow lanes. Web sites and services willing to pay a toll will be channeled through the fast lane, while all others will be bottled up in the slower lanes. COPE, and similar telecom legislation offered in the Senate, does nothing to protect the consumer from this transformation of the Internet.

The telecoms are frustrated that commercial Web sites reap unlimited profits while those providing entry to your home for these companies are prevented from fully cashing in. If the new telecom regulations pass without safeguarding net neutrality, the big telecom companies will be able to prioritize the Web for you. They will be free to decide which Web sites get to your computer faster and which ones may take longer – or may not even show up at all.

So if AOL partners with Fox News, you would have a hard time getting to CNN. How is that a good thing? Seems that something like this wouldn’t get much political traction…

The proposed new rules have received surprisingly sparse media coverage. The new laws have economic, political and social ramifications. There are several explanations for the silence.

The most probable is simply that because the laws have strong bipartisan support in both houses of Congress, they do not appear particularly newsworthy. COPE has been promoted vigorously in the House by both Texas Republican Joe L. Barton and Illinois Democrat Bobby L. Rush. While a few legislators are attempting to preserve net neutrality – most notably Democratic Rep. Edward J. Markey of Massachusetts and Republican Sen. Olympia J. Snowe of Maine – they are clearly outnumbered.

OK, I’m not stupid. I know that this is all about money – the ability of the internet providers to shake down the big web sites, and of course the politicians ability to shake down the internet providers for the ability to shake down the big web sites.

But this is just so obviously a problem in how the internet works. Why isn’t there more concern about this?

I wrote in an earlier post about how I used to be a Republican, back when I thought they believed in freedom and fiscal restraint. Crap like this, along with the record spending, the refusal to address immigration, and general unseriousness of the GOP in governing according to conservative principles has sent me over the edge.

Maybe it is time for a Democratic House and Senate. At least then we will have truth in advertising when they campaign for more spending, less freedom, and more socialism.

Pathetic.

Filed under: Science and Technology