traffic jam on the information highway?

[Birdy]

looks like my free wheelin' days of cruising the internet might be friggin' OVER.

read this:

buzz kill article

What if the Internet were like cable television, with Web sites grouped like channels into either basic or premium offerings? What if a few big companies decided which sites loaded quickly and which ones slowly, or not at all, on your computer?

Welcome to the brave new Web, brought to you by Verizon, Bell South, AT&T and the other telecommunications giants (including PopSci and CNN.com's parent company, Time Warner) that are now lobbying Congress to block laws that would prevent a two-tiered Internet, with a fast lane for Web sites able to afford it and a slow lane for everyone else.

[bouche]

oh those assholes that already control Television, Telephones, Music, etc just can't stand the fact the the Internet isn't controlled by them.

[timouse]

there was a post about this a couple months ago. i think the technology that makes it possible is called "deep packet sniffing" and it means that a router can tell the difference between an indymedia video and pay per view wrestling and give preferential treatment to the "paying customer."

it's actually disturbing on a whole bunch of levels. on the surface, it's all about bandwidth providers being able to give the paying public more access to "media." the practical upshot of it seems to be control & surveillance of the interweb.

boo-urns!

[bradm]

If you're looking for info on this issue, the best search phrase is "net neutrality". There's an article published today

http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20060525-6921.html

about the US House of Representatives passing a

bill [that] would make it an antitrust violation to "block impair, discriminate or interfere with anyone’s services or applications or content"

Read the full article, though, as it's not a perfect solution, and there are other bills in the House and Senate on the same issue.

Aloha,

Brad

[timouse]

as an aside, randomly following links from bradm's post led me here.

meet one of the top 10 spurious patents, as decided by John Perry Barlow and the EFF.

on the subject of the post, i'm glad that there is something being done to get a grip on the technology.

Opponents of the bill continue to insist that 'Net neutrality is a non-issue (again), as they continue to argue that innovation and competition should be left alone. "We are optimistic that the majority in Congress will see this legislation as an attempt to solve a problem that does not exist," said Tim McKone, AT&T executive VP for federal relations.

that bothers me. this is a huge issue...this is like internet infrastructure, not to mention opening up a whole can of privacy worms

[mattm]

It's definately a problem. The sites loading slowly that can't afford to pay really sucks but things like file transfers have some "protection" against this.

For example, torrent clients such as uTorrent have an option to encrypt the data. It doesn't necessarily encrypt it in the fashion we think about (nothing to do with security I mean), it just rearanges the bits in each byte so that the deep sniffers don't recognize it and pass it along.

It's the small websites that will take the major hit but that's life. Priviledge comes from money not worth.