Net Neutrality

There was an outage yesterday among Comcast users in Massachusetts and southern New Hampshire, and the event has raised the specter of Net Neutrality once again.  After the fact, Comcast is claiming it was a hardware issue, and Google seems to be okay with that, having offered technical assistance to Comcast in resolving the issue.

more insideIf you’re not familiar with the issue of Net Neutrality, it’s like this:  There are content providers, service providers, and viewers on the internet.  Content providers are people like Google, ABC News, Minnesota Monitor, even Michael Brodkorb is technically a content provider.  Service providers are companies like Comcast, Verizon, Time Warner – the companies that own the servers and communications lines that transport data.  These companies charge viewers like you for using those systems to access content like this post.

The service providers want to be able to charge not only viewers, but also content providers for using their pipes to serve content.  To do this, they’re proposing building a “tiered internet” – content coming from providers who pay a premium to the Comcasts and Verizons (First-tier) moves as fast as always, and content coming from everyone else (second-tier) moves at the rate you might see back in 1996 on a 28.8 modem.  This would require a tremendous re-architecting of the internet, but would also allow the service providers to double dip on EVERY SINGLE communication that happens on the web – you pay to view a site, whose owner also pays for you to view it.

Locally, Ted Stevens, of “The Internet is made of tubes” infamy, will soon be raising money for Mark Kennedy.  Kennedy has used the “bridge to nowhere” in Alaska as an example of why congressional budget oversight needs to be given to the President in the form of a line-item veto – but Kennedy voted for the budget bill that included the infamous pork project.

This figures to be a continuing project as I try to find out who’s on what side of this debate.  So far I have identified Tim Walz as being a supporter of Net Neutrality and an opponent of Big Telecom’s efforts to mold the internet to fit their business models.

That’s right – Tim Walz is standing up for right-wing bloggers’ right to have their content freely accessible, as the Internet was intended to be.

If anyone has more information on Congressional and Senate candidates’ positions, especially Mark Kennedy’s, hit up the comments.