Comments on: Net Neutrality: What Works For You?

By: bee

bee — Sun, 18 Jun 2006 06:53:40 +0000

just two things.

- smart network /dumb pipe is false analogy - they could make the network “smart” for all types of traffic that need it (voice, video) across the board without “toll roads”

- I like toll road analogy.

- interstate highway system analogy also good. what if walmart got to send its trucks in the fast lane on the interstate, while small businessmen had to eat their dust.

“mob bosses running toll roads”

By: gar

gar — Sun, 18 Jun 2006 03:40:42 +0000

Tell you what. How ’bout you people pay to build and maintain a nationwide highway system, but you route things so that, every once in a while, stuff has to flow across my privately owned quarter mile bridge, or my 100 mile stretch of road. I’ll get stinking rich charging higher than needed rates for these little hops, and you people can stuff it. How’s that sound?

Now, let’s talk internet routes.

By: nobody

nobody — Sun, 18 Jun 2006 01:59:26 +0000

i like the AOL, Compuserve analogy. They lost a lot of customers the last time this was tried. AOL could have been the biggest ISP if they had provided the Internet in 1996, instead of making it a difficult and slow link to get to.

The same thing happened to Webcrawler and Altavista. They were the biggest search engines, but finding what you were searching for became impossible, as sponsored links filled the first few pages of results. Google merely gave real searchs again.

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By: Lee

Lee — Sat, 17 Jun 2006 23:19:25 +0000

I think this is all still dancing around the gorilla in the room. The closest Dover Bitch’s list of analogies comes to getting at the most dangerous (and potentially persuasive) element of the issue is:

Competitive information: Without Net Neutrality, there’s no reason the companies controlling your web access won’t deny access to information they don’t like.

But why not come out and say that this can include POLITICAL information that they don’t like? Without net neutrality the telecom industry can control political speech on the internet every bit as much as they already control political speech on TV. Compared to this the fact that they’d also be charging us more is peanuts. The fact that they could be steering us to online retailer A rather than online retailer B also pales in comparison.

It is THIS danger, of corporations controlling the content that users can access (in practice, affordably, etc.) on the internet, that should form the core of the message.

By: brownandserve

brownandserve — Sat, 17 Jun 2006 23:18:25 +0000

I personally think “Website Impartiality” would have been a better choice of terms for what we’re arguing for than “Net Neutrality”.

If VeriZomcast were to have a financial stake in, say, Fox News, which of your local TV affiliates will have the best streaming video of the local news?

By: professor rat

professor rat — Sat, 17 Jun 2006 19:32:07 +0000

Personally I reckon the nets a pretty much nuclear bombproof sort of ‘tar-baby’ and I almost feel sorry for any fool that messes with her BUT the ‘ Manchurian Global’ arrogance of corporations like Cisco, Microsoft and Yahoo colluding with fascist regimes in order to censor and jail people makes me sick.
I want those who believe they can censor the net to know fear…to taste fear.
Cutting off their vig is just the start of it.

By: drouse

drouse — Sat, 17 Jun 2006 19:19:19 +0000

The no free lunch meme works for me. Although the concept of rent seeking might be hard to explain to the average joe.

By: Jim

Jim — Sat, 17 Jun 2006 18:41:00 +0000

I won’t weigh in on which of the analogies listed here works best for me (there are several excellent choices), but will say that, along with many other (in my case former) Northern Virginians, I witnessed a preview of the net neutrality problem in the 1980s.

The Dulles Access Road, a 4 lane highway that connects Dulles Airport to the DC beltway, carved a corridor through the Western suburbs of the DC area that allowed no local traffic. It was built, at considerable taxpayer expense, so that Congress and its staff would have a nice, uncontested drive to Dulles Airport.

I had an office that overlooked the Access Road in the 1980s, and many times could count on one hand the number of vehicles that passed along both directions of the Access Road in the course of a minute, while traffic flooded local roads.

So there you have it - a public resource, paid for by the public, that could only be used by the privileged (or those who live and travel where they do). Like the alternatives to net neutrality, a monumental waste and a scam understood by very few.

By: renska

renska — Sat, 17 Jun 2006 17:42:48 +0000

er, sorry. Hit post too soon. Or Anne’s comment at

abo ve

By: renska

renska — Sat, 17 Jun 2006 17:41:14 +0000

I second Leslie’s call-out of the Kos post (a gas station analogy).

http://www.firedoglake.com/200.....ent-146389

Also Anne’s post at