The internet is breaking

A right, eh? How do you propose funding infrastructure upgrades if it's free?

So you want the US government maintaining the Internet? I'm a bleeding-heart liberal, and I support nationalized healthcare, etc, but there's no way in hell I would support a government-run internet. First of all, the internet is inherently multinational and doesn't discriminate about which packet came from where. You can't even pretend that the US wouldn't block traffic to/from Cuba, Iran and other undesirable nations. Also, the potential for abuse is far greater. Do you expect the government not to snoop around on the internet, looking at your data? Of course, at first they'd be looking for child porn and terrorist communications, but they'd spread to prosecuting music piracy, adultery and profanity over instant messaging. The internet must stay the open, free wellspring of data that it is now, without filters put in place "for your protection."

lololololol
ok history lesson arpnet or the internet as yous guys like to call it was started by our tax payer money and controlled by the US gov. It was opened up to the public.
The net is still controlled by the US gov much to the chagrin of many nations, we wont give up control of the root as promissed.

Government controlling the internet may seem outlandish and undesirible but it is excatly what we have right now, they just havent clenthced the fist.

The only government regulation of the internet I would support is to guarantee competition. That means eliminating "natural monopolies" and making sure customers have actual options. Making sure that there is no collusion between "competitors" would be helpful as well. The reason I trust a for-profit company more than the government is that the company's actions are more specific. If I don't like the company, I can ditch their service. If I don't like what the government is doing with the internet, but I like the government's immigration, economic and foreign policies, then I'll probably find myself voting to continue to harmful internet policy as well. Thus, it's easier to effect positive change with a for-profit company.

Okay...

We are all kind of looking at the relationship to this Renaissance, just as Gutenberg did over 500 years ago. The online experience is still in its infancy. How would you compare the evolution of the printing press, language, books etc. to what we are currently going through?

On an important parallel a century ago, citizens became aware of the idea of what was and is today known as "Public Utilities".

At the time, during the progressive era, there had been a previous period of time, where large corporations took control and ran this country, leaving people at the bottom in a stricken state of affairs.

Private control of the country by extremely wealthy families (Rockefellers, Morgans, Mellons Rothchilds, Crockers, Dukes etc.) were able to control most of the country.

By the 1900, the country was in a huge fight over regulation of corrupt private company behavior vs. public ownership with the two of the key battles being water and electricity. What had mostly been the domain of small medium and large water companies, would all but be taken over by local government. As an example of just how serious the issue was, many people preferred to drink beer rather than water due to the danger of contaminated, overpriced water.

A growing number of Americans at the time, especially working class people were tired of wealthy people lording it over the rest of the country. This could be seen in the battle over railroads and the next big bubble industry coming up, electricity. By the turn of the century, most of the rural areas wouldn't see electric anything for another 30 years, while urban areas would have overlapping power struggles (funny how that word has such an interesting dual purpose here doesn't it) where the streets would have huge numbers of wires strung up by competing companies all on the same pole.

The battle over who might distribute electricity to the public became the number one issue in this country for over two generations. City's like Los Angeles and Seattle showed how publicly owned and operated electric power operations could be far cheaper to run than private companies, that were at the time controlled by the wealthiest few in the country, mostly organized out of Wall Street's tiny super elite.

As the anger started to move most of the country towards the side of public ownership, the power brokers, like Morgan organized the National Civic Forum to find a strategy to counter the growing "Socialism" that was spreading across the country.

In 1907 the struggle came to a head between Morgan and Thomas Edison's former right hand man Sam Insull. Insull had been calling for the formation of Public Utility Commissions as a way to head off the "Public Power Movement".

The idea that the richest people in this country would ever accept any kind of regulation over their personal property had gone too far. But Insull's strategy of pushing regulatory control out of the hands of local communities and into state control was the only thing that staved off the growing demand for public control over the country's electric industry.

What was so insidious about Insull's state regulatory strategy, was first off, it gave the appearance that privately owned electric companies were becoming good citizens that would follow rules. But what was worse, it moved the decisions to the state capital, of which most communities had few resources to send someone to keep an eye on the Public Utitility Commission (PUC). Within a decade the public power movement had documented the fact that most PUC's were in the hands of companies they had been setup to regulate. The only state in the country to oppose the PUC model has been Nebraska.

Just as we watched all of the small ISP's that helped make the BBS community and then the Internet be swallowed up by big companies, the same quickly happened with electric companies.

As anyone who has watched the disasterous Clinton Gore move to privatize the internet here with the 1996 Telecommunications act, we were promised that the private corporations would use their newly aquired freedoms to bring the country a new "online super highway" Where fiber optics would revolutionize the speed and power of the internet.

Instead, that deregulated environment would be used to put back the monsterous AT&T mega monopoly that had been dismantled just a generation before after over a decade of public battles. Rather than using the online super growth of the 90's to build that super highway the money was used in a massive buying spree that has given most of the country one or two options, both a distant 2nd to what Fiber could have given us by now.

A century ago, private interests came up with the strategy that public control over things like electricity or our phones was tantamount to communism and used the red baiting tactic to scare the public into thinking that even thinking about public control over these things might inspire red dictatorships here.

The likes of NBC, a Morgan created network was used to attack public control vs private ownership in the country.

Today, most people are ignorant of the immense public battles that took place over public vs. private control. Back then, the idea that the city councils in this country were conspiring with communists to take away the rich's patriotic right to control these important resources won out because of the fact that radio and and most of the country's newspapers were held by conservatives.

The progressive era between 1907 and 1920 was all about small town conservatives waking up to the corruption and lies of the super wealthy. The likes of Teddy Roosevelt and many other famous populists called for more than just a reform of the country but an awareness that placing a pricetag on everything just isn't ethical or wise.

Next time you get a chance, take another look at the Wizard of Oz, look at it as a carefully written story of the hidden coporate elite that run this country from behind a curtain of propaganda and lies designed to attack public governance and democratic values over private, top down corporate dictatorships.

I agree. energynet, you should turn that into an article. This is off subject, but you comment reminded me of the quote who else but the Republican party could convince the majority of Americans that tax cuts for the wealthy was good for them also...

Btw, good article Vinnl

But seriously, great piece - clipped to Newsviner's Picks.

One could argue that that's just how the market works, one could also argue that the system is flawed.

I could not agree more. The system is...to put it very mildly....@!$%#ed. Net neutrality is not the answer though, it's just another problem.

Your bus analogy is very good.....and that would really suck...but for the analogy to work you would have an understanding that that sort of thing might happen, so getting pissed off about it might make sense....legal action would not.

If the argument was "let's make regulations regarding how clear a ToS agreement has to be, and how potential changes in that ToS are done, to make it fair for the customer, and if need be give them time to decide what to do before such a ToS change goes into effect"...I'd be all for it. That is not what this is about though, it's about restricting how businesses can operate. It may even be beneficial to a lot of people...but "makes a lot of customers happy" is not the same as "freedom".

The standard model for ht internet which has gotton us this far and has allowed companies like newsvine, digg, amazon and others to compete head to head with traditional established huge mutlinational corps is specifically because we don't judge the bits. We dotn say this bit is better than that bit. We don't say our voip is better than everyone elses voip cause we have control of the throttle.

if you are sellign access to "The net" youa re not throttlign some of my bits and not others.
If you want to sell access to your walled garden aka AOL, nothing is stopping them
But just cause we let you set up a lemmonade stand in a public park doesn't mean you can fense the park in.. you don't want competition near you? go buy your own land and don't try to do business in the public tax payer built park.

go buy your own land and don't try to do business in the public tax payer built park.

What about the many parts of the "park" that aren't tax funded? What about the guy that owns the land around the water fountain and has been letting people stroll through it as they please, but decides at some point that maybe he doesn't want to do that anymore for some reason. Would you force him to allow anyone who pleases to travel on his private land just because the land near-by is tax funded?

The whole concept that net neutrality is a fight to make the internet free of obstruction is ludicris. Yes, it would have that effect to a degree, but is government intervention and forced regulation of private property/equipment/services really a move towards freedom of any kind? If it is I haven't heard an argument that showed any signs of it yet. Maybe I will at some point...until then, it just seems like loss of freedom all around in exchange for likely (though not certain of course) price hikes, and a lack of interest in new business models and ingenuity. When the price of creating new business models or doing buisness in new ways is actually made to be restrictive (and in some cases illegal) beyond the usual business/criminal laws...everyone loses. It has been shown in the Cable TV industry (though obviously there are serious differences there in some cases).

Net Neutrality is repackaged control with a shiny new "it's for the freedom of the internet" paint-job....but no one seems to be even trying to explain how that would be the case.