crashsystems.netHome of Crashsystems LLC, and a blog about miscellaneous things

My first, previous, and thus far only political party affiliation was the Grand Ol’ Party, aka Republican. This is because I was raised with (and still hold) strong social conservative convictions. My no longer being a card-carrying Republican was initially happenstance. My first state of residence was Florida, which has mandatory party affiliation. When I moved to Tennessee I became an independent, simply because there was no “Republican” check box on my driver’s license form. However, I have come to appreciate my lack of party affiliation since then, due to the increasingly hard to ignore criminal behavior of the current administrative branch, plus the pettiness and corruption in the party apparent whenever I watched the big news channels.

I will come back to my ranting about political parties, but I want to talk about something else first: Network Neutrality.

What is Network Neutrality? Instead of trying to frame it in my own words, I’ll use the definition given on Wikipedia.

Network Neutrality is a principle that is applied to residential broadband networks, and potentially to all networks. A neutral broadband network is one that is free of restrictions on the kinds of equipment that may be attached, on the modes of communication allowed, which does not restrict content, sites or platforms, and where communication is not unreasonably degraded by other communication streams. (emphasis mine)

To sum it up, this means that on a neutral network, the Internet Service Provider (ISP) cannot discriminate (throttle or block entirely) against the types or sources of content users access. This also means that the ISP cannot determine how you use your connection, the types of devices you use it with, etc. This was the standard policy until just a few years ago.

Unfortunately the debate on Network Neutrality has been one mostly unheard of other than by geeks like myself. This is strange, because primarily it is not an issue about technology, but about freedom. There is a variety of reasons why many people believe that Network Neutrality is important, but these reasons can be boiled down a few points:

• Bandwidth caps: One of the things that a lack of neutrality on the Internet allows is bandwidth caps. This means that you have a monthly allotment of bandwidth you can use each month. If you go over that limit, you can ether twiddle your thumbs until the next month, or pay a higher price for more bandwidth. This means that with more and more websites including lots of multimedia, you might soon need to watch your bandwidth usage to avoid overages, much like you do with your cell phone minutes. Think this sounds too crazy to be true? Time Warner cable is already testing such a plan, and such behavior is the norm with most satellite Internet.
• Anti-Competitive Practices (aka monopoly): Imagine that your ISP just made a deal with News Corporation, the owners of Fox News, Myspace, 20th Century Fox, and many other companies. Suddenly you can view/browse Myspace, Fox News channel, movies produced by 20th Century Fox, and any other content owned by News Corporation at blazing fast speed. Also, if you try to use Facebook, CNN.com, movies produced by Warner Brothers, etc. you might find that the content is ether slow or completely unaccessible. Usually this would be called anti-competitive practices, which is illegal in the United States. When it is the telecom industry doing this, it is called business as usual.
• Censorship: The previous point touched on this one, in that filtering a competitor’s content is a form of censorship, but what about political censorship? During the live Internet stream of a Pearl Jam concert in 2007 the lead singer was muted just as he sang lyrics critical of George Bush. There are many more examples of such behavior, with a variety of motivations. What happens though when certain ideas become illegal? AT&T and other telecoms companies already help the government illegally spy on ordinary citizens (pesky 4th Amendment!), and the same technology can be used for filtering undesired viewpoints from the web.

HR.5353, titled “Internet Freedom Preservation  Act of 2008″ is where politics comes in. The summary of this bill is as follows:

To establish broadband policy and direct the Federal Communications Commission to conduct a proceeding and public broadband summits to assess competition, consumer protection, and consumer choice issues relating to broadband Internet access services, and for other purposes.

If you want a bit of interesting reading, go to the bill’s page on maplight.org, then click on the “Supporters & Opponents” tab. To see the list of organizations officially supporting/opposing this bill, click “Show organizations.” On the list of supportive groups, you have Google (a company that profits from open information), plus a list of mostly “liberal” organizations. The one pleasant surprise for me on that side of the table was the Christian Coalition of America. On the opposition side, there are absolutely no surprises. In addition to a few activist organizations, you have AT&T, Comcast, CTIA (an advocacy group for a huge number of wireless carriers), Time Warner, US Telecom Association and Verizon. Those names represent the vast majority of companies that stand to profit from the ability to decide what people can and cannot access.

Now what interests me, and the source of my recent frustration, is the information revealed by the list of the bill’s cosponsors:

Rep Ellison, Keith (D)
Rep Eshoo, Anna G. (D)
Rep Frank, Barney (D)
Rep Harman, Jane (D)
Rep Inslee, Jay (D)
Rep Lofgren, Zoe (D)
Rep Miller, George (D)
Rep Pickering, Charles (R)
Rep Schakowsky, Janice D. (D)
Rep Sestak, Joe (D)
Rep Walz, Timothy J. (D)

With the information above, what is the first thing that comes to mind? Almost all of them are Democrats. Why is this? Is it that Net Neutrality is an issue that is “un-conservative?” As this blogger points out, the gist of it is that we want to get what we paid for, don’t want our choices limited, and don’t want to be spied upon. Perhaps there are almost no Republican cosponsors for HR.5353 because part of it is about the ability to spy illegally, and the current party leader (aka POTUS) is certainly in favor of domestic espionage. Perhaps it is because the democrats are in favor of Network Neutrality, and an upstanding conservative certainly cannot agree with a liberal about anything.

As I said before, I no longer have any party affiliations, because I find both parties to be manipulative and petty. However, I do give credit where credit is due. No matter if Democrats are ether standing up for HR.5353 because the Republicans are against it, or they truly believe in it, my thanks goes out to them for standing up for something thats right!