Neutrality On the Net Gets High '08 Profile
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Bloggers and other Internet activists made their marks in the past two presidential elections chiefly by building networks of political enthusiasts and raising money for candidates. Now, they are pushing aggressively into policymaking -- and not just over high-profile issues such as Iraq.
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Net neutrality rules for broadband died last year, but now Google and its old allies are pushing for similar rules on wireless networks.
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(InfoWorld) - Timothy Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web, advocated that the U.S. Congress protect net neutrality and questioned the value of DRM (digital rights management) Thursday. Berners-Lee, speaking before the Subcommittee on Telecommunications and the Internet in the U.S. House of Representatives, said it was "very, very important" for lawmakers to protect the ability of users to access the Web content they want regardless of their ISP. Berners-Lee didn't endorse specific net neutrality proposals largely supported by congressional Democrats, but he said the Web as a communications medium deserves "special treatment" to protect its nondiscriminatory approach to content. While he was growing up in the U.K., there were high penalties for interfering with mail delivery because mail was one of the main ways to communicate, Berners-Lee said. Now, the Web is a major communications medium worthy of protections, he said. One company or country shouldn't control access to the Web, he added. "We are a society only in as much as we are individuals communicating," said Berners-Lee, founder of the World Wide Web Consortium and author of the first version of HTML. For the past two years, many e-commerce companies and consumer groups have called on Congress to pass a law prohibiting broadband carriers from blocking or slowing Web content from competitors or from speeding up partners' content. In mid-2005, the U.S. Supreme Court and the Federal Communications Commission freed broadband providers from nondiscriminatory carriage rules, and net neutrality backers say large broadband providersÂ like Verizon and ComcastÂ will now be tempted to provide tiered speeds based on which Internet companies pay them the most. Broadband providers and many Republicans have opposed a net neutrality law, andÂ efforts to pass one failed in a Republican-controlled Congress in 2006. Democrats took over Congress this year. While Berners-Lee didn't hear a lot of opposition to his net neutrality comments at the hearing, Representative Mary Bono, a California Republican, challenged his assertion that DRM copy protections could hinder the growth of some parts of the Web. Berners-Lee called for open standards instead of closed DRM technologies. Instead of DRM, copyright holders should "allow people to do the right thing" by providing the information on how to legally use the material, he said. Bono questioned if his idea would prevent mass stealing of copyright materials. "Is that not the equivalent of having a speed limit but not enforcing the speed limit?" she asked. But Berners-Lee suggested DRM limits the market for digital music downloads, echoing recent statements by AppleÂ CEO Steve Jobs. "What is the enforcement for speeding?" he said. "The enforcement for is not that the car grinds to a halt. [Instead of DRM] I'm inclined to make software to allow people to do the right thing first." But Bono said strong protections for digital content are needed. "With great respect to Steve Jobs, he's trying to sell hardware, first and foremost," she said. "I wonder if he would feel the same way about his patents being on the Internet free of patent protection."
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The U.S. Congress still needs to deal with network neutrality, and supporters in Congress are willing to block any legislation favored by broadband providers until the issue is resolved, a leading Democratic lawmaker said Wednesday.
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A global summit aims to lay the groundwork for a new structure of internet governance. Participants, however, have very different visions for the future of broadband deployment, net telephony and other web technologies. By Wendy M. Grossman.
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The inventor of the World Wide Web, advocates U.S. Congressional protection for net neutrality.
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By Ray McAllister, Richmond Times-Dispatch, Va.  Dec. 12--Virginia may have taken a step yesterday toward recognizing . .  . the Internet.   Don't laugh. That would put us ahead of most states.
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Broadband Internet access is gradually becoming a defining  characteristic of advanced industrialized economies, and broadband take  rates have been increasing at a rapid pace across the world.
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The Internet most of us experience is not the World of Ends suggested by the end-to-end system design concepts around which the Net was originally architected and built.  Instead we have something that is faster-than-dialup, and faster-than-it-used-to-be; but is not The Net. Instead it is the part of the Net that's left in a pipe that's optimized for television, for one-way few-to-many "content delivery" and for locking users into client roles, while servers labor somewhere else. I just had FTTH (fiber to the home) installed. And, while it's way cool in some ways, it's also uncool in the way it prevents far more business than it generates for itself. It would be great if the carriers made it easy for businesses to grow on the Net, and then suppoted those businesses with services that helped those businesses thrive and grow. But the carriers would rather serve "content" to mass quantities of "consumers" while chaging prohibitive prices for "business-class" services. Hey, it's a mass media mentality, and they have every right to it. But...
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'Power to the people. And us.' Just after Comcast copped to throttling P2P traffic, a new net neutrality bill appeared on Capitol Hill.â¦
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The U.S. Federal Trade Commission is taking the middle ground in the net neutrality debate that pits large telecommunications operators against Internet giants.
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In 2004, President Bush pledged that all Americans should have affordable access to high-speed Internet service by 2007. A report to be released Thursday by the administration says it has succeeded Â mostly.
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Many of the campaigns for the 2008 presidential nomination are working to utilize popular Web 2.0 applications while maintaining control of their message.
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RESTON, Va., Sept. 14  /PRNewswire/ -- Debate over whether to regulate Internet Service Providers has raged during consideration of so-called "net neutrality" (NN) legislation now pending in Congress.
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Comcast's response yesterday to its public thrashing by the FCC may have had a second, more important, purpose: A prominent Congressman has introduced legislation paving the way for a ban on Internet throttling.
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Marketer says the left-leaning groups are miles ahead in using the Internet for political advocacy.
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Despite our best efforts to unearth tech-inclined voters, Net neutrality doesn't ring a bell with most residents we interviewed in the Granite State.