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    • Comcast and BitTorrent Become "Net-Neutral" Friends [view article]
      "Existing net neutrality laws only state that all information sent over the Internet be treated equal(ly) - all packets of data must be transferred through our (I say "our" because the tax payers paid for it ..."

      Beg to differ.

      1) What the telcos want is to be compensated fairly for the use of their bandwidth. Currently, you can start a business that sells toilet paper online and uses minimal bandwidth or you can start another version of YouTube that uses massive amounts of bandwidth and you would be charged exactly the same amount for your connection. This is like renting an apartment and demanding to be charged the same price for a huge penthouse as you would be for the storage space beside the boiler. If I have a business that runs one truck over the road or one that runs fifty trucks over the road, I pay proportionally for expenses and taxes. Net neutrality just means that after the first truck, the others are expense free. File sharing programs will merely increase the traffic in all directions and clog the pipes in a new form

      Comcast and other providers charge subscribers different rates for different upload and download speeds, why not charge based on volume of bits transferred. This doesn't prevent anyone from getting on the internet, only from hogging everyone else's bandwidth without paying for it proportionally. That "extra" charge will go toward expanding the pipes and allowing more traffic to flow at competitive pricing.

      2) Taxpayers haven't paid for the current "pipes" through which data passes - the original experiment may have been funded by DARPA but now it is all the big telcos and other businesses that provide the average user's bandwidth and pay for infrastructure improvements.


      "The simple fact is that the Internet belongs to the people who use it, and net neutrality keeps telecom greed from getting in between that."

      Apartments don't "belong" to the people who rent them and in most places existing laws don't allow the "users" to set the usage rates - competition does that.

      We are slowly sliding into the morass of socialism in every aspect of our society. This "we the little people" vs "them - the greedy capitalist pig businesses" net neutrality argument is just another example. Let competition work things out. Keep the government out of it.


       Mar 29 10:53 AM
    • Can We Take Microsoft at Its Open Source Word? [view article]
      Microsoft has a plan that ultimately has nothing to do with being nice to open source developers or allowing anyone access to their API's without a (at the moment free) license. They desperately need to widen their influence on the net as they are being passed by on all sides and run the risk of being marginalized in the next 5 to 10 years.

      If Google or others establish a net based free office suite that can be used with open source server software, then Microsoft will be left on the downhill slide. After all, no one knows better than the boys from Redmond the attraction of free software and what it does to the competition. They just never imagined a model where it could all be free.

      Steve Ballmer hasn't changed his stripes. Ray Ozzie isn't striking off on his own to lead Microsoft to a new future where we are all one big happy family. There is a plan and it involves using free engineering labor to regain world supremacy. After all, if open source programmers voluntarily write code that ties their offerings tightly to existing Microsoft products - how can the socialist judges in Europe object? The people will have spoken.

      Be afraid. Be very afraid.       Feb 23 10:35 AM
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