US finance sector puts Web pricing in crosshairs

[ShockediSay]

http://today.reuters.com/news/articlenews.aspx?type=technologyNews&storyid=2006-05-02T180423Z_01_N02229709_RTRUKOC_0_US-CONGRESS-FINANCIAL-TELECOMS.xml

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The U.S. financial sector, a powerful force in Washington, may be gearing up to jump into a Capitol Hill fight over the future of the Internet and stop an effort it says could add billions in costs just to maintain current offerings.

The issue is "net neutrality" -- a battle so far contained between high-speed Internet broadband operators and companies with online product offerings, such as Amazon.com.

Broadband providers such as AT&T Inc., BellSouth Corp. and Verizon Communications want to expand from flat pricing and also sell tiers of service based on the speed, reliability and security of the bandwidth used....

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Corporofascists team up w/ lobbyists to earmark their way into charging us all more for the net, IMHO

Read the full article and make a big stink w/ your appropiate committee member, i would suggest

[Kagemusha]

1. Pass the popcorn. This is gonna be fun.

Evil corporate power coming down on the side of what's right for us devoted net users.

[IthinkThereforeIAM]

2. Very interesting...

... I think.

[bemildred]

3. Megacorp don't like it when it's marketing tricks are used against it.

The backbone providers want to create tiers of service so they can charge more for the good stuff while allowing the inferior stuff to decay. Soon everybody is paying more. Dah dah! The truth is that the internet is too important to be left to private profit-oriented providers, it needs to be run as a highly regulated public utility, if not a quasi-governmental agency, to ensure that no games are played like they did with our power system, and still are doing.

[bain_sidhe]

4. Heh. Clash of the titans

Giant media conglomerates vs giant bank/credit/mutualfund/finance conglomerates.

:popcorn:

[Steven_S]

5. Isn't that already in play - to some extent?

A 56K modem is very inexpensive compared to a T1, which is about $500 a month where I am.

And the cable modem with 30MBps goes for $60.00 a month. Regular cable is $45.00. Page 2 and 3 of that link weren't available - so are they talking about home users like us or the big guys like Amazon?


Help me out here.

[bemildred]

6. They already price bandwidth, the things you mention.

The intent here is to also price "security, reliability, and speed", where speed means response time or latency, I assume. Standard IP is insecure, unreliable, and guarantees no particular latency. It boils down to the fact the backbone providers want to make more money, and this is a mechanism to do it. The PROBLEM is that it creates a class system on the internet, which will sabotage the democratic nature of the medium, equal access for all. It will also create a profit incentive to the backbone providers to sabotage their own low-class service in order to force users to "move up", i.e. it is anti-consumer and pro-fat-capitalist, just the sort of thing our so-called representatives in Washington love.

OTOH, it will not stop us from talking here anytime soon, and we can kick those assholes out of Washington and nationalize the internet like it ought to be, if we don't like it. I don't like it.

[madmark]

7. sounds like Intel's pos celeron processor which was only a diabled

version of the Pentium 4.

[bemildred]

8. You got the right idea. nt

[ShockediSay]

9. The whole article

http://today.reuters.com/misc/PrinterFriendlyPopup.aspx?type=technologyNews&storyID=2006-05-02T180423Z_01_N02229709_RTRUKOC_0_US-CONGRESS-FINANCIAL-TELECOMS.xml

hope this is what you were looking for and this gets you there

[Steven_S]

10. Yes, that's what I was looking for....

Thank you. One thing's for sure.

They will never stop thinking up ways to take our money, and give less for it.