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Intershame On: Rossputin (Again) |
Clueless on the Concept of "Net Neutrality"
09/24/2009
Rossputin, embarrassingly clueless on the subject of net neutrality
I can't believe I have to shame this guy again.Freedom Works blogger "Rossputin" is back and this time he's tackling Net Neutrality. And by "tackling", I mean "criticizing based on a complete misunderstanding of the concept."
In Rossputin's article, "Net Neutrality is Theft" (which is but one piece of Freedom Works' larger attempt to stifle net neutrality legislation on behalf of the large telecommunications companies), he argues
"The very term, "neutrality", is a nice-sounding but intentionally misleading description of the policy. Would you call a policy "neutral" by which a customer could walk into a store and demand a service or product that is expensive for the store to provide at the same price as some service or product that is cheaper to provide?Not quite. Rossputin's analogy is backwards. Everybody knows that ISPs charge different rates depending on different levels of service i.e., you want faster internet service, you pay more. Net neutrality isn't about that. At all. In fact, protecting that concept is embedded into the definition of net neutrality...
This so-called "interference" is little difference from people in front-row seats at the stadium paying more than those in the 50th row or from large trucks being charged more at the highway toll booth than passenger cars are. It is not only normal, but necessary, for companies to manage demand for their products and recover costs of providing those products with tiered pricing."
Net Neutrality: "The principle states that if a given user pays for a certain level of internet access, and another user pays for a given level of access, that the two users should be able to connect to each other at that given rate of access."Rossputin's sporting event analogy revealed his ignorance of the subject. Net neutrality regulations prevent ISPs from putting restrictions on providers of internet content not consumers of it. Using Rossputin's sporting event analogy: Passing net neutrality legislation would be akin to preventing stadium owners from making some teams play on a smaller field than others. Altering the nature of the game for these teams would all but assure their demise.
The only way that Rossputin's argument would be applicable to reality is if the internet was a push service. It is not. You're reading these words right now because you requested them. You, the consumer, made the decision to read this article which means that I in no way am forcing my content down the pipes of your service provider onto your machine. If I were, then I could understand ISPs wanting to charge me more for using their service, but that's now how the internet works.
The Internet has grown into what it is today because of innovations from individuals who were able to compete on a playing field that large corporations couldn't simply buy access to and drive competition out. Net neutrality aims to perseve this. Nothing more. I'll let Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the Internet, argue for the importance of net neutrality in his own words:
"When, seventeen years ago, I designed the Web, I did not have to ask anyone's permission. The new application rolled out over the existing Internet without modifying it. I tried then, and many people still work very hard still, to make the Web technology, in turn, a universal, neutral, platform. It must not discriminate against particular hardware, software, underlying network, language, culture, disability, or against particular types of data.Wise words obviously lost on Rossputin. In order to drive the point home that he really has no idea what he's talking about, Rossputin goes on to compare net neutrality to the fairness doctrine and concludes
Anyone can build a new application on the Web, without asking me, or Vint Cerf, or their ISP, or their cable company, or their operating system provider, or their government, or their hardware vendor.
It is of the utmost importance that, if I connect to the Internet, and you connect to the Internet, that we can then run any Internet application we want, without discrimination as to who we are or what we are doing."
"Perhaps it should be no surprise that two such Orwellian-named policies would be supported by the same people."Ridiculous. "Net neutrality" is about as Orwellian as "Have a nice day". There's no double-speak here, just a clear term representing the desire to keep the Internet's neutral playing field available to all who wish to innovate on it.
Comments
- 966 days agoHe should have read this first: http://oneminute.rationalmind.net/net%20neutrality/
- 965 days agoYou miss the point entirely...and I'm sure intentionally. Yes, ISPs can charge more for faster service, but the content providers pushing NN want to force the ISPs to accept content without restriction which could slow down service for the majority of customers in a given price of service because of the actions of a minority of customers. As I said, it's like arguing that 18-wheelers should be allowed in unlimited numbers on a toll road at the same price as passenger vehicles even though the trucks are responsible for most of the repair and maintenance costs. What about the fact that the ISP's OWN (yes, it's a word that socialists don't understand) their infrastructure don't you understand? Should the government be able to tell you how to price and sell whatever it is you sell at your business? It doesn't matter if it's a push or pull technology. It's one big pipe and people can be crowded out or slowed down and the ISPs should have the ability to make sure that doesn't happen. If customers don't like how the ISP is handling it, they can (in most cases) switch. Furthermore, you didn't address my point about it being crazy to apply these rules to the wireless space. First, wireless is absolutely not ready to be forced to handle the highest bandwidth applications without restriction. Second, the wireless space is incredibly competitive and if there's money to be made by catering to those whom other ISPs might want to limit, someone will fill that space. The idea that the development of the internet on its current path will somehow reach a point where individuals can't make and prosper from their own apps is ridiculous. There's not a shred of evidence to support that assertion and plenty of evidence that it's wrong. (You must believe in man-made global warming, too, given your ability to believe things for which there is no evidence.) It's only liberals who could take the single best example that I'm aware of of the development of a world-changing paradigm in an unregulated environment and say that it will improve with regulation. Here's an interesting article on the subject. It's generally against NN but I think fairly balanced: http://www.dmnews.com/legal-brain-opposes-net-neutrality-legislation-at-ftc-workshop/article/94516/ In any case, you have no idea what you're talking about and it's funny how liberals support NN with no good reason other than that they think it's cool to steal property rights from evil telecommunications companies and give them to cool Internet companies.
- 965 days agoWow Rossputin, all you do is throw demonizing words and completely misunderstand even the simplest concepts. "He disagrees... SOCIALIST!!!!". Do you realize that it isn't just liberals that support net neutrality, but quite a few people who work in the industry that understand exactly where we are on the precipice? I bet you get your "news" from Glenn Beck also (just kidding). Seriously though, you are *for* allowing unrestricted rights of ISPs to downstream charge for favored content, an idea that is also quite easily subverted by larger and extremely rich corporations (or, *gasp*, governments) to the point where several large corporations or governments could conceivably control what content you are allowed to see on what it becoming a central media platform for a large percentage of households? What's that, one large organization or government controlling the production and distribution of product (in this case, content)? Let's see, what do they call that? Oh, yeah, that's *socialism*. Smear a veneer of capitalism on it all you want, but it's a slippery slope towards allowing the Few to exercise control over the Many. But as long as it's to *make money*, instead of benefit the consumer, THAT makes it capitalism? Really?
- 965 days agoSo I agree with what you said: As I said, it's like arguing that 18-wheelers should be allowed in unlimited numbers on a toll road at the same price as passenger vehicles even though the trucks are responsible for most of the repair and maintenance costs. I think we should push this to our national highway system. I pay taxes to maintain our states roads, I don't think that anybody that lives out of state to drive on our highways. They don't pay use our resources and it's our infrastructure. Fight Highway Neutrality! We could go even further. I pay taxes to the city so lets ban the out of towners from our city roads. They don't pay a dime to maintain our roads. I know what you are going to say, it will be silly to ban every one from the roads, so let's make the people from out of state drive slower on our highways and restrict them to the right lane only. Our highways only have so many lanes and we need these resources. Together we can screw the socialists and their road sharing ideas once and for all!
- 965 days agoI hope everybody enjoyed Rossputin's response as much as I did. I believe the arguments have been made and I'll leave it to the readers to decide which one of us makes the better argument about Net Neutrality. I do ask that everybody keeps in mind that Rossputin writes for Dick Armey's FreedomWorks organization which is open about its desire to defeat Net Neutrality legislation. In other words, Rossputin writes as a means to obtain a predefined result, not to better understand, reveal or ascertain the truth.
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