Sunday, July 16, 2006
Net Neutrality--Another post
You can find out where your senator stands by way of Net Neutrality atwww.savetheinernet.com. They have a great FAQ that covers the major issues. Interestingly every last sentator that is against keeping the Net flat are Red senators.
The push to deregulate the Net and allow the ISPs to control what content gets the upper hand really seems to stem from the big CableCo and Telco need to control media. With services like YouTube coming online, the notion of broadcasting will become blurred just like journalism. The broadcasters see what is happening to the newspaper world--far fewer subscribers--and fear that they are next.
Truth is, that they probably are.
ABC recently announced that they would like DVR manufacturers to disable the ability of viewers to skip content. Trust me, that will just futher alienate the viewer.
So who will this kind of shift affect? Mostly you and me. We're the ones that will suffer when smaller businesses can't pay the extra money to make their content "premium".
My company, WESTAF builds software for non-profits. We have software that is designed to simplify applications to art festivals. We also custom build grant making software. If we were forced to pay additional moneys to ensure speedy access to our systems, we would likely be hurt very badly. The end users (folks who apply to art shows and apply for grant monies) would be similarly be harmed because they could potentially no longer have quick access to these non-profit systems.
Please contact your legislators and let them know how you feel about this. It is too important an issue to just hope it turns out OK.
The push to deregulate the Net and allow the ISPs to control what content gets the upper hand really seems to stem from the big CableCo and Telco need to control media. With services like YouTube coming online, the notion of broadcasting will become blurred just like journalism. The broadcasters see what is happening to the newspaper world--far fewer subscribers--and fear that they are next.
Truth is, that they probably are.
ABC recently announced that they would like DVR manufacturers to disable the ability of viewers to skip content. Trust me, that will just futher alienate the viewer.
So who will this kind of shift affect? Mostly you and me. We're the ones that will suffer when smaller businesses can't pay the extra money to make their content "premium".
My company, WESTAF builds software for non-profits. We have software that is designed to simplify applications to art festivals. We also custom build grant making software. If we were forced to pay additional moneys to ensure speedy access to our systems, we would likely be hurt very badly. The end users (folks who apply to art shows and apply for grant monies) would be similarly be harmed because they could potentially no longer have quick access to these non-profit systems.
Please contact your legislators and let them know how you feel about this. It is too important an issue to just hope it turns out OK.
