Mission Creek

Here is an interesting post about the political process.  Imagine in private commerce, if companies could slip unrelated license terms or conditions in unrelated agreements.  This is another example of how the system is broken.

from cnet.com 

President Bush just signed into law a bill slapping more restrictions on online gambling. The odd thing, though, is that at his press conference on Friday, Bush mentioned neither gambling nor the Internet.

That’s because the restrictions were buried in Section 801 of a massive port security bill, which had nothing to do with the Internet and became one of those must-pass-before-November-7th political gambits of which Congress becomes so enamored in election years.

If this happened only rarely, perhaps we could forgive our elected representatives for gluing unrelated amendments onto a proposal that’s destined to become law. (With a tight election just weeks away, how many politicians have the mettle to vote against “port security?”)

full story here 

from siliconvalley.com

What an baffling move on the Indian government’s part…

Outraged Internet users from New Delhi to Silicon Valley are blasting India’s government for shutting off access to millions of blogs, drawing comparisons of the world’s largest democracy to the authoritarian censorship of China and Iran.

“A lot of people are saying, `Wait a minute. This can’t be happening in India. China, yes. Pakistan, understandable’,” said Fremont blogger Sabahat Ashraf, who has several blogs that attract readers from India but now can’t be read in India. “People are startled and distressed.”

Other Silicon Valley bloggers are baffled and angry over India’s ban in recent days of blogs hosted by popular services used by Americans. The ban of 17 blogs and Web sites, which the government claimed fanned religious hatred, was unintentionally extended to millions of blogs when some of India’s Internet service providers blocked entire domain names, instead of just the specific sites. Banned domains include Google’s Blogger, Yahoo’s GeoCities and Six Apart’s TypePad services…

full story here 

from infoworld.com

I think that this is an interesting showdown.  Personally, my libertarian innervoice feels the net should be on a first come first serve basis, and if you are going to be a provider of access, then you should maintain a netrual position on the traffic that travels accross your network….

As the U.S. Congress argues the pros and cons of network neutrality, many companies doing business on the Internet say their very futures may be at stake.

Net neutrality supporters want new laws prohibiting Internet providers from blocking or degrading traffic from their competitors’ networks. If providers are allowed to give preferential treatment to some Web traffic, businesses using competing tools will find themselves in the slow lane, said Dave Greves, owner of Denver-based Faction Media, an advertising agency that focuses on online campaigns.

Greves’ 20-employee company uses Web analytics packages, an ad server product, a hosted e-mail service, and even Google for business-to-business advertising. Without Net neutrality rules, a broadband provider could block Google in favor of its own, or a partner’s, search engine, Greves said.

“Of course, it’s all speculation, but it could radically change the way we operate,” Greves said. “It would put us effectively back in startup mode.”

Determining the full effects of Net neutrality can be difficult, however, in part because the concept is hard to define precisely. Most of the debate has taken place inside the Washington Beltway, where lawmakers and outsiders have proposed several different versions…

full story here

Now I dont mean to be mean. But I think that this short excerpt is a good example of someone who doesn’t understand technology, attempting to write legislation where they don’t have a clue:

Here are Senator Ted Stevens (R-Alaska) comments regarding the internet:

There’s one company now you can sign up and you can get a movie delivered to your house daily by delivery service. Okay. And currently it comes to your house, it gets put in the mail box when you get home and you change your order but you pay for that, right.

But this service is now going to go through the internet* and what you do is you just go to a place on the internet and you order your movie and guess what you can order ten of them delivered to you and the delivery charge is free.

Ten of them streaming across that internet and what happens to your own personal internet?

I just the other day got, an internet was sent by my staff at 10 o’clock in the morning on Friday and I just got it yesterday. Why?

Because it got tangled up with all these things going on the internet commercially.

So you want to talk about the consumer? Let’s talk about you and me. We use this internet to communicate and we aren’t using it for commercial purposes.

We aren’t earning anything by going on that internet. Now I’m not saying you have to or you want to discrimnate against those people [¿]

The regulatory approach is wrong. Your approach is regulatory in the sense that it says “No one can charge anyone for massively invading this world of the internet”. No, I’m not finished. I want people to understand my position, I’m not going to take a lot of time. [¿]

They want to deliver vast amounts of information over the internet. And again, the internet is not something you just dump something on. It’s not a truck.

It’s a series of tubes.

And if you don’t understand those tubes can be filled and if they are filled, when you put your message in, it gets in line and its going to be delayed by anyone that puts into that tube enormous amounts of material, enormous amounts of material.

Now we have a separate Department of Defense internet now, did you know that?

Do you know why?

Because they have to have theirs delivered immediately. They can’t afford getting delayed by other people.

[¿]

Now I think these people are arguing whether they should be able to dump all that stuff on the internet ought to consider if they should develop a system themselves.

Maybe there is a place for a commercial net but it’s not using what consumers use every day.

It’s not using the messaging service that is essential to small businesses, to our operation of families.

The whole concept is that we should not go into this until someone shows that there is something that has been done that really is a viloation of net neutraility that hits you and me.

Here is a story on these comments

From the New York Times: