Congresswoman Writes On Broadband, Net Neutrality

An anonymous reader writes "Anna G. Eshoo, a California Democrat representing parts of Silicon Valley, has written an op-ed defending net neutrality and pushing the administration to take more steps to speed up US broadband. From the article: 'A climate of openness and innovation has been the hallmark of the Internet. A decade ago, it's what allowed a startup named Google to compete with better-funded, less technologically advanced competitors. Today, Congress has the responsibility to preserve this climate for the next Google, and for the consumers and the economy that will benefit from its success.'"

Opt-ed??

[claybugg]

Can we opt out?

Re:Wrong, wrong, wrong.

[CyprusBlue113]

What are you smoking? The internet flourished specifically because of regulation. Look up some of the history of reciprocal comp for example, or the tarifs before cable/dsl were exempted from them, PSCs etc.

Re:Wrong, wrong, wrong.

[Charliemopps]

To be frank, you have no idea what you're talking about. This isn't about the government trying to control the internet, it's about the government telling the ISPs to STOP trying to control the internet. It takes extra equipment, extra staff, extra planning to control whos packets get which priority and keep track of billing. All of this will require and entirely new divisions inside ISPs. It's much simpler to just leave everything alone and stop dinking around with traffic shaping. The ISPs have been lying to and defrauding their customers about what bandwidth they can expect with their given package for about a decade. With the advent of recent high bandwidth services such as Netflix, youtube, etc... it's becoming increasing obvious to the average internet user that "something" is wrong. ISPs are trying to blame their customers or the services their customers are trying to use. But the fact of the matter is, the formula is fairly simple, If they are selling you 5mb/s service, you should be able to get that speed at 6pm on a Saturday night. But we all know how unlikely that really is. ISPs need to upgrade their infrastructure and are instead are trying to block their customers from accessing sites that would allow them to use the service they paid for.

Re:Wrong, wrong, wrong.

[biryokumaru]

Whom.

Re:Wrong, wrong, wrong.

[shutdown -p now]

Since when? Have there been sites you could not access? I haven't noticed ANY change in how my ISP acts now, or five years ago, or even back in the beginning (1993).

It didn't yet get to the point where it would be up in your face, such as pay to access certain websites. But major US ISPs have already stated that they'd like to see e.g. Google pay extra to have their content delivered to end user at the same speed as everyone else's, rather than being throttled down. The way it reflects upon you as a user is that Google might no longer be able to afford to offer some services for free that it does today, and there will be more ads on others.