| Posted on Easynews Some of you may have heard or seen in the news lately rumblings of "net
neutrality" or a "tiered Internet". For those of you that haven't, the
issue is that the major telecommunications companies in the US
(including Verizon, AT&T and BellSouth) want to begin offering service
levels for backbone Internet traffic across their networks. This means
that sites such as Easynews, Yahoo, Google and others will have to pay
an additional fee to keep speeds high or risk being labeled "bulk"
Internet traffic with a lower quality of service.
The Internet runs today with the concept of "net neutrality" meaning
traffic on the backbone of the Internet is not given any preference
during delivery. It flows on a first-come, first-serve, best-effort
basis. A VoIP call, an e-mail, and your downloads from Easynews all have
the same priority. If net neutrality is done away with, those that
control the Internet backbones will have the ability to demand fees from
service providers (such as Easynews) for higher rates of service.
A higher rate of service basically means that traffic would have higher
priority over other traffic. There is no telling what limit this concept
could be taken to. A possible scenario could be "all non-premium traffic
will flow at 50KB/s, while premium traffic will be allowed to flow as
fast as possible". Even if a service provider were to pay a fee, it's
likely that if another service provider were to come along and pay a
higher fee, the first provider would be more or less where it started:
with a degraded level of service compared to the competition. This cycle
could repeat endlessly.
What this means to you, the customer, if legislation passes that
abolishes net neutrality is that costs could become substantially higher
to provide services on the Internet. Those costs would be reflected in
the price of the services. Free services could become pay and pay
services would become more expensive.
This is not something that will affect just Easynews, it will affect
every site in the US on the Internet. This concept, if proven to be
profitable to the big telecommunication companies here in the US, would
likely spread to the rest of the world. In short, this has the ability
to change the Internet as we know it. We believe it would not be for the
better.
If you live in the US, you can help with this issue! We encourage you to
learn more about the subject. Become informed and let your voice be
heard. Write your Congressman! Let them know that this issue is
important to you and you don't want service costs inflated. We firmly
believe that the major telecomm companies will be successful in their
lobbying efforts if the public does not make their voices heard.
Further information can be found at:
»news.google.com/news?hl=en&ned=u···rch+News
»news.google.com/news?hl=en&ned=u···rch+News
»www.cdt.org/speech/net-neutrality/
»handsoff.org/
Write your Representatives online at:
»www.house.gov/writerep/
Find your Senator's contact information at:
»www.senate.gov/general/contact_i···_cfm.cfm
Thank you,
--
Matt
Systems Administrator
Easynews.com - Usenet made easy! |
