Net neutrality rules to be announced by the FCC Monday

It's Friday - we're all ready for a little weekend time, so I'll try to be quick. The FCC will be announcing a broad set of rules regarding net neutrality this coming Monday. Very little is known at present about what's to be released, but all signs point to a rather introductory session with follow-ups in October to hammer down the details.

One can only hope that given the recent cryouts in favor of putting a stop to the silliness of blocking, slowing or charging extra for traffic that we'll see some of that reflected in what the FCC has to say.

Source: InformationWeek

Where I live, cable is trying to recoup lost business that went to Verizon. The one who starts charging for extra bandwidth will loose in the long run or the one with the smaller cap.

This tiered billing bull sh*t is bad business. I heard on NPR this morning that you might go to Amazon to buy a book and the website will load super fast because they pay for more bandwidth, but if you go to the little Mom & Pop online book store it will load more slowly because they can't afford to pay for the same bandwidth. When I heard that I related that to walmart and what they have done to the small business. Its a proven fact that when walmart moves into a community the small businesses go out of business. So if a small business owner can't afford his bandwidth needs for his online commerce, he might as well quit. That is infuriating, globalization and corporate control makes me so mad.

The announcement is out

http://www.cbc.ca/technology/story/2009 ... -crtc.html

I don't understand that one.

Not hiding or being deceptive about the way the company, etc is managed.

For example Handicap International has this "Transparent Management" statement available to the public
http://www.wmaker.net/handicapinternati ... t_a62.html

Ah ok.

So "transparent" is used to say, management should be showing what is actually going on behind the scenes. Rather than being opaque about it, which would be hiding what's happening in the background.

So transparent doesn't actually mean transparent.....

I'm looking forward to the clarification talks - and perhaps the first legal case or two. I have a feeling none of this is going to mean a thing until someone 'interprets' them as the law sees.

Should have known Comcast would be one of the first whiners.



By the way, anyone who would like to keep up with this or even share your opinion and be counted, head over to OpenInternet.gov.

What's the difference between streets/highways and multi-tiered bandwidth ? Both require maintenance.

What is being proposed isn't much different than Sarah Palins "road to nowhere" when you stand back and think about it.

Umm, no, that is what "transparent" means. The provider will have to make available their policy on network management. Previously, all they had to do to explain why they would throttle bandwidth was that it serves the purpose of "network management". So now they will have to be upfront about how this management works. Comcast, which has lost a series of big class action lawsuits over this, was hampering P2P services to make up for the fact that they could not give everyone what they paid for. Of course, they did not include this in their TOS, and did not even want to admit they had done it until taken to court.

Interestingly, I notice Comcast also lost a big class action suit in Detroit over double billing. You can see the profit motive here: we'll provide you with half of what you paid for, at twice the price. So now people who continue to use them must be helping to pay for all their court costs, lost suits, and FCC fines...

See now to me, when I do some sort of network management or whatever "transparently" means that I do it after hours or on the weekend or something and my network users are none the wiser, as far as they are concerned nothing is changed.

Okay, I think I can see how you are using the word...like it means "invisibly".

That's fine, but just to let you know, that is the opposite of it's common usage, which means "see-thru". That is the opposite of opaque, which is a something you cannot see thru*. For example, transparency in government means the government is open to examination by the public -- they do not have "secret procedures" which are hidden and/or cannot be revealed.

In programming, transparent is used the same way. A "transparent" element of an API is one which contains sub-components also made plain and available for use by the programmer. For example, the "public methods" available in a class are transparent parts of the class; methods which are only used internally by the class's own functions are opaque parts -- the programmer is not able or suppose to use them, so you don't have to know about them either. Often a function call will be called a "black box" to indicate it is opaque; you do not need to be concerned about how it works. However, if it uses, for example, a global object which could be modified by some other related function, we need to add a bit of transparency to indicate this.

* opaque and transparent things are both "visible", which is the opposite of "invisible"...but something that goes on inside an opaque object is invisible, whereas if it were inside a transparent object, it would be visible. So you have got the usage backward, kc0tma

Looks like the next meeting has been slated for October 22.