The Man Who Invented the Web on Net Neutrality

[Xiahou]

The Redleg defense? Accuse me of an ad hominem attack that doesn't exist? I didn't accuse you of anything. I asked. Are you familiar with the common English concept of a question? Not quite the same as an accusation, is it?

Is not an ad hominem attack. It was the only solution I could think of for why you would be arguing in such a way. I thought perhaps you might be a Level3 employee, considering your claims about what happened last year. I asked a sincere question. Like Redleg, I recommend that you research the meaning of the ad hominem fallacy.

Honest question my foot. "Im going to go out on a limb and say you either work for or are in the pocket of the telecoms since there is no other explanation for your position." That's a text-book ad-hominem- you're attempting to dismiss my position by suggesting that I'm influenced by telecoms. If If you weren't trying to dismiss my points by claiming bias why did you even bring it up? I think your motives were clear to all.

I suppose you could go back to your post and edit that out now. Burden of proof rests on you, sport.

You're asking me to go back and show that no laws were passed to resolve the dispute? That's comical, how would I do that? By listing every bill and act passed during and since the dispute? That's comical. You state there was government intervention- if so, it should be easy to find us some evidence for it. Unless there isnt any? For my part, I'm content to leave it at there being no evidence of government intervention.

Further, as Ive said, the Level3/Cogent dispute does not pertain to "net neutrality" since it was about the peering agreement between two tier1 networks. Even "net neutrality" recognizes that providers have a right to charge or contract for basic access.

You've painted this discussion several times as being about stopping "net neutrality", when in fact it has been about amendments added to a 135-page bill which consists of bad regulation without a leavening of good regulation to balance it out. It's too late now to claim that you didn't say what you said. I recommend reading back through your posts.

I'll tell you what, you educate me on this one. What is new in the bill the jeopardizes the current "net neutrality"? There must be something- since you're now claiming that this bill is why the ammendment was neccesitated.

There wasn't a bill to have net neutrality. Did you not even read your own link? What was defeated was an amendment to the Stevens bill which would have added some guarantees. Are you now claiming the above isn't a support for the Stevens bill? Either you're just not understanding what was going on in committee or you aren't paying attention to the posts in this thread.

You're just being ridiculous. I never said it was a bill and what difference does it make besides? I was against it because I see it as new, burdensome regulation of the Internet. I don't care whether it's a bill, an ammendment to a bill, or an executive order- I am opposed.

They've flat out stated that they want to finance improvements to a higher level internet broadband backbone by providing preferential service to those who pay higher fees. It's no secret.

Of course, and they should be allowed to. Anyone should be allowed to pay more for faster access. The "net neutrality" accusation is that people who don't pay a premium will have their service deliberately degraded or pushed into Snowe's so called 'slow lane' or be blocked altogether. This won't happen- if Amazon wants the status-quo they can continue to pay for it. If Google wants to dump terabytes worth of streaming video onto these networks and run it over the existing infrastructure they can do so. If they want network providers to provide high-speed, low-latency connections for streaming video, they can pay for the upgrade. Network providers are not charities and neither is Google.

The CAGW first started as a reasonably non-partisan anti-waste group back in the 1980's. They publish the Pig Book, which I hope you're familiar with, at least. If only they'd stuck to their non-partisan beginnings. But in the mid-90's they took a great deal of money from Microsoft to fight legislation dealing with open source software. At that point they lost massive amounts of credibility and now they're known to decry waste on one hand while accepting massive funding from corporations which promote that very waste. It's the height of hypocrisy. Google "open source" and "CAGW" and report back to us, OK?

Look, I'm sorry but your orginal characterizations of both Cato and CAGW can be described as little other than false. First both organizations recieve the vast majority of their funding from private individuals. Cato recieves about 80% of its funding from private citizens and about 8% from corporations. So, no, they are not in the pocket of big business- not even close. You've also still totally failed to show any examples of when Cato endorsed any pro-business regulations. Naturally, some corporations do support Cato- it's consistently pro-free market and anti-regulation and some businesses feel these positions are in their interests. But again, these contributions only account for a small part of their funding. I often disagree with Cato on foriegn policy and national security- but they are nothing if not consistent.

As for CAGW, they also only get a small amount of their total funding from corporations. I also am familiar with their so called anti-opensource position that you're trying to use to demonize the entire organization. Let's post CAGW's position on the topic for everyone to read so they can judge for themselves how you've mischaracterized it.

October 29, 2003

I invite everyone to read the entire article- but for brevity's sake, I will post the closing paragraph here:

CAGW and its more than 11,500 members in the Bay State who want fairness in government contracting are still waiting for an official statement from the governor's office. Government should choose software based on it's merits, not on the way it is developed or licensed. This will allow open source software and commercial developers to compete, taxpayers to save money, and customers to benefit from better products.

Hardly the position that you tried to portray them as having.... They didn't unfairly attack open-source, they said that both have different costs/benefits and that both should be chosen based on the merits of the software- not based on whether or not it's open source. The Massachusettes proposal was to completely slam the door on non-open source software- period. CAGW was right- doing such a thing out of hand is not in the interests of effecient government.