MIENFOKS: SAVE THE INTERNET BY JULY 16TH ! ! !
Does your opinion really matter ? who knows, but check out the geek dressed like the guy from TRON !
This is about Net Neutrality. What is currently happening right now is ISPs are beginning to sniff the packets you send and receive and throttle those packets if they don't like what they "see." Some ISPs stop them outright under certain conditions. Currently they are able to because they "claim" it is part of combatting piracy. They do things like prevent the transfer of encrypted traffic or throttle it. Many throttle or prevent the transfer of P2P traffic.
WHat it is heading towards and what the PUBLISHED plans are as follows:
In order for businesses to get the full transfer rate they paid for to customers of an ISP they must pay the ISP a fee. How much they pay will determine how much the people requesting the information will receive. On the other side, customers will have to pay tiered service that won't increase bandwidth but access to information. So customers that pay the least will ONLY be able to access sites that have paid the highest premium. On the next level they will have access to sites that have paid a lower premium but at a throttled slow speed.
The result is you pay more money for far less service. ISPs will make so much more money under this model than under a standard model that no net neutral ISP would ever be capable of competing; it would make absolutely no business sense to not have this model because it:
1) creates an entirely new source of income.
2) allows them to advertise higher speeds that will not actually be given
3) allows them to conserve bandwidth thereby reducing cost. Currently they have sold more bandwidth than they have; and have relied on people not transferring large file or being connected and transferring 24/7.
Additionally there are tremendous privacy concerns. They are actively sniffing packets of information you send to determine what is in them. There is currently no law against this. It is however the very same thing as if the phone company decided to listen to everyone's phone calls and if someone started talking about something they didn't like they'd disconnect them.
Additionally on the sending side, this opens the door very wide for government to influence ISPs to censor various websites by charging them more than anyone else in order to receive "premium priority" or even to be sent at all to anyone except those that are paying the highest personal connection fees.
So if you like the internet at all, support net neutrality.