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Tech at Night: Net Neutrality, Google, Privacy

By: Neil Stevens (Diary)  |  November 13th, 2010 at 01:00 PM  | 

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Tech at Night

Good morning. Last night Tech at Night didn’t quite come because I was not feeling well at all. But there’s stuff I want to highlight so this morning I’m going to make it happen. Here we go!

Want to be more like Europe? Well, in one way, we do: The EU has rejected Net Neutrality regulation as unnecessary. The EU’s equivalent of an FCC Chairman says “We should allow network operators and services and content providers to explore innovative business models.”

Can we actually stand to be more regulated than Europe, and drive innovation across the Atlantic? I don’t think so. We absolutely cannot tolerate proposals like this to force AT&T, Verizon, and others to open their wireless networks to each other, essentially partially nationalizing and socializing a major part of our telecommunications infrastructure going forward.

I can think of no better way to kill the wonderful wireless revolution we have going on, and end investment in it, than to turn everyone into free riders off of each other. This would devastate rural Internet access by creating a tragedy of the commons out there. We cannot let this happen.

And there’s still more planned government control online planned by the Obama administration. No, really. They keep coming up with more and more to do. Pass the popcorn, though, because the Obama team wants to fire a privacy shot right at Google, naturally by expanding the FTC’s power beyond what it already has. Fortunately Rep. Joe Barton, likely incoming Republican chairman on these issues, is opposed to that.

I just hope Barton also gets proactive to pass a bill curtailing the FCC’s powers on Net Neutrality, because again, We just don’t need it.

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  • http://www.redstate.com/etcartman Kenny Solomon

    In honor of the upcoming amnesty vote in the next few days…….. Si Neil, esto es numero de edicion cincuenta.

    …..and many friends thank you for doing this regular column.

  • jollygiantsd

    One company should not be required to open their connections for use or forced to pay someone else to use their connections when each have their own connections and networks available. If any company cannot keep up, they get bought out or shut down. Forcing them to share or use each others connections/networks thus negates the very capitalist basis this country has had the freedom to have, and thus negates the very competition model where the strong survive and the weak die.
    A plan like what Obama is pushing for only make the strongest weaker and the weak stronger while forcing the strong companies to take the bulk of the costs. It would allow shell leach companies to sell phones and phone plans without even needing their own cell phone network.
    This could cause many of these companies to either shut down or massively increase their rates. No more $40 per month cell phone plans, now the cheapest most basic service will start at $100, unlimited data plans will start around $250 per month killing most competition and innovation.

  • http://www.hakubi.us/ Neil Stevens

    Wow, thank you very much.

  • Adjoran

    Forcing companies to allow other providers to use their infrastructure, paying only actual operational costs.

    In other words, you spend millions building it, then I get to use it at the same cost you do – but you can’t recoup your investment, because my cost is now lower so I can undercut your price.

    This delayed universal broadband by several years, so now they want to do the same thing for wireless.

    Congress really should be limited in what they attempt, given their obvious mental limitations.

  • http://www.hakubi.us/ Neil Stevens

    For the last mile wire, the excuse is that you can’t run an open market of wiring to people’s houses, due to practical limitations on that.

    But for wireless, there’s just no excuse.

  • http://xmmlbchat.blogspot.com katesmith

    I have several active blogspot blogs which I need to move to a different host because google is censoring my content. For those who imagine google is merely biased, that’s not the case. My blogs are very small and non-commercial, but I frequently post articles that Soros, the global warming mafia, the Ground Zero mosque mafia, Jeffrey Immelt, etc. wouldn’t like. 4 things happen. One: I’ll spend 1-3 hours putting a post together, put it up, make one change, then 3/4 of the article is erased. Corrections and additions cannot be made on the post, the whole space is corrupted, meaning I have to delete the few remaining words and start over. Two: I put up a post for which I make no additions or corrections, but notice a few days or a few weeks later, most of it has been erased. The title is the post is still up, but over the space of the post you only see one word every few inches. So they have come in sometime after the post is up and corrupted it. Three, as happened yesterday, I worked for 2 hours on a post about the TSA, put it up, and it came out corrupted. I have never mentioned this on my blogs until last night after the TSA post and 2 hours wasted time. I left a short note in effect, Dear Reader, this post is not easy to read, I’ll fix it. I’m in the process of finding a new blog host as google clearly is not happy with me. They have also erased large chunks of other posts you may see on this blog. Thanks. What just happened a few minutes ago is even more sickening. Sometime in the past 24 hours Google had gone back in and messed with some corrupted posts again. One post in particular dated Sept. 13 (I made notes about it last night) this year was about the Ground Zero Imam. They left some material at the beginning and end of the post but took out most of the middle. I went back to re-do it a few minutes ago, and they had fixed it so there were no big gaps on the page, just left in a couple links and the title. I had alerted readers they could find posts with big gaps, and in less than 24 hours google removed all the gaps. Perhaps they have removed entire posts, I don’t know at this point. I don’t think they are worried about me per se. I think they want to make sure that my time is wasted. Just my experience with google.