Net Neutrality is taking a real pounding this week. The Heritage Foundation has come out shooting, calling for a major rollback in the FCC’s authority, including repealing Net Neutrality legislatively. Also, The US Chamber of Commerce is calling upon the FCC to be held to the President’s standards for regulatory review, which would certainly put Net Neutrality at risk.
But its supporters press on. Even as GoGo Inflight Internet offers non-neutral Free Facebook access (just wait until the radicals start telling us that free stuff is bad!), Andrew McLaughlin says the Egypt situation proves the need for state control of the Internet through Net Neutrality. Try to figure that one out. I sure hope Vint Cerf didn’t feed him that line. He has a reputation.
Remember the arguments against Net Neutrality and the FCC power grab? Remember how I warned that if the FCC took power it did not have under the law, we’d be at risk of content and price controls, no matter how many times the Democrats claimed it was purely about network management?
Oops. The National Association of Regulatory Utility Commissioners is asking the FCC to impose “Content Neutrality” and price controls, justifying its request based on FCC statements on Net Neutrality and the Comcast/NBC Universal merger.
Sure makes Heritage’s plan to neuter the FCC sound better, doesn’t it?
Closing note: Google says Microsoft is lifting Google Search results for using its Bing Search, with alleged evidence to prove it. If what Google says is true, I think there’s no doubt that Microsoft is doing just that. However I don’t think we have any independent way to verify Google’s claims, so let’s grab the popcorn and watch them fight it out.
Moe Lane
Dan Spencer
Dan McLaughlin
Jeff Emanuel
Yes, there is evidence, it is called a honey pot trap
sparkyva Thursday, February 3rd at 2:55AM EDT (link)If I am google and make up a special and weird search answer: say you ask about Orangutan foot fungus problems, and the Google link sends you to a web page Google created for that special question. the page has nothing on it about Orangutans or about foot fungus, so regular web crawlers would never think that page was a good answer to the question.
That page is now a honey pot trap. Now Google goes on Bing and asks about the Orangutan foot fungus, and Bing sends them to the honey pot page. Bam!
Bing could have only gotten that reference from asking Google what the answer was to the question. Furthermore, Google can isolate the IP address asking the question as a Bing server, and, if it wanted to be nasty, feed them wrong answers.
Google could keep poling Bing on the honey pot trap and identify any new IP addresses Bing was using, or switching to, and trap them with either wrong answers or long wait times to make users hate Bing.
Yes that's what Google says
Neil Stevens (Diary) Thursday, February 3rd at 9:42AM EDT (link)But we have no way of independently verifying that.
RS contributing editor and “a hardy variety of crabgrass.”
Read the RedState Posting Rules
Unlikely Voter: Poll Analysis, Election Projection.
“I rejoice that America has resisted.” – William Pitt, the Elder
It's a different type of "content control" proposed
seandparnell (Diary) Thursday, February 3rd at 11:20AM EDT (link)The “content neutrality” referred to by the NARUC has nothing to do with the sort of First Amendment concerns you commonly link to Net Neutrality. It is solely about allowing the government to limit or control the prices that “content providers,” i.e. Comcast, NBC, etc., are allowed to charge the smaller and mid-sized cable providers.
The NARUC proposal is here, on page 17 http://winter.narucmeetings.org/2011WinterProposedResolutions.pdf
So price controls, yes. Content control, of the variety you are concerned about and that I would be too if I thought it were real, no.
Sean Parnell
President
Center for Competitive Politics
http://www.campaignfreedom.org
http://www.twitter.com/seanparnellccp