Paying Protection Money


As Adam says over at the Huffington Post:

If Net Neutrality is gutted, Google, eBay, and YouTube either pay protection money to companies like AT&T or risk that their sites process slowly on your computer. Comcast could intentionally slow access to iTunes, steering Internet customers its own music service. And the little guy with the next big idea would be muscled out of the marketplace, relegated to the "slow lane" of the information superhighway.

Read the rest of the post. It's pretty damned devastating. And note, I don't think Ed Whitacre is happy with The Agonist (we're in his own backyard) so I doubt we'd have enough protection money. So here's what we should all do:

Sign a Net Neutrality petition to Congress, call Congress now, blog about this issue, or put our "Save the Internet" logo on your Web site, MySpace: Add "Save the Internet" as a friend, write a letter to Congress, Visit our coalition Web site for more information.


Sean-Paul Kelley May 2, 2006 - 2:43pm
( categories: Net Neutrality Diary )

repressive governments mix administrative clumsiness & ineffiency with authoritarian tendencies.

Give me $60,000 and I will support net neutrality.(sic)
Give big business controll and we will be directed to where they want us to go.
Maybe Firefox wont work there because MS has payed enough money to these crooks to make sure only IE works there! Scary thought.

kimmy May 2, 2006 - 6:18pm

P2P technology might obfuscate the origin of the data and the content so that AT&T can't recognize that a user is downloading a video stream.

Anyway, somebody should implement and the user should first install circumventing software. A nuisance.

-- There are no income taxes in The Democratic People's Republic of Korea

Gandalf May 3, 2006 - 9:46am

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