Canadians for Net Neutrality
p2pnet.net news:- It seems the opponents to Net Neutrality are getting more and more excited and angry, with their amusing comparisons to protecting the fundamental design principle of the Internet (the end-to-end principle that suggests that endpoints in the Internet should not need additional permission or payment to an intermediary to deploy new services) with communism. I have a hard time understanding the logic, but you can read it for yourself to see what you think.
Where Mark Goldberg says “Sorry – those days of central government planning and the associated glacial or geological pace of network evolution have been eradicated from most of the planet”, I say “Sorry – those days of central network planning where various monopolistic intermediaries (state or privately owned) controlled all communication need to be eradicated or at least diminished”.
Funny how two people can appear to agree politically, but come to opposite conclusions for issues like Net Neutrality.
Even if the current providers continue to break the end-to-end design principle and seek to revert communications networks back into the past, and Canadians need to help build and switch to alternatives, no properties would be expropriated. This is true even if the last mile were to be separated from other services, and provided neutrally by governments. All that would happen is that various levels of government would offer the same type of commodity connectivity services for communications like they already do for transportation: basic infrastructure, allowing all sectors to then build on top of that.
No “expropriation” is involved as it’s not expropriation if a historical property owned by the private sector no longer has commercial value.
Who’ll want to stick with the old copper wires owned by the phone and legacy cable companies, if all the same services could be purchased more easily and cheaply over a municipally managed fibre infrastructure?
I was recently invited to join a FaceBook group called Canadians for Net Neutrality started by Canadian technology journalist Amber MacArthur. This, along with Kevin McArthur’s Neutrality.ca website are great places to connect to other Canadians who see this as a critical issue.
Russell McOrmond – p2pnet contributing editor
[McOrmond is an independent author (software and non-software) who uses modern business models and licensing (Free/Libre and Open Source Software, Creative Commons). He's also the CLUE policy coordinator.]
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April 29th, 2007 at 9:32 pm
Taken down, citing some “legal concerns”
http://martin.cleaver.org/blog/2007/04/21/net-neutrality-canada-site-taken-down-your-internet-service-provider-wants-to-double-charge-for-the-internet/