DIGITAL MEDIA

Andrew Cuomo is a politician most Australians won’t have heard of but today he is trying to radically change the internet that you connect to every day.

As the attorney general of New York State the recent collusion enacted between his office and the three largest ISP’s in the USA (Verizon, Time Warner, Sprint) will affect you personally sooner rather than later.

This along with the recent efforts of Senator Stephen Conroy, demonstrates the dangers of what can happen when boys play with dangerous toys that they don’t understand the ramifications of.

To get an understanding of why this is happening and how it should be driving hoards of protestors onto the street lets look at the vested interest of the “The Players”.

The Politician: He’s out for re-election. Enough said.

The Lobbyist: Working for the highest bidder, this unseen mandarin has a cunning way of pulling the strings in the background, with a simple whisper into the ear of a politician “think of the children”.

The ISP: With their world being dragged from the modest 14.4k Hayes Modem to the DSL/WiMax/Fiber Optic permanently connected “always on demand” high speed internet we now have, the ISP’s lot is a thankless task.

Their biggest burden being the P2P downloading teenager burning up bandwidth by downloading the hottest content that they must have to fill their brand new 1TB hard drives. Dropping newsgroup servers will save them at least 1.5TB of disk space each day .

The Carrier: The carrier once upon a time was king. Before “The Carter Act” you couldn’t even connect a PSTN phone to the network that you didn’t buy from them. Now with VOIP and Skype, the carrier is chasing smaller and smaller telephone bills each month. Carriers thought TV was the answer but Netflix on demand and Joost, allows the return of networks as dumb pipes with users paying the lowest common fee possible for connectivity.

So what exactly was the collusion that happened last week, and why did the internet change overnight without you even noticing it.

“Attorney General Andrew M. Cuomo announced landmark agreements with Verizon, Time Warner Cable, and Sprint to shut down major sources of online child pornography. For the first time, three of the world’s largest Internet Service Providers (“ISPs”) have agreed to block access to child porn from two significant sources”

Seems pretty reasonable right – child porn bad…must prevent . Sounds like something similar that we have been hearing from Australian politicians….”must spend your taxes on the ‘great Firewall of Australia’…..think of the children” didn’t a press release like that come out of Senator Conroy’s office recently?

Even though countless technical people have clearly stated that the Great Firewall of Australia won’t work and have clearly demonstrated how your average 13 year old can bypass a proxy, and that the millions of dollars spent to block ‘bad’ sites using your tax dollars were just wasted before they even finished being spent.

So last Thursday Verizon made the announcement that they were dropping over 1000+ newsgroup hierarchies. They would however continue to carry managed “big8” newsgroup hierarchies.

Yep you heard that correct they were killing off 99.7% of all newsgroups and would no longer be providing access to them.

So you might think 99.7% of these newsgroups were carrying child porn, bomb making information and terrorist plans to rule the world, nope.

Lets face it no-one uses newsgroups apart from computer geeks and perverts right?

Ok so this doesn’t really affect you right?

Lets say you went into work on Monday morning, and out of the 1000 websites you had saved into your favorites folders only 8 out of 1000 were deemed Cuomo friendly. All the other 992 of them were wiped off the internet never to be seen again.

Would this affect you?

This cataclysmic death to a major portion of internet content has occurred, not through rule of law, not due to the highest court in the land handing down it’s decree but simply through ‘editorial decision’.

The question not being covered by the press is why is this happening?

What’s in it for “The Players” – why did The Politician sit down with The Carriers and markedly change the internet as you know today almost overnight with no real public discussion or dialog?

Verizon are leading the pack so lets pick on them – What’s in it for them?

Usenet is an ancient ‘spooky’ space on the internet that no one but geeks and porn swapping perverts visit, by blocking 99.7% of UseNet’s under the guise of getting rid of kiddy porn Verizon are able to establish a precedent that ‘managing’ internet access for the betterment of society is a good thing.

In effect, The Carriers have finally killed the albatross around their neck called “Net Neutrality”.

This pesky issue of Net Neutrality has been preventing The Carriers from making the “real money” they ‘deserve’.

For years they’ve been trying to go to Google and say – Hey Larry and Sergey, you guys made $20b from people visiting your website on ‘our’ networks – pay us some protection money or a few packets might get lost along the way.

Larry and Sergey says back – “no way man, net neutrality means a level playing field for all”.

Or does it anymore?

So according to Cuomo's office, it's ok for ISP's to disconnect 99.7% of Usenet groups from customers without any explanation BUT that if you want to pay $15 to one of the other Usenet providers overseas it's all cool to go and look at child porn on their servers that’s a-ok.

So in affect Net Neutrality has been struck down in the name of “fighting kiddy porn”.

After that it’s easy to start blocking off entire country domains, I mean no one in the USA has any good reason for reading Arabic blogs in Iran correct?

Lets move to something that some people will care about.

Lets block all P2P traffic, I mean P2P is only used by people swapping pirated music and video’s – yes some 5% of the population may complain but most of them will be kids and not voters so we should be able to contain any publicity backlash.

….now lets move onto the juicy bits. – That pesky Vonage Voip traffic is travelling over our users networks and Verizon don’t make any money from this, lets start blocking that traffic.

….You like watching video’s from Netflix using their Roku internet set-top box, cool we’ll just have to charge you for this.

…..Listening to a radio station that isn’t in the Time Warner ‘family’, sorry this is tier 2 internet class traffic so the audio might be a little jittery from time to time, sorry about that…..

As a society we should be strong enough to accept that any technological solution to a societal problem will never work and any politicians who suggest otherwise are either too dumb to be making that decision (e.g. swallowed a story from a lobbyist) or is acting in coercion.

But what do I know; I’m just a disgruntled geek.

If you want to hear from people who are far better at explaining this I’ll ask you yet again to check out http://deancollinsblog.blogspot.com/2008/03/net-neutrality.html

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