Skip to main content

"The Open Internet: Preserving the Freedom to Innovate"


I believe we must choose to safeguard the openness that has made the Internet a stunning success. That is why today, I delivered a speech announcing that the FCC will be the smart cop on the beat when it comes to preserving a free and open Internet.


In particular, I proposed that the FCC adopt two new rules to help achieve this.


The first says broadband providers cannot discriminate against particular Internet content or applications. The second says broadband providers must be transparent about their network management practices.



via whitehouse.gov

Given how out of touch and backwards government usually is on the Internet, this is a very welcome shock.

Labels:

Comments

John Allen said…
Not a fan of Net Neutrality. If company x just hates 15 year old boys downloading/exchanging terabytes of data on their networks, the networks they built and maintain, they should have the right to not allow such activities. I am wary of any government involvement in the management of private networks except for national security reasons.
September 22, 2009 at 10:38 AM
Matthew Woodward said…
But that concern can be handled in a bunch of different ways without the provider monitoring traffic, or worse, modifying packets before they're delivered to me, which some providers have started doing without telling anyone they're doing it.Some providers block bittorrent across the board. That's stupid. There's nothing wrong with bittorrent as a technology, but the RIAA and MPAA have done a great job of making bittorrent and "stealing stuff" synonymous, so when I was on Comcast, for example, I got a nasty email from them when I used bittorrent to download a Linux distro.Skype's another biggie. I'm buying a pipe from my ISP. If I choose to use Skype over that pipe, they shouldn't be able to tell me I can't because the ISP also sells phone service and is afraid I won't buy their phone service if I use Skype.If it's people eating up bandwidth that's the concern, then sure, put bandwidth caps in place. I don't have a problem with that. But when the provider of the pipe can dictate whether or not I can use bittorrent, or Skype, or they can have some company pay them a lot of money to inject ads in my traffic based on my demographic data and they don't tell me they're doing that and allow me to opt-in only if I so choose, that's wrong.Yes, the ISPs spend a lot of money on infrastructure. They also charge a lot for their services. And me using their pipe doesn't give them full reign over everything I do on it.
September 22, 2009 at 10:47 AM
John Allen said…
I couldn't agree more that a service provider should NOT, NEVER, EVER modify packets. I also understand the argument of a provider not being a honest broker for competing companies/technologies that use the provider as their life blood, Skype is an excellent example.But, I also believe, eventually, we will have more and more providers which will let customers vote with their pocket books if a provider is being stupid or overly restrictive with there bandwidth/level of service.What I fear is that the FCC will jump the gun and regulate a little to quickly before we have a little more understanding of the unintended consequences.Customers should scream bloody murder if providers start to hassle them about using their networks for legitimate reasons, Comcast sent you an email about geeking out and downloading bitttorrent of an open source os? GRRRR.... I'm locked into Comcast at the moment and that would irk me.Regulation is necessary, regulation is sometimes extremely beneficial, but I feel that this experiment called the internet, is just a little to young to have broad, and I might say vague, rules applied to it just now. Although, I'm also a total hypocrite. I do believe that the government SHOULD start taking internet infrastructure a more seriously, and thus will lead to some regulation.
September 22, 2009 at 11:35 AM
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Installing and Configuring NextPVR as a Replacement for Windows Media Center

If you follow me on Google+ you'll know I had a recent rant about Windows Media Center, which after running fine for about a year suddenly decided as of January 29 it was done downloading the program guide and by extension was therefore done recording any TV shows.

I'll spare you more ranting and simply say that none of the suggestions I got (which I appreciate!) worked, and rather than spending more time figuring out why, I decided to try something different.

NextPVR is an awesome free (as in beer, not as in freedom unfortunately ...) PVR application for Windows that with a little bit of tweaking handily replaced Windows Media Center. It can even download guide data, which is apparently something WMC no longer feels like doing.

Background I wound up going down this road in a rather circuitous way. My initial goal for the weekend project was to get Raspbmc running on one of my Raspberry Pis. The latest version of XBMC has PVR functionality so I was anxious to try that out as a …
12 comments
Read more

Running a Django Application on Windows Server 2012 with IIS

This is a first for me since under normal circumstances we run all our Django applications on Linux with Nginx, but we're in the process of developing an application for another department and due to the requirements around this project, we'll be handing the code off to them to deploy. They don't have any experience with Linux or web servers other than IIS, so I recently took up the challenge of figuring out how to run Django applications on Windows Server 2012 with IIS.

Based on the dated or complete lack of information around this I'm assuming it's not something that's very common in the wild, so I thought I'd share what I came up with in case others need to do this.


This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

Assumptions and CaveatsThe operating system is Windows Server 2012 R2, 64-bit. If another variant of the operating system is being used, these instructions may not work properly.All of the soft…
14 comments
Read more

Setting Up Django On a Raspberry Pi

This past weekend I finally got a chance to set up one of my two Raspberry Pis to use as a Django server so I thought I'd share the steps I went through both to save someone else attempting to do this some time as well as get any feedback in case there are different/better ways to do any of this.

I'm running this from my house (URL forthcoming once I get the real Django app finalized and put on the Raspberry Pi) using dyndns.org. I don't cover that aspect of things in this post but I'm happy to write that up as well if people are interested.

General Comments and Assumptions

Using latest Raspbian “wheezy” distro as of 1/19/2013 (http://www.raspberrypi.org/downloads)We’lll be using Nginx (http://nginx.org) as the web server/proxy and Gunicorn (http://gunicorn.org) as the WSGI serverI used http://www.apreche.net/complete-single-server-django-stack-tutorial/ heavily as I was creating this, so many thanks to the author of that tutorial. If you’re looking for more details on …
27 comments
Read more