"You get this tremendous serendipity"

When it comes to shrimp, Tiny and Baby know how to game the system. For our part, we're willing to give them what they want in exchange for exquisite photo ops.

"You name it . . . Face it . . . Look," boilerplates Mike McCurry -- Bubba's former press secretary, now "contributing blogger" at The Huffington Post and lobbyist in chief of HandsOff.org* -- in an embarrassingly mismatched email "debate" [via InstaPundit] with Craig Newmark -- proprietor of Craigslist and charter member of SaveTheInternet.com -- on this crazy thing called "network neutrality" that seems to have come to a head this week in Congress, where the House Judiciary Committee will vote today on a bill that would make it illegal for any provider of high- capacity telecommunications services to discriminate between web sites. When we say mismatched, we mean McCurry is talking out of both sides of his mouth -- it depends upon what your definition of is is -- hoping we're too dumb to catch on. Newmark, self-acknowledged geek that he is, is calling the shots as he sees them. A taste of Newmark's argument:

Mike, can I suggest some straight talk from your clients?

The problem has already been discussed; the big guys will get privileges at the expense of the little guys and at the expense of consumers. They've admitted they'll do that. Let's stand up for small and innovative businesses.

I realize you're cleverly using Colbertian "truthiness," and I just can't compete with that. Nerds are notoriously literal.

On the other side of the aisle:

"You have to ask how much of this might be blatant regulatory gaming of the system," says Adam Thierer, a telecommunications analyst at the Cato Institute. "Yahoo, Microsoft, Amazon, [Google] -- if they can push any regulatory mandate that benefits them in the long run, they're going to do it."

Good point, but if we have a choice, we'll go with the nerds, and speaking of nerds, Sir Tim Berners-Lee -- "the British scientist who developed the web in 1989 as an academic tool to allow scientists to share data" -- makes the case for keeping politics out of it, reports the BBC:

The World Wide Web Consortium, of which Sir Tim is the director, believes in an open model. This is based on the concept of network neutrality, where everyone has the same level of access to the web and that all data moving around the web is treated equally. This view is backed by companies like Microsoft and Google, who have called for legislation to be introduced to guarantee net neutrality . . .

Speaking to reporters in Edinburgh at the WWW2006 conference, he argued this was where the great benefit of the internet lay.

"You get this tremendous serendipity where I can search the internet and come across a site that I did not set out to look for," he said.

A two-tier system would mean that people would only have full access to those portions of the internet that they paid for and that some companies would be given priority over others.

The serendipity is where it's at. Ironic that Google, champion of network neutrality, is acting just like those big, bad telecoms, closing the gates for presumably political/dhimmitudinous reasons both here and in China. The latest provocative you-don't-sbose from Instapundit:

GOOGLE FUNDING MOVEON? Eli Pariser denies it.

Says Pariser, executive director of MoveOn.org, who doth protest too much:

Internet freedom opponents told one right-wing tabloid that "Google has become the single largest private corporate underwriter of MoveOn." That's news to us since MoveOn has never received a cent from Google - or any other big business. We're funded by the small dollar contributions of 3.3 million members.

We know our friends on the far left are really into telling truth to power, but that's just plain disingenuous. As we've blogged before, billionaire George Soros is MoveOn's silent partner in crime. Which brings us to a crossroads:

Apple's browser, Safari, has a built-in Google.com search window, which is very convenient. But what if you're fed up with Google's insidious political and dhimmitudinous shenanigans and would like to substitute -- say -- Ask.com as the default? We've done a workaround by adding Ask.com to our Bookmarks and activating the Bookmarks Bar. Anybody out there know how to change the built-in-window?

*HandsOff.org . . . echoes of Soros-sponsored, Gore-friendly MoveOn.org, whose acolytes are  gathering in cells living rooms throughout the nation tomorrow evening "to help pick the three big positive ideas that MoveOn will campaign for in 2006."

Comments

[hNAV]

such good questions about changing Safari...

i am always amused at how political the pre-installed news sources as bookmarks are when turning on a new Apple.

i enjoy all thought, conceptions, expression, but wish those who profess to be 'open' or liberal, could at least try to fake it.

anyway, so happy the waters have receded, and you are returned to normal happy days.

i wish to tell you, if you haven't viewed it already, the wonderful KITTY of KITTY LITTER has a announced the loss of a fine PET CAT...

i am certain you would understand her loss...

my best wishes.

[Goomp]

Great results from a hanging shrimp. It is to be expected that the pols who would legislate for a hanging chad are terrified by freedom on the internet and would like to eliminate uncontrolled speech.

[Teresa]

I've kinda stayed away from the Net Neutrality argument. I haven't had time to really read up on it. I checked out some of the links you've got and read the exchange between Newmark and McCurry. I didn't see the bill itself or how it's worded and this worries me. Most people forget the law of unintended consequences when getting legislation passed. I've seen the statements about what the bill is "supposed to do" and I still don't know what it actually does.

What I can say right now is that Mr. Newmark is correct. We should be moving to IPv6 because we are running out of IPv4 addresses. That should help not only with address space, but also with network security too. The problem is (and here Mr. Newmark fails to inform) it is expensive to change over. Old routers can't be used, they aren't built to handle IPv6 and so, even though they work, they would have to be taken out of service and new ones bought and properly installed ($$$). There are TONS of legacy systems out there - they won't work with IPv6 this is no small matter!

What neither he or Mr. McCurry have mentioned is that large network concerns like Yahoo and Google already pay higher prices than smaller companies because the telecoms charge by the bandwidth you use. Any blogger knows what happens when you exceed bandwidth!

I'm not sure what they mean by charging more to deliver certain content faster. The only way I know of at the moment (and maybe my information is out of date) to do that is to give certain packets priority going through the switches - all the switches along the route to the end point - how much priority would determine how slow other things load.

Therefore, I have issues with both sides and I have difficulty picking one or the other. It's not just a matter of giving the "worker bees" at the telecom the ability to do extraordinary work, it's a matter of a huge capitol improvement cost - explain that to the stockholders if you're the CEO. It's also not just a matter of some content arriving more quickly, this will, by necessity, slow other things.

It's very much more complicated than it first appears. One thing to keep in mind, most of the geekiest people are socialists at heart. They think all programs should be freely available to all on the net and net access should be freely available to all.

That's why I'm having trouble with this bill, what does it really mean and what other things could be implemented because of it? Conversely, what happens if things are left as they are and nothing is changed? I just don't have enough information to figure it out.

Thus I am indecisive.

As for the google tool bar - I have seen people post directions for its removal from Firefox - you may try searching for "removing google tool bar from safari" and see what you come up with. Personally, I'd just leave it and not use it. You never know what you'll break when trying to get rid of something that was built in like that.