You guys heard about it?

http://www.google.com/help/netneutrality.html


I find it really stupid, it's like when Greece decided to ban all games to stop gambling.

Unfortunently, if I remember correctly, the bill go past the house of commons but congress sent it back to get changed a bit.

Imagine, you'll have to pay your cable connection or dial-up, and then pay different companies to access certain sites. Basicaly you'd be paying this company so much a month to view, say, a handful of sites, and then this other ompany, to view these sites. And most likely you'll get charged for using more then 1 company, and yea.. wooo

Oh yea, we'd be paying to get Windows updates too, cool huh?

There's always a good and a bad side to these types of situations. I would think that the only sites you'd need to "pay to view" will be the more "specialized" sites...not a bad thing. Truthfully, if webmasters had to charge for visitors to view content then the Internet as we know it would fold in a number of days...count the hits you have made across the 'net today alone - then charge yourself let's say $1 for every site visited...I can't see this working as a "rule of thumb" more as a restiction on certain areas of the 'net.

Well from what I've gathered, you'd be charged monthly by different companies (phone & cable companies) where you'd pay different amounts to be able to access pages at full bandwitdh.

For example, if they offer a plan where you get 5 sites at max speed for 5$ a month, and you choose which sites. All other sites, which arent't part of those five, will load but at speeds slower then 14k dial-up, they'd be practicaly unviewable.

But that's not really the problem here. What they're doing is the same thing as if they'd be telling you "you can call these people, but not these. Unless you pay us extra per month"

...and that's why it won't work. People power (consumers) is a mighty powerful weapon

Well, the problem is that Congress doesn't see it that way, they almost ratified it, but instead sent it abck for minor tweaks. They don't care about the internet, most of them don't even know what it is or how it works nor how much people use it and need it. It's like that Alaskan senator who thinks the internet is like a highway with pipes that can get filled with the crud we dump into it..

I agree that more visibility of what's "actually going on" is needed in all Governments...they are generally so out of touch. Well, we'll have to wait and see tho' I guess with anything 'net related, there's always gonna be a way around it - ask the RIAA about that one

You mean about how they sued a family without internet nor a computer for illegal file-sharing? LOL