Internetworkers: http://www.ibiblio.org/internetworkers/

[Cristóbal Palmer <cristobalpalmer AT gmail.com>]

Okay, so that first article you linked? Written by this guy:

http://reason.com/people/peter-suderman/articles

FreedomWorks is definitely an astroturf outfit, and you can judge the
rest of that list of publications for yourself. Also, comparing the
complete garbage "proposal" by the Foundem CEO to Google's net
neutrality stance is spurious at best. I'm not going to claim that
Google is some saint, but the framing of that article is very, very
bogus.

On Tue, Feb 2, 2010 at 10:28 AM, Matt Drew <matt.drew AT gmail.com> wrote:
> relatively free system we currently enjoy.  I'm a fan of the concept
> of Net Neutrality, but it is best enforced by customer action and
> increased competition, not government mandate.

Two things here. One is the fact that generally speaking, the last
mile is owned by either a cable company or a phone company, so the
agency that is already set up to regulate those companies definitely
does have business looking at how they provide Internet service. The
last mile is always going to be expensive, so while I'm hopeful that
new spectrum opening up and other market changes will shift us away
from the current duopoly, I won't hold my breath. I guess I could say
the same thing about the prospects for intelligent oversight from the
FCC under future administrations given its recent history, but at
least in principle the FCC has my interests at heart, whereas
corporations like TWC are contractually obligated to care about their
shareholders first. There are structural reasons to prefer the FCC,
especially now.

As an aside, I think it's depressing that you give "customer action"
and "government mandate" as the two distinct options, firstly because
it ignores the many ways in which Internet access is not just a
vendor/customer relationship, and because it sets up government
mandates as some foreign other, some inscrutable force of mysterious
provenance. Emphatically no! Government mandates should very much be
the transparent will of a scientific administration. To the extent
that they are not, then we have failed in our role as engaged
citizens.

I'll grant that in some ways federal level and state level are very
different animals. It's much more within our power to affect decisions
in Raleigh vs. decisions in Washington, and in my case decisions in
Carrboro vs. decisions in Raleigh. When TWC is making huge profits
while raising rates, you can bet I'm going to talk to my
representatives about it. When TWC tries to squeeze through
legislation that would prevent other municipalities from following
Wilson's lead, you can bet I'm going to talk to my representatives
about it.

You can fight about what "Net Neutrality" means and what regulation is
appropriate till the cows come home, but please don't pretend that we
live in a system with no or little regulation and that THAT is what
makes our current system great. What makes our current system great is
that for $20/month I can have pretty excellent hosting that can reach
anybody in the world up to a certain number of concurrent users, and
with free or cheap tools I can publish text, video, and more on that
platform. The cost of publication is suddenly within reach for
practically everyone *** who can get a reliable Internet connection
***. We need to (a) make sure that continues to be the case, and (b)
expand the set of people who have reliable access to that network.
Let's have a sensible conversation about how we can accomplish that.

Cheers,
-- 
Cristóbal M. Palmer
ibiblio.org systems
cdla.unc.edu research assistant