[ NNSquad ] Re: H.R. 3458, Rep. Markey's third bill proposing to regulate the Internet and ISPs

["John S. Quarterman" <jsqdell@quarterman.com>]

Interesting point:

> The Internet is an unfinished demo that needs a lot more work before it
> can serve the needs of civil society and the 21st century citizen.

So why is it that many other countries (Korea, Japan, Sweden, ...)
manage to provide fast Internet everywhere, while the U.S. lags way
behind in Internet speeds and uptake?

 http://www.usatoday.com/tech/news/2009-08-24-speeds-digital-internet_N.htm

(The old canard about population density doesn't answer this.  In the
U.S. we can hardly get in our densest areas even the slowest speeds
that you can get everywhere in Japan.)

USA: dead last among the 29 countries speedtest.net tracks, behind
Latvia, Portugal, and Liechtenstein.

Why is this?  It's the same Internet protocols and mostly the same routers
and server and client hardware and software in all those countries.

Maybe technology is not the issue.  Could it be a decade of
regulatory capture by the telcos and cablecos?

Markey is proposing a small step towards breaking that duopoly
and restoring the environment that produced the Internet in the first place.
Good plan!

My biggest complaint with Markey's bill is it's not enough.
We need to do what FDR did.  We need an REA for the Internet,
so we can get high speed Internet access everywhere:

 http://riskman.typepad.com/peerflow/2009/08/rea-for-fast-internet-everywhere.html

Sure, the duopoly won't like that, either, but if they'd been doing
their free market job the U.S. wouldn't be an Internet international
and domestic backwater.

-jsq

PS: As for the ad hominem "debate", it seems to me only one side is
using such phrases as "lying through your teeth".


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