Hey friends! We have to dedicate this post to the very pertinent and scary issue of Internet liberty (commonly known as Net Neutrality), which is threatened currently by the FCC and large cable and telephone companies who want to charge extra taxes for extra speed online.
If this proposed legislation, which is in the Congress right now, passes, then we and all other small and medium size businesses will shut down without any room for debate!!!
Please read the following excerpts from the challengers of this bill, including the
Coalition for Net Neutrality (made up of giants like Google, Microsoft, eBay, Intel, Amazon and others):
1) Click
here to read an excerpt from Google AND from the INVENTER of the World Wide Web, Mr. Tim Berners-Lee.
2) Meg Whitman, CEO of eBay, writes
"Right now, the telephone and cable companies in control of Internet access are trying to use their enormous political muscle to dramatically change the Internet. It might be hard to believe, but lawmakers in Washington are seriously debating whether consumers should be free to use the Internet as they want in the future.
The phone and cable companies now control more than 95% of all Internet access. These large corporations are spending millions of dollars to promote legislation that would divide the Internet into a two-tiered system.
The top tier would be a "Pay-to-Play" high-speed toll-road restricted to only the largest companies that can afford to pay high fees for preferential access to the Net."
Click here to read more and make your voice heard.
3) Mike LaBaw, president of Sound Telecom, a phenomenal Answering Service that handles inbound calling services for us as well as the Red Cross and other large companies, has written the following about this tense issue:
"FCC Chairman, Kevin Martin, is a very enthusiastic supporter of "numbers". Small to midsize businesses will be impacted by this new proposal that would place a tax on telephone numbers. Many firms with 20 to 100 employees could see their telephone bills increase hundreds of dollars each month. And guess what, the recipients of most of these taxes which are used to provide Universal Service to low income, rural, insular and high cost areas are once again the telecommunications companies such as AT&T, Qwest, Verizon and Comcast. These companies collect these taxes from consumers and then they receive most of the $7 Billion dollars collected each year to provide USF (Universal Service Fund). Starting to see a pattern here?
We urge you to get involved, contact the Senators in your state and the FCC and let them know that you are opposed to paying these ill-conceived taxes and destroying equal access to the Internet. Please check out this website, keep a close eye on the news and mail, email or fax your Senators. Please ask them to thwart the efforts of these large lobbyists."
Thank you for your time. We urge your immediate action.
Sincerely,
The CLC Team
by: CLCLeather
1 Comments:
I think the situation is a little more complex than you describe it. Yes, they want to have tiers of access, with the more profitable traffic (the traffic they can charge more for) priority. Obviously, if this were the case, other traffic wouldn't move as quickly as the "priority traffic" but it wouldn't necessarily move slower than it does now.
I guess what I'm saying is, telecom companies pay to increase their infrastructure which, in turn, means more bandwidth. Having tiered access they can charge more for means its worthwhile to invest in infrastructure.
I'm not saying, however, that they should be allowed to do whatever they want. I'm not even saying tiered access is a good idea. What I do think is that while ISPs should be able to make money and charge more for better quality/faster access, they should be regulated to ensure that all content is as accessible and at least as fast to load as it is right now.
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