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Nexus Clash :: View topic - What is Net Neutrality?
Joined: Jan 19, 2010 Posts: 276 Location: The internet
Posted: Tue May 27, 2014 11:12 am Post subject: What is Net Neutrality?
This is both in character and off topic, so I wasn't sure which forum to post it in. : P Here is my poem (feel free to share it along with the link):
What is Net Neutrality?
In the fight between good, evil, and neutral
I'd choose neutrality, it's useful
You can serve your own purposes by empowering all
And if some villains happen to fall
You can turn that into a campaign spin
They were the ones evil didn't like
And good counts it a win
There are forces out there more vicious than evil
Server crashes, downtime, ISPs who don't treat data equal
There are things more sacred than good
A level playing field where it's understood
That battles won through fair play are surely the best
But there are forces out there who seem to object
And to that end we must protect the neutral, open internet _________________ Murder Monkey
Joined: Jan 19, 2010 Posts: 276 Location: The internet
Posted: Tue Jun 03, 2014 10:26 pm Post subject:
* Note: I added a new video I saw to my website (see link on the previous post) on June 1st if you haven't seen that yet.
Here is my horribly drawn picture I made. : P And also the start to a story about Net Neutrality. We'll see how far I get. : P I was going to make a game, but... a story would be easier. So, this would be the intro page:
Young mage.
You have looked over many scrolls, sometimes quickly glancing over them to find what you seek, sometimes pored over in deep study. But while such study would make you a scholar, on it's own it would by no means make you a wizard. Without the amulet of channeling you wear about your neck, without the tokens of power you carry, without your staff - if you had none of these things, your power would be gone from you.
This causes you no worry, though. In untrained hands such objects would be useless. A thief would fumble about for a few minutes, and then toss them to the ground in disgust. The precise patterns needed to activate such enchanted objects to do one's bidding can become intuitive after sufficient study, but there is a logic to the movements of one's fingers that cannot be blindly guessed at.
And so, along with reading as to what those patterns and movements are, there must be practice. You have honed your skills in magic well, having learned to channel the energies of this world through you, and with subtle shifts in your movements direct them towards useful purposes. However, one misplaced tap and your spells will fizzle. Corrections can be made, but without understanding where your errors lie you would never be able to move beyond simple spells to become a master of complex magic. _________________ Murder Monkey
Joined: Jan 19, 2010 Posts: 276 Location: The internet
Posted: Fri Jun 06, 2014 11:49 pm Post subject:
"Imaginary evil is romantic and varied; real evil is gloomy, monotonous, barren, boring. Imaginary good is boring; real good is always new, marvelous, intoxicating." - Simone Weil
Your eyes are closed, lost in thought. Whales. Whale songs are so beautiful to you that you only wish to imagine the creators of these as perfect creatures, especially the largest of them, the largest of all creatures, the blue whale. You imagine the drawings you have seen. You imagine life under the sea. You imagine graceful creatures too astonishing for harm to ever befall them.
The vocalizations of whales can travel miles upon miles upon miles through the ocean aided neither by tools nor magic. Your fascination with this ability is not why you took up telecasting, but from time to time it does make you think. You spend time pondering the nature of whales. You spend time pondering the nature of telecasting. Throughout these musings your mind wanders onto other subjects, but for the most part telecasting and whales are what have caught your attention. After a period you feel a hand gently come to rest on your shoulder, and you slowly look up.
"Good morning, mage. I saw your calling card and came looking for you."
The man hands you a stone with various symbols indicating where you may be found carved into it. You scowl and with a twist of your wrist the stone breaks apart with a popping sound. A similar stone you keep in your knapsack can also be heard popping. "I told her not to give out copies of my location stone," you mutter to yourself.
The man vanishes - a mere apparition - leaving a small scroll behind.
You pick up the scroll and out of curiosity begin to read. As you do, it seems there is something strange about this. Perhaps this is not yet another indiscriminate, uninvited summoning of your limited time and attention? The message was clearly from someone unknown to you, who makes no claim of your acquaintance, and yet... there is something very curious about this message. _________________ Murder Monkey
Joined: Jan 19, 2010 Posts: 276 Location: The internet
Posted: Sun Jun 15, 2014 6:50 pm Post subject:
Alrighty! I -was- planning on fluffing this out quite a bit, with tons of magic and fantasy type stuff to make it interesting, but considering I have just over 100 pages to dissect if I want to do this right, and a time limit if I want to get this in before the September 10th deadline (and the sooner before that deadline the better), I have dropped that idea. I -might- still try to be amusing in my dissection, but no garauntees.
There was going to be like, a whole story line with you discovering pieces of this not ancient, but certainly old, lore and finding translators and magic keys and who knows what else to make this bland pile of legalese into an ADVENTURE! but... that's beyond what I think I can do at this point. So, we'll work with what we've got and hopefully I won't put you to sleep until we get to the Land of Nightmares. Er, I mean... hey, look over there! Is that a swallowtail?
Remember, the most boring parts are in quotes - only the bravest adventurers dare travel there! So, let's begin:
TITLE II--COMMON CARRIERS of the Communications Act of 1934: as ammended by Telecom Act of 1996 starts on page 35 of this .pdf from the FCC, and ends on page 137.
I'm going to start off with the first section, within PART I--COMMON CARRIER REGULATION. It's SEC. 201. [47 U.S.C. 201] SERVICE AND CHARGES. In the .pdf it's about a half page long. To quote:
Quote:
(a) It shall be the duty of every common carrier engaged in interstate or foreign communication by wire or radio to furnish such communication service upon reasonable request therefor; and, in accordance with the orders of the Commission, in cases where the Commission, after opportunity for hearing, finds such action necessary or desirable in the public interest, to establish physical connections with other carriers, to establish through routes and charges applicable thereto and the divisions of such charges, and to establish and provide facilities and regulations for operating such through routes.
(b) All charges, practices, classifications, and regulations for and in connection with such communication service, shall be just and reasonable, and any such charge, practice, classification, or regulation that is unjust or unreasonable is hereby declared to be unlawful: Provided, That communications by wire or radio subject to this Act may be classified into day, night, repeated, unrepeated, letter, commercial, press, Government and such other classes as the Commission may decide to be just and reasonable, and different charges may be made for the different classes of comunications: Provided further, That nothing in this Act or in any other provision of law shall be construed to prevent a common carrier subject to this Act from entering into or operating under any contract with any common carrier not subject to this Act, for the exchange of their services, if the Commission is of the opinion that such contract is not contrary to the public interest: Provided further, That nothing in this Act or in any other provision of law shall prevent a common carrier subject to this Act from furnishing reports of positions of ships at sea to newspapers of general circulation, either at a nominal charge or without charge, provided the name of such common carrier is displayed along with such ship position reports. The Commissioner may prescribe such rules and regulations as may be necessary in the public interest to carry out the provisions of this Act.
Ok! This is my first time looking at that, so what does it all mean? Well, I'm not a lawyer, so I'm just guessing here, but this is my impression of what it says/means/does:
"You can't read, understand, and most of all translate this into something both understandable and non-boring without getting a headache."
Well. That's quite the enchantment this document has on it. I suppose I expected that, but not on the very first page I looked into. I'll have to roll versus scrutiny and see if I can break through the lock on this one...
My roll came up watermelons. I'm not sure if that's good or bad? Anyway, here's my second try:
I have two choices here. I could either give the too long; didn't read version that gives a basic impression of what's in this bit, or I could go over every line and try to explain in detail what I think it does, which would of course be longer than the quoted section itself. I think I'll save long, detailed expalanations for any sections I feel need extra attention.
They use the words "public interest." They refer to wire and radio communications. They refer to reasonable fees and practices and regulations and such. It mostly seems to be saying that they have the right to use common sense with regards to establishing rules related to interstate and foreign communications. There's nothing really that stands out too much, except one thing that I noticed is that communications can be put into different classes and charged differently based on that. (This would be like your phone service with cheap night time or weekend rates.) Also it says that common carriers who are subject to this act are free to do business with common carriers not subject to this act.
According to Title II is the key to net neutrality—so what is it? - "For those of you keeping score at home, Wheeler’s proposal said that if it does decide to reclassify ISPs, the FCC would likely forbear from applying all but sections 201, 202, 208, 222, 254, and 255 of Title II." I'll have to verify that, but if that's the case it looks like I will have to come back and go in-depth on Section 201 at some point.
So... that's it for today! We'll see if I manage to get to the rest of it. =O _________________ Murder Monkey
Reposting the July 1st article in full:
----------------------------------
July 1, 2014 | By corynne mcsherry
Forbearance: What It Is, Why It’s Essential to Net Neutrality
As John Oliver and others have observed, the net neutrality debate is plagued with jargon—“reclassification,” “Title II,” “information service vs. telecommunications service,” and so on. But there’s one bit of jargon we need to hear more often: “forbearance.”
As we explained yesterday, forbearance is the process by which the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) expressly commits NOT to apply certain rules. It can choose to do that where enforcement of a given rule is not necessary to ensure reasonable and nondiscriminatory practices, or to protect consumers, and forbearance is consistent with the public interest. Normally the FCC forbears in response to a specific petition from a service provider but it can also do so on its own.
Forbearance is crucial to net neutrality because it helps to limit FCC regulation. If the FCC reclassifies broadband as a telecommunications service, which it must if it is going to do its part to protect an open and neutral Internet, then many folks fear it will be obligated to impose on the Internet a whole set of rules that were developed for telephone service. That would be a disaster, because most of those rules just don’t make sense when we’re talking about Internet infrastructure. For example, there are rules about obscene phone calls, rate schedules, telephone operator services, carrier reporting requirements, etc., that could lead to a host of new problems if misapplied to our Internet.
Forbearance is how we help ensure the FCC does what is necessary – and no more. It isn’t an iron-clad limit; the FCC must choose to do it, and it can change course if need be. But having made the choice to forbear, the FCC can’t change its mind willy-nilly, or in secret. Instead, it has to invite public comment, and respond to public concerns. If Internet users stay vigilant, forbearance would give us some lasting confidence that the FCC couldn’t use "net neutrality" as an excuse to interfere with free expression and innovation.
So while we call on the FCC to do the right and sensible thing and reclassify, we must simultaneously demand that the FCC explicitly reject any telecommunications regulations beyond specific and narrow prohibitions and requirements designed to create a fair and level playing field for innovation and user choice. Without broad forbearance, reclassification can become a nightmare for users, innovators and service providers alike. _________________ Murder Monkey
Joined: Jan 19, 2010 Posts: 276 Location: The internet
Posted: Tue Nov 18, 2014 11:12 pm Post subject:
"We must take the time to get the job done correctly, once and for all, in order to successfully protect consumers and innovators online." - Tom Wheeler
The following is a message intended to be sent via email:
---------------------------
Email subject title: Do you know anyone in San Francisco?
---------------------------
Please forward this message to everyone you know.
If the person works with computers for a living, they will know why it's important.
If they do not work with computers for a living, they can simply pass it on and it will get to the people who need to know about it.
"Net Neutrality" is an ambiguous nonsense computer nerd term that geeks use when discussing the underlying functionality of the internet. Like many such technical terms, it is a form of shorthand that encompasses a topic of considerable depth, thereby enabling anyone to easily look it up on the internet what it means if they come across a discussion using it which they don't understand, while allowing anyone who does understand it to not have to write out whole paragraphs of text any time they want to say something about it.
This is similar to someone referencing the movie "Star Wars" under the presumption the other person you are talking to has already seen the movie and doesn't need a rundown of the entire plot when you make a two-sentence joke about Princess Leia.
EFF Joins Local and National Groups in Call to Protect the Internet
San Francisco - The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) is joining a broad coalition of local and national public interest groups for a rally and forum in support of strong net neutrality rules at San Francisco City Hall on Thursday, November 20, at 5:30 pm.
"Bay Area Speaks: A People's Hearing on the Future of the Internet" comes at a key moment in the debate over net neutrality. The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has a proposal that does not provide full protections for the Internet and could vote to enact the plan early as December. Meanwhile, President Obama has issued a statement urging the FCC to change course and reclassify the Internet as a telecommunications service. This reclassification would be the best way to achieve strong rules against blocking, throttling, and paid prioritization online, and echoes the demands of millions of Americans who have submitted their own comments to the FCC over the last few months.
Former FCC Commissioner Michael Copps will be one of the speakers at Thursday's rally, along with EFF Intellectual Property Director Corynne McSherry and many others. The event is free and open to the public, and there will be time for community comment. The public testimony will be submitted to the FCC.
What:
"Bay Area Speaks: A People's Hearing on the Future of the Internet"
Date:
Thursday, November 20
Time:
Rally – 5:30 pm
Forum – 7 pm
Where:
San Francisco City Hall
1 Dr Carlton B Goodlett Place
San Francisco, CA 94102
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