An email from "eBay" [modified]
-
I received this e-mail yesterday from "eBay" and at first wrote it off as spam--looking through the headers though it looked like it might be real...so then I began to wonder about the plausibility of the content; does anyone know anything about this? Net Neutrality and the eBay Community: A Call to Action Dear [UserName], As you know, I almost never reach out to you personally with a request to get involved in a debate in the U.S. Congress. However, today I feel I must. 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. Join me by clicking here -- [omitted] -- to send a message to your representatives in Congress. 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 allow them to 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. The bottom tier -- the slow lane -- would be what is left for everyone else. If the fast lane is the information "super-highway," the slow lane will operate more like a dirt road. ... -- modified at 9:25 Thursday 3rd August, 2006
-
I received this e-mail yesterday from "eBay" and at first wrote it off as spam--looking through the headers though it looked like it might be real...so then I began to wonder about the plausibility of the content; does anyone know anything about this? Net Neutrality and the eBay Community: A Call to Action Dear [UserName], As you know, I almost never reach out to you personally with a request to get involved in a debate in the U.S. Congress. However, today I feel I must. 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. Join me by clicking here -- [omitted] -- to send a message to your representatives in Congress. 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 allow them to 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. The bottom tier -- the slow lane -- would be what is left for everyone else. If the fast lane is the information "super-highway," the slow lane will operate more like a dirt road. ... -- modified at 9:25 Thursday 3rd August, 2006
nullGumby wrote:
through the headers though it looked like it might be real
Ho... And what does spam headers looks like?!? Until the day where email would have some kind of authenticating secure signature you have no certainty!
-
I received this e-mail yesterday from "eBay" and at first wrote it off as spam--looking through the headers though it looked like it might be real...so then I began to wonder about the plausibility of the content; does anyone know anything about this? Net Neutrality and the eBay Community: A Call to Action Dear [UserName], As you know, I almost never reach out to you personally with a request to get involved in a debate in the U.S. Congress. However, today I feel I must. 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. Join me by clicking here -- [omitted] -- to send a message to your representatives in Congress. 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 allow them to 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. The bottom tier -- the slow lane -- would be what is left for everyone else. If the fast lane is the information "super-highway," the slow lane will operate more like a dirt road. ... -- modified at 9:25 Thursday 3rd August, 2006
The plans seem to be real, I read about them in some newspapers I usually trust. Writing to your representative cannot be wrong, but you don't have to click on links from an email to do so.
-
I received this e-mail yesterday from "eBay" and at first wrote it off as spam--looking through the headers though it looked like it might be real...so then I began to wonder about the plausibility of the content; does anyone know anything about this? Net Neutrality and the eBay Community: A Call to Action Dear [UserName], As you know, I almost never reach out to you personally with a request to get involved in a debate in the U.S. Congress. However, today I feel I must. 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. Join me by clicking here -- [omitted] -- to send a message to your representatives in Congress. 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 allow them to 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. The bottom tier -- the slow lane -- would be what is left for everyone else. If the fast lane is the information "super-highway," the slow lane will operate more like a dirt road. ... -- modified at 9:25 Thursday 3rd August, 2006
I have no problem with traffic shaping used to prioritise packets that actually are priority packets, with specific timeliness requirements, such as voice, audio or video streaming, where the customer (either producer or consumer) could potentially be charged more for such packets. What the telcos want is to charge higher rates for access to popular websites, or rather to charge higher rates to those sites for better connections, that is differentiating between different port 80 connections. For most of us it doesn't matter if general-purpose web connections are mildly slower than they might otherwise be as long as the net isn't saturated with high-priority streams blocking our connections completely. That said, I can see users of BitTorrent and similar applications abusing the Quality of Service bits and declaring a higher than background priority. In the same way, I could imagine web page designers making use of multiple connections to load pages faster and work around the traffic shaping - indeed this is already done, using additional servers to work around the two-connection limit mandated in the HTTP specification. Firefox has a configuration option in the UI to raise this limit, while IE's limit can be raised by editing a registry setting. I'm basically saying that it's likely to backfire.
Stability. What an interesting concept. -- Chris Maunder
-
I received this e-mail yesterday from "eBay" and at first wrote it off as spam--looking through the headers though it looked like it might be real...so then I began to wonder about the plausibility of the content; does anyone know anything about this? Net Neutrality and the eBay Community: A Call to Action Dear [UserName], As you know, I almost never reach out to you personally with a request to get involved in a debate in the U.S. Congress. However, today I feel I must. 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. Join me by clicking here -- [omitted] -- to send a message to your representatives in Congress. 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 allow them to 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. The bottom tier -- the slow lane -- would be what is left for everyone else. If the fast lane is the information "super-highway," the slow lane will operate more like a dirt road. ... -- modified at 9:25 Thursday 3rd August, 2006
-
eBay emails always include your real name, not just your username, so I would assume it was spam. Also, did you check the link that was included in the mail for any suspicious URLs?
-
I received this e-mail yesterday from "eBay" and at first wrote it off as spam--looking through the headers though it looked like it might be real...so then I began to wonder about the plausibility of the content; does anyone know anything about this? Net Neutrality and the eBay Community: A Call to Action Dear [UserName], As you know, I almost never reach out to you personally with a request to get involved in a debate in the U.S. Congress. However, today I feel I must. 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. Join me by clicking here -- [omitted] -- to send a message to your representatives in Congress. 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 allow them to 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. The bottom tier -- the slow lane -- would be what is left for everyone else. If the fast lane is the information "super-highway," the slow lane will operate more like a dirt road. ... -- modified at 9:25 Thursday 3rd August, 2006
nullGumby wrote:
The phone and cable companies now control more than 95% of all Internet access.
But the fact is that they built and maintain 95% of the hardware that makes it work. I wonder how many casual internet users have any kind of clue how much physical infrastructure and ongoing maintenance it takes to keep all these bits flowing.
-
nullGumby wrote:
The phone and cable companies now control more than 95% of all Internet access.
But the fact is that they built and maintain 95% of the hardware that makes it work. I wonder how many casual internet users have any kind of clue how much physical infrastructure and ongoing maintenance it takes to keep all these bits flowing.
Not any more idea than they have where their crap goes when they flush the toilet, I imagine ... :rolleyes: Now THAT'S an infrastructure I would hate to lose. I lived without the Internet for a long time, but no sewage services, now that would suck!
Any sufficiently gross incompetence is nearly indistinguishable from malice.
-
Not any more idea than they have where their crap goes when they flush the toilet, I imagine ... :rolleyes: Now THAT'S an infrastructure I would hate to lose. I lived without the Internet for a long time, but no sewage services, now that would suck!
Any sufficiently gross incompetence is nearly indistinguishable from malice.
-
I received this e-mail yesterday from "eBay" and at first wrote it off as spam--looking through the headers though it looked like it might be real...so then I began to wonder about the plausibility of the content; does anyone know anything about this? Net Neutrality and the eBay Community: A Call to Action Dear [UserName], As you know, I almost never reach out to you personally with a request to get involved in a debate in the U.S. Congress. However, today I feel I must. 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. Join me by clicking here -- [omitted] -- to send a message to your representatives in Congress. 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 allow them to 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. The bottom tier -- the slow lane -- would be what is left for everyone else. If the fast lane is the information "super-highway," the slow lane will operate more like a dirt road. ... -- modified at 9:25 Thursday 3rd August, 2006
This is an issue before congress. The problem is that under the current design there is no differentiation between different types of packets. In other words, the internet equally favors, say, John Smith downloading illegal movies and John Smith's companies making an offsite backup over the wire. The obvious solution is to provide a multi-tier system where some packets get higher priority than others. This is very tempting, but avoids the obvious conflict of interest that those companies controlling the high priority packets now can effectively shut off anyone they choose to. In other words, say I have a broadband through company X and they have a deal with a provider to deliver pay-per-view movies at a discount rate. I find a better deal with a different provider. Under the proposed system, company X could limit or even block the packets from that second provider. Now company X might have a point; by having an exclusive deal with the original provider, they can optimize my download and streamline my user experience which is to my benefit. Also, their bandwidth is being paid for by not just my subscriptions but by the totality of income from their enterprise, including the pay-per-view deal. If I use my bandwidth with they second provider, their service is then being subsidized by company X. This wouldn't necesarily be a problem if this only concerned the last mile--the connection from your house to the first main routers of your provider. If this were the case, then consumers could simply choose among the various providers, including wireless providers, in their area. Unfortunately, the proposal allows the various companies to reach deep into the internet, shutting off competition and ensuring they maintain their monopoly status. One of the first results of this legislation would be, in my opinion, the loss of secondary broadband providers in urban markets (the wireless guys.) In the long run there could be wide spread censorship at a much more effective level than there is now. My own view is that all governments are composed of well meaning fools and they tend to cause more problems than they solve when trying to regulate things. Overall, we're almost always better off with less regulation than more. (Though, ironically, many people opposed to the current bill aren't in favor of less regulation either. If it's a choice between the government regulating the internet or corporations, I'll hold my nose and go with the corporations.)
Anyone who thinks he