Net Neutrailty
“Net Neutrality” means that all web pages and content are treated equally. That no site is given preferential treatment over another at the ISP level.
Wikipedia on Net Neutrality
Every small business owner should care very much about Net Neutrality. Without it, large business could pay or negotiate for faster download or upload speeds. In other words, your ecommerce site would load like a dog while Wal-Mart’s opened immediately. Your videos would take forever to download and YouTube would be instant streaming. It would mean that certain players would start t have undue influence over web sites and content. There is no doubt, lack of Net Neutrality would make it more expensive for small business to succeed on the web.
There are other ramifications for your TV, video, cable and entertainment options which would bring the tyranny of the cable monopolize to the web. But, I think the chance of small business ending up on the “old road” while the big guys build a “super highway”.
But, from what I can tell, Google’s OpenEdge does not damage this concept. Allowing ISPs to cache content means that content that is loaded by multiple people will be saved at the ISP. It will load faster. Your internal proxy server works the same way. If one person loads it, the proxy gets it from the source server. The second person downloads it from the proxy and it loads faster. As long as you can get multiple people to load your content, your site will benefit too.
Filed under General | Comment (0)Important: Net Neutrality
Net neutrality is of utmost importance to all of our customers. Basically, right now all web content is delivered equitably regardless of the source. But, some ISPs would like to change the world so that sites would pay them more to get priority delivery. Other sites would simply load slowly or not at all.
This would substantially raise the cost of doing business on the Internet and make it almost impossible to compete with an ISPs own products. IE: if you offered the same program, like photo sharing, that Yahoo does, theres would always load faster. Unless, you pay more, probably a lot more, to play with the big boys. Keep this in mind at at time when Google is controlling more content, like people’s medical records & Microsoft is looking to by Yahoo.
There is a long way to go before this is over. But, if you have any interest in doing business on the web, you should fight for Net Neutrality. Right now, call your politicians and let them know you care about preserving net neutrality.
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Whose Web Is It, Anyway?
An FCC hearing this week sparks a new debate on ‘Net neutrality.’
By Brian Braiker | Newsweek Web Exclusive
magine an alternative reality in which you attempt to do a routine online search. In this Bizarro World, your Internet service provider (which happens to be one of the four top dogs: Comcast, AT&T, Verizon or Time Warner) has a deal with Yahoo, but not Google. You try your search on Google first but notice the page loads very slowly. Impatient, you try again on Yahoo, which is running noticeably faster. Over time, you default to Yahoo’s apparently faster search engine whenever you look something up.
Welcome to one vision of a world without “Net neutrality.” In the neutral Internet of today, we’re accustomed to accessing any Web site at any time, at the fastest speed available. This applies to corporate sites as much as it does to start-ups and individuals. For now the virtual playing field is fairly level.
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In what may be a watershed moment for the Net neutrality debate, on Monday the Federal Communications Commission held a public hearing at Harvard Law School to determine whether Comcast was manipulating its network traffic in a “reasonable” manner. (Watch it here.) “There wasn’t a lot of argument over the facts of the case: they were slowing down BitTorrent,” says David Weinberger, a research fellow at Harvard Law School’s Berkman Center for the Internet & Society. “The question is: is this a violation of policy, and if so what happens to Comcast and more importantly what happens to the policy?” A spokesman for the FCC would not speculate on when the commission would issue a decision. Also this week, New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo issued a subpoena asking Comcast for “information” (a Cuomo spokesman declined to elaborate to NEWSWEEK).
Read entire article Newsweek: http://www.newsweek.com/id/117068
Filed under Politics & Law | Comment (0)