Bil MacLeslie
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Homepage: http://www.iphouse.com/
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Posts by Bil MacLeslie
Net Neutrality – An immediate response is needed.
Aug 20th
Thursday Evening I attended the public hearing held by Free Press at Minneapolis South High School.
Full of dignitaries and speeches, I was impressed by both Secretary of State Mark Ritchie and Senator Al Franken breadth of knowledge on what this highly charged but reasonably simple issue could mean to me, Minnesota and the nation.
Do you hear what I hear?
May 6th
The FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski made a statement today that makes me wonder what took them so long.
In 1997 I spent some time lobbying at the Minnesota Legislature and the Minnesota Public Utilities commission about the differences between a data connection and data communications. The differences may seem plainly obvious to those of us in the Internet / Cable / Telephone industries, but for those milling around on the hill, they can’t quite grasp the difference between a carrier pigeon and the message tied to it’s leg. This analogy was too esoteric for those who were approaching dementia so I changed the analogy to a letter carried by a postal service. They seemed to understand that governments should regulate the postal service, but not the contents of the letter. You tell me, which part of that analogy resembles a connection and which resembles information? Pretty obvious, huh?
Content really IS king.
May 4th
The official draft text of the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement was recently released.
All I can say is wow.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation did some preliminary analysis of ACTA. What it comes down to is that ACTA is about to require that signatory countries impose liabilities on ISPs for their users’ behaviors. That means ISPs need to be enforcers/police/nannys for their users. And US ISPs will lose any protections they currently enjoy from the DMCA.
If you use the Internet to share copyrighted information, YOUR ISP could face penalties. Do you think ISPs will accept this? You might expect ISPs to be up in arms about ACTA, but instead they look like they might accept ACTA openly. By all counts ISPs were lucky the FCC lost the case against Comcast. Otherwise ISPs would have no way to be an enforcer! Just kidding.
The Brave New World?
Apr 8th
This week has been busy when it comes to all things Internet…
First off I found out that the FCC can’t protect consumers from big bad corporations. It’s no fault of their own. Big bad corporations spend LOTS of money making sure that the law is in their favor. It was expected that the court would rule (a PDF of the ruling is here) to allow Internet providers to restrict access in order to “manage” their networks.
From the Internet provider side, this makes some technical sense. We need to be able to throttle traffic in order to meet Service Level Agreements and maintain quality service. How we manage our network is part of what sets us apart from our competition.
But content providers are worried that their content will play second fiddle to the content owned by the provider. This seems logical to me too. If we have content that competes with the content provider, why should we give the content provider a free ride to our consumers?
Because that’s what net neutrality is.
I think it’s reasonable to assume that a consumer does not really care who owns the content, as long as access to the content is not restricted in any fashion by their access provider. And that’s exactly how ipHouse operates.
Way back in 1997 I posed this exact conundrum and worried about what happens when one access company / distributor owns the content I want to view? Will I be required to have a Time Warner connection in order to view Bugs Bunny? Will I need a Comcast connection to see MTV online? Today, no. But what about tomorrow? Big corporations without watchdogs will do whatever they want, just watch.
I waited a few days after the ruling to see what the feedback was going to be. This is such a fascinating problem that people have a hard time taking sides. You tell me, should consumers be upset by this ruling? It seems some people just can’t tell if they should be upset or not.
In other fascinating news, a local jeweler gets lambasted by social media and wonders if the publicity generated by the “failed” advertisement offsets the publicity generated by the response to the ad…
Really, you may not have known who R. F. Moeller was a few days ago, but you might know now. This is exactly what social media is all about, responding socially to what companies do in the marketplace. Consumers have a voice, and social media lets those voices be heard, loud and clear. Some might think that this is a win for R. F. Moeller. The amount of publicity they’re receiving might outweigh the scar. Only time will tell…
Then along comes a reminder that some crazy new treaty will put ISPs on the hook for our customers bad deeds. What are people thinking?
All these things make me ogle at the wonder that is the Internet. But it leaves me wondering, is it time to take a break from the Internet?
Nah.
Peace.
Bil
Should ISP’s be copyright enforcers?
Feb 5th
A few months ago I started this blog entry and then left it sit because I was so angry about what the potential outcome could mean to the ISP industry. Today I read this article on Wired that give me some hope that the world isn’t about to end for ISPs so I decided to revisit this entry and see if it still makes sense. Let’s see…
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We live in a society that has mostly agreed on what is right and what is wrong. We have coined the term, Common Values in order to build communities where we can agree on what is acceptable behaviour. To enforce our safe communal living, we turned these common values into laws. As a society, we have set up governments to enforce the laws (common values) and protect us from those who would harm us.
As members of society, I think we’re all in agreement that theft is a bad thing. No matter what country you are from, it’s pretty much a given that stealing is frowned upon. It’s a pretty common value, maybe even sacrosanct.
