Salon: Google-Verizon plan: Why you should worry (Ominous references to the "public Internet")

[onehandle]

But the proposal went further. It would promote the expansion of new services, not part of the Internet as we know it now, that would go beyond anything we have today. These new services, if Congress and regulators enacted the companies' proposal, could not be designed to be end runs around net neutrality; they would have to be genuinely new. But here's the rub: You should not trust Verizon or other carriers, or Google for that matter, to follow through in ways that are truly in the interest of the kind of open networks the nation needs. Throughout the conference call, we kept hearing references to the "public Internet" -- an expression that leads inescapably to something else.

snip...

So when Seidenberg said, "We have to be flexible," my immediate thought was, uh-oh. I've been worried for years that the game was on to turn the carrier-controlled Internet into just another version of television. Maybe the carriers won't get away with that.

The right way forward is to have sufficient bandwidth that we can do pretty much anything we choose using public networks -- a true broadband infrastructure where packet-switched services (moving data around, at super-fast speeds, in little packages that are reassembled at the user's device) are the basis for all communications.

Instead, the game is on to create a parallel Internet. It'll still be packet-switched. But they won't call it the Internet anymore. That's an end game we should not encourage.

http://www.salon.com/technology/dan_gillmor/2010/08/09/google_verizon_deal

[Recursion]

1. I demand circuit-switching! NT

[deminks]

2. Average US bandwidth speed - 3.9 Mbps.

The key is the bandwidth. And US bandwidth sucks. Bigtime.

http://www.dslreports.com/shownews/Average-US-Broadband-Speed-39-Mbps-106488\

Chart at the above article ranks US as 18th in the world behind Romania and the Czech Republic among others.

The providers will make consumers pay for raising our standard of internet living above that of a banana republic. Why should they give up their new yacht? Flexible my ass. Flexible is how much we are willing to pay for access. Flexible is how much we can make do with how little bandwidth we can get by with.

Al Franken is right, this is the first amendment cause of our lifetime. If we don't get off our assess and fight for it, it will be taken from us.