Elizabeth Barrette (ysabetwordsmith) wrote,
Elizabeth Barrette
ysabetwordsmith
  • Mood: irate

Access Speed

Here's a very disturbing article about how companies may pressure clients into using products that the company prefers. It says in part:

Imagine 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.


I've already seen this happen with browsers. Also no matter how thoroughly I set all my parameters to Unfiltered, somehow there's always content that gets blocked -- and the way I usually find out about that is when I'm trying to access something controversial or sexual for work-related purposes. Other people's greed and stuffiness makes it harder for me to do my job and make a living. It's infuriating.
Tags: cyberspace theory, politics
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  • 1 comment
tuftears

tuftears

March 18 2008, 20:59:55 UTC 13 years ago

This is exactly why I worry when big phone companies say they want to start being able to charge different rates to different companies for the bandwidth they use. Sure, Google uses a lot of bandwidth, but guess what, there's nothing special about the brandname that goes on bandwidth, the phone companies shouldn't be able to charge more for a brandname's bandwidth, essentially holding them hostage for exactly the scenario you describe.

Hence, I guess, 'Net Neutrality'.