30 June 2006

Yes, I know we've been over this already

More on the net neutrality issue. This is important, folks.



Here's some of what Mr. Sims (a.k.a. First Coffee) has to say:
... It's rare First Coffee finds himself agreeing with RINOs like Sen. Olympia Snowe of Maine, but whoever writes her public statements uncorked a good one with "Net neutrality has been the founding principle of the Internet and has been the single greatest reason for its growth and its success." Ditto here.

After all, it's not like the phone companies invented the Internet, or even subsidized its early years, or have done anything but make money off it. They have tons of unused bandwidth lying around, do they expect us to believe their tatty excuses that they need more? No, I don't think they really do, they just need some mantra their bought and paid for legislators can repeat at press conferences. "Need to invest in more bandwidth" will do for the intellectually lazy, those who dig deeper, well, screw 'em. Who cares?

... First Coffee's almost always on the side of the free markets — when it's a product or service that was developed via the free markets, which the Internet was not. The Internet was created and developed by the government and large research universities, about as far from the free market as you can get in America. The free market didn't develop it because it wasn't profitable to do so.

Now you can make a buck off the Internet, so the phone companies are blustering around like they took losses for years "innovating" and "differentiating" as they nursed the Internet along, and now they want to cash in on what's rightfully theirs.

Bushwa. If anybody should rightfully get to cash in off today's Internet it's the government, specifically the Department of Defense, not the Johnny- come- lately phone companies. ...
RINO means "Republican In Name Only" by the way — I had to look it up.

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