Mixed and Other Views On Net Neutrality
| “ | I want to be clear what we mean by Net neutrality: What we mean is if you have one data type like video, you don't discriminate against one person's video in favor of another. But it's okay to discriminate across different types, so you could prioritize voice over video, and there is general agreement with Verizon and Google on that issue. | ” |
|
—Google CEO Eric E. Schmidt (August 4, 2010) |
Washington Post columnist Jeffrey Birnbaum has called the debate overhyped, saying the claims of both sides are "vague and misleading."
Author Andy Kessler has argued that, though network neutrality is desirable, the threat of eminent domain against the telcos, instead of new legislation, is the best approach.
Columbia University Law School professor Tim Wu observed the Internet is not neutral in terms of its impact on applications having different requirements. It is more beneficial for data applications than for applications that require low latency and low jitter, such as voice and real-time video: "In a universe of applications, including both latency-sensitive and insensitive applications, it is difficult to regard the IP suite as truly neutral." He has proposed regulations on Internet access networks that define net neutrality as equal treatment among similar applications, rather than neutral transmissions regardless of applications. He proposes allowing broadband operators to make reasonable trade-offs between the requirements of different applications, while regulators carefully scrutinize network operator behavior where local networks interconnect. However, it is important to ensure that these trade-offs among different applications be done in a transparent manner so that the general public will have input on important policy decisions. This is especially important as the broadband operators often provide competing services - e.g. cable TV, telephony - that might differentially benefit when the need to manage applications could be invoked to disadvantage other competitors.
Read more about this topic: Network Neutrality
Famous quotes containing the words mixed and, mixed, views, net and/or neutrality:
“It seems to me that our three basic needs, for food and security and love, are so mixed and mingled and entwined that we cannot straightly think of one without the others. So it happens that when I write of hunger, I am really writing about love and the hunger for it, and warmth and the love of it and the hunger for it ... and then the warmth and richness and fine reality of hunger satisfied ... and it is all one.”
—M.F.K. Fisher (b. 1908)
“Where might is mixed with wit, there is too good an accord in a government.”
—Elizabeth I (1533–1603)
“No work of art ever puts forward views. Views belong to people who are not artists.”
—Oscar Wilde (1854–1900)
“it was you untying the snarls and knots,
the webs, all bloody and gluey;
you with your twelve tongues and twelve wings
beating, wresting, beating, beating
your way out of childhood,
that airless net that fastened you down.”
—Anne Sexton (1928–1974)
“My father and I were always on the most distant terms when I was a boy—a sort of armed neutrality, so to speak. At irregular intervals this neutrality was broken, and suffering ensued; but I will be candid enough to say that the breaking and the suffering were always divided up with strict impartiality between us—which is to say, my father did the breaking, and I did the suffering.”
—Mark Twain [Samuel Langhorne Clemens] (1835–1910)