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A couple of weeks ago, I blogged about the importance of net neutrality. In the meantime, the first actual challenge to net neutrality took place this past week. Time Warner Cable has launched a trial tiered pricing program to new subscribers in Beaumont Texas. The tiers are “$29.95 a month for relatively slow service at 768 kilobits per second and a 5-gigabyte monthly cap to $54.90 per month for fast downloads at 15 megabits per second and a 40-gigabyte cap.” Every gigabyte beyond the cap costs $1. It’s a bit odd that landlines, like DSL service, is going toward tiered service and cell phone carriers are going toward an all you can eat service. How does that affect you? Well, an iTunes movie is between 1 and 1.5 gigabytes or a tv livestream of its primetime broadcasts measure around 300-500 MB depending on the quality of the video.  Obviously if you are a big consumer of online video, you’d hit your cap pretty soon every month.

While Time Warner Cable has every right to cap its service and charge more for more users, the tiered pricing, as we discussed last week, can …

Right now, as you read this post, you are likely logged onto the internet. The way that you get to Dear Author is through an internet service provider who allows data packets to be sent over phone lines, cable lines, cell towers, or via satellite. The internet service provider could be Comcast, Qwest, AOL, and the like. Each month, you pay a fee for this access. Currently, all access is supposedly deemed equal meaning that you can access Dear Author at the same speed that you can access CNN, assuming that the websites are optimized for speed.

Internet Service Providers (ISPs) have the power to do two major things to impede the free flow of information: traffic management and therefore content management.

Traffic management is a way for ISPs to decide who gets what information and at what speed. For example, an ISP can control how fast content is delivered to your computer. ISPs want to move toward tiered access whereby the end user (you) pay and the content provider, such as a blog owner, pay for use. We have a modified tier access right now in …

A couple of weeks ago, the possible assimilation of Yahoo by Microsoft caused people to wonder about the future of Google. Now that Microsoft’s bid is off the table, a Yahoo + Google merger is swirling around again. According to BBC, the potential merging of search engine giants is facing a call from activists of regulatory intervention.

In a letter to Assistant Attorney General Thoma Barnett, head of the Justice Department’s anti-trust division, the coalition argues that such a deal would give Google almost 90% of the search advertising market and strengthen its influence over internet users’ access to information.

“We face a possible future in which no content could be seamlessly accessed without Google’s permission,” the letter states.

Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR) met with a number of technology executives and argued forcefully that ISPs must stand up for net neutrality or face the removal of legal safe harbors and tax freedom. One of those legal safe harbors is Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act which provides immunity from liability for ISPs for the wrongful acts of others.

No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider.

Net neutrality is the concept that allows unfettered access to the internet. Some people have proposed tiered access to the internet. Companies would pay for its content to be put on a faster bandwidth and companies that didn’t pay, like DearAuthor, would be shunted to the end where it would take a long time to load. Other net neutrality issues is the censorship of content which occurs frequently in non democratic countries like China.

Net neutrality is an important issue for anyone who uses the internet.

Via Ars Technica. Thanks RebeccaJ for bringing this article to our attention.