Telcos are Evil!
Many of us have grown to accept the Internet in its current form as a given. It is just there, it has been there for a while now, and it always will be right? Not necessarily!
Down here in South Africa, I pay more in one month for my ADSL (3GB cap, 512kbps shaped) than I do for an entire year of web hosting at Lunarpages (my web host: 400GB per month + much more). Telkom, the sole South African land line provider, is an ex-government company that has been privatised, yet years later is still enjoying the benefits of its monopoly. We here in SA have some of the most expensive telecommunications costs in the world, a fact that holds back businesses and growth, along with it much needed jobs.
Of course Telkom is not alone in their desire to screw the public in an attempt to make even more money; the CTO for Atlanta-based BellSouth Corp wants to charge for web speed! What he wants is for ISPs to be allowed to charge web sites to have traffic to them prioritised. If you run a small web site, this is a truly scary thought. When Yahoo, MSN and who knows else are paying to have priority over your site, how can you possibly compete?
Thankfully, a coalition of technology companies is pushing for network neutrality.
“The incredible potential of broadband will be severely compromised if network operators are permitted to be the gatekeepers of the Internet, deciding what content, applications and services succeed or fail on the Internet,” wrote the coalition, which includes Amazon.com Inc., eBay Inc., Google and IAC/InterActive Corp.
While this is good, it isn’t necessarily enough.
Whatever country you are in, there is always a threat that someone wants to take away some freedom or other. The Internet brought with it a new freedom of expression, the ability for information to spread at a speed never before seen. These days however, this freedom is being removed almost imperceptible, inch by inch, by companies looking to make more profit at your expense. These companies know only one ethic, the ethic of profit, they do not care about the user and they most certainly don’t care about your freedom of expression. They want to turn the Internet into the modern equivalent of cable TV, where you pay a huge company so they can decide what you want to watch.
I’d hate to live in a future, where I cannot afford to run a web site that people can access, where the only way I can post anything onto the internet would be through massive corporate controlled portals, where dissenting voices just get deleted. We need to fight it, and the best way to fight this is to let your elected officials (assuming there is such a thing where you live) know how you feel, and to make them to do something about it.
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December 11th, 2005 at 3:52 am
We have offices in SA, the prices for an ADSL business line are unbelievable. And with 128k they are still the slowest link on the network, and always cause trouble with AD replication and mail.
Unbelievable that a telco monopoly is even allowed. In the Netherlands I find prices keep going down while bandwidth goes up, although typically very asymmetrically: download speeds are good but upload speeds are restricted. Which makes it a bitch to use symmetrical P2P like bittorrent.
February 11th, 2008 at 10:52 pm
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