{"id":582,"date":"2009-12-09T11:20:05","date_gmt":"2009-12-09T15:20:05","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.engineeringradio.us\/blog\/?p=3928"},"modified":"2023-07-09T15:26:20","modified_gmt":"2023-07-09T19:26:20","slug":"net-non-neutrality","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.engineeringradio.us\/blog\/2009\/12\/net-non-neutrality\/","title":{"rendered":"Net Non-Neutrality"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Internet Neutrality has become a big topic among some groups.\u00a0 The fear is that some ISPs will filter internet users’ content, arbitrarily excluding whatever items they want without explanation or disclosure.\u00a0\u00a0 The temptation is too great for some ISPs (Verizon<\/a>, Comcast<\/a>, ATT<\/a>, et. al.) not to block certain IP addresses, say for example, that of a competitor.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This amounts to corporate censorship.\u00a0 If I have a Verizon account and I want to research other telephone companies, will I get accurate results?\u00a0 What about some potential regulation change that the company didn’t want to have Congress pass?\u00a0 How about adverse rulings about Verizon from the state public service commission?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In light of the NBC\/Universal – Comcast deal announced last week, those concerns appear to carry even more weight.\u00a0 If the internet is going to replace radio, TV, and newspapers as some suggest, access must be unfettered.\u00a0 Any member of the public should be able to search through any ISP’s infrastructure and find all relevant data.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

There have been FCC hearings<\/a> on the matter, there is a NPRM<\/a>,\u00a0 a web site<\/a> has been set up, and there is a wikipedia entry<\/a>.\u00a0 Recently, senators John McCain<\/a> (R-AZ) and Marsha Blackburn<\/a> (R-TN) have come out against the idea of Net Neutrality, although I cannot imagine why.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I decided to do a little experiment myself.\u00a0 At my official job, we have to ISPs, each on a separate T-1 line.\u00a0 The first ISP is a local company, Best Web<\/a>.\u00a0 The other ISP is Verizon.\u00a0 On the Best Web circuit, I did a Google search for some innocuous term, with safe search turned off.\u00a0 I then used the same search terms on the Verizon circuit.\u00a0 I was surprised to see different results for each search.\u00a0 I did specific searches for items based on a geographical location, e.g. “widgets, Washington DC.”\u00a0 In each case, the Verizon search results were missing some of the pages that the Best Web search results had.\u00a0 This is going through Google.\u00a0 I have Verizon at home also and noted the same differences there.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

By this relatively brief research, it would seem that Verizon is filtering out some pages they don’t like.\u00a0 It is difficult to say why, and if I didn’t go through the trouble of changing ISPs and repeating the search, I would have never known about it.\u00a0 Clearly, most people don’t understand:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This is already happening!<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

This is one of the key problems with the “internet” future.\u00a0 Access to data can be very easily controlled by programming firewalls and gateways at the IPS’s data center.\u00a0 Users searching for items will never know what they are missing.\u00a0 Having a diverse broadcasting industry has fostered freedom of the press and advanced our democracy.\u00a0 Loosing that will put us on a slippery road to Corporatocracy if we are not already there.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Internet Neutrality has become a big topic among some groups.\u00a0 The fear is that some ISPs will filter internet users’ content, arbitrarily excluding whatever items they want without explanation or disclosure.\u00a0\u00a0 The temptation is too great for some ISPs (Verizon, Comcast, ATT, et. al.) not to block certain IP addresses, say for example, that of … Continue reading Net Non-Neutrality<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[36,86],"class_list":["post-582","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general","tag-internet","tag-net-neutrality"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.engineeringradio.us\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/582","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.engineeringradio.us\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.engineeringradio.us\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.engineeringradio.us\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.engineeringradio.us\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=582"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.engineeringradio.us\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/582\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":12134,"href":"https:\/\/www.engineeringradio.us\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/582\/revisions\/12134"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.engineeringradio.us\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=582"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.engineeringradio.us\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=582"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.engineeringradio.us\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=582"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}