Working at Home on the Internet » Net Neutrality

Net Neutrality May Yet Survive!

Joe Hauckes — Thu, 24 Sep 2009 20:27:40 +0000

As some of you may remember, I have been an advocate of Net Neutrality for quite some time. On more than one occasion, I have written my Congressman Joe Sestak (D-Delaware County, Pa) to voice my opinion on what I feel Net Neutrality means to me, and I feel the Internet as a whole.

This is his e-mail response to my latest communication in it’s entirety…

September 24, 2009

Dear Mr. Hauckes,

Thank you for writing to me concerning H.R. 2902, the Broadband Internet Fairness Act. I greatly appreciate your input on this matter, and I apologize for the delay in my reply.

As a Member of Congress, it is my responsibility to represent my constituents’ concerns and interests and to provide them the honorable and enthusiastic service they deserve. I truly value your thoughts and suggestions on issues before the House. In a representative government such as ours, it is essential that I know what your views are on these issues.

The internet is a vast and increasingly important medium for work, commerce, entertainment, and personal communications. As this trend progresses, there have arisen questions of what the role of the government is in ensuring that all lawful users have equal and unfettered access to the Internet. There is concern that broadband providers could potentially discriminate in their pricing, or favor the internet content owned by the networks themselves. In response to this potential for abuse, the concept of “Net Neutrality” has been championed by those who believe that network-unaffiliated content providers should have the same access to the Internet.

  I strongly believe in the principles of Net Neutrality. The ability of individuals and small businesses to affordably access the Internet is essential for our future economic prosperity. Some argue that the government ought not to regulate the actions of Internet providers, but I believe that basic notions of fairness oblige us to make sure that consumers, and not corporations, decide what content we can view. I have co-sponsored the Internet Freedom Preservation Acts of 2008 and 2009, which seek to prohibit discriminatory pricing by Internet providers and preserve the freedom of users to attach and use non-harmful devices in conjunction with their broadband service.

  As you may know, Federal Communications Commission Chairman Julius Genachowski made a major announcement on September 21, 2009, announcing his intent to establish new FCC rules to ensure Net Neutrality. I am a strong supporter of this action by the FCC and will continue to work to see that these assurances are carried out. It is time for Congress and the FCC to stand up for consumers and continue to provide a free and open internet for all Americans.

  The Broadband Internet Fairness Act is designed to prevent major broadband Internet service providers from offering service plan rates that are unjust or discriminatory. It requires those major providers, defined as those providers that serve at least 2 million users, to show justification to the Federal Trade Commission for the volume usage service plans they offer, identifying the different tiers of service based on data transmission volumes, specifying the accompanying terms, rates, and conditions, and showing that the tiers are economically reasonable. “Reasonableness” is determined based on capital costs and operating costs of the facilities and provisions of the different service tiers. The Act authorizes the Commission to enforce these requirements.

As I mentioned earlier, I am a co-sponsor of H.R. 3458, the Internet Freedom Preservation Act of 2009. The Internet Freedom Preservation Act is designed to assess and promote Internet freedom for consumers and content providers. Internet freedom generally embodies the notion that consumers and content providers should be free to send, receive, access and use the lawful applications, content, and services of their choice on broadband networks, possess the effective right to attach and use non-harmful devices to use in conjunction with their broadband services, and that content providers not be subjected to new, discriminatory charges by broadband network providers. These general principles have often been referred to as “network neutrality” principles as well.

In the 110th Congress, I co-sponsored the Internet Freedom Preservation Act of 2008, H.R. 5353. That bill did two things. First, it amended the 1934 Communications Act to include some policies which state that “to maintain the freedom to use for lawful purposes broadband telecommunications networks, including the Internet, without unreasonable interference from or discrimination by network operators.” This is a very important action because it prohibits interference from network operators of the Internet. The legislation establishes overarching national broadband policy. Similar to the provisions of law that today guide U.S. telecommunications and media policy, which were enacted decades ago as Section 1 of the Communications Act, the bill proposes a new section to the Communications Act to update these policy objectives and articulate new national policy for the broadband era.

The previous version of this bill included mandates for the Federal Communications Commission to assess broadband services and consumer rights. That section of the bill is not included in the 111th Congress, however, because the new FCC Chairman, Julius Genachowski, has already undertaken many of those actions and is moving the Commission toward protecting net neutrality. Specifically, the FCC has recently taken stronger action to ensure that broadband network providers adhere to the FCC’s Broadband Policy Statement (FCC 05-151).

The goal of this bipartisan legislation is to assure consumers, content providers, and high tech innovators that the significant, open design of the Internet will be preserved. H.R. 3458 is designed to assess and promote Internet freedom for consumers and content providers. Internet freedom generally embodies the notion that consumers and content providers should be free to send, receive, access and use the lawful applications, content, and services of their choice on broadband networks, possess the effective right to attach and use non-harmful devices to use in conjunction with their broadband services, and that content providers not be subjected to unreasonably discriminatory practices by broadband network providers.

I hope this response sufficiently outlines my strong support for Net Neutrality. Thank you again for your letter. If I can be of any additional assistance, please do not hesitate to contact me. I look forward to our future correspondence.

Ok, it may be a canned response. I don’t really expect individual attention, but I am really glad to see that my Voice still counts and maybe I contributed a little bit to the effort of so many to ensure Net Neutrality.

Cable and Telco’s Lying about Net Neutrality

Joe Hauckes — Wed, 08 Nov 2006 23:36:09 +0000

Sorry, I know I said I try to keep politics out of this Blog, but IÂ saw an ad by Comcast Cable (local) that tells people that Net Neutrality is Bad for the Consumer.

They say that the Big Billion Dollar companies in Silicon Valley want to charge you for information.

Talk about False Information and Lies.Â They want to charge for their “pipes”, even though we already have to pay for any access to the Internet we get.Â I wrote an article or two on my PolBlog regarding Net Neutrality, and Liz over at Successful Blog has an extensive listing of Articles that explain it in much more detail.

My point is that if the Cable and Telco’s are spending Advertising Dollars Lying about Net Neutrality, we need to amp up our efforts to Protect our Rights to a Free Internet.

And in case our friends in Canada think they are safe from Cable and Telco interference with the Internet in the Great White North, Read The Newspapers…Â They’re trying the same thing up there.

Service (or non-service) vs Net Neutrality

Joe Hauckes — Tue, 20 Jun 2006 10:36:00 +0000

In the middle of research for posting yesterday, around 8:30 am, Verizon DSL went down. I tried rebooting the Modem, tried resetting it and still no connection. It wasn’t the UBS connection or anything simple, it was the internet connection itself.

Went I tried to bring up Internet Explorer, the only thing that would come up was the Set-up page of Verizon, telling me to install the system.

I called Verizon and after going through line tests and resetting passwords, I still couldn’t get a connection. Finally, the tech checked their system and found the had a problem at the routing station in my area and needed to change out a card.

I finally got the connection back at 7:30 pm, a full 11 hours later. Needless to say, I lost a full day of work on the internet. I did get some offline work done, but that is usually reserved for weekends, so there wasn’t really much to catch up on.

The Big Question…

How are the Telco’s going to handle a two tiered internet when they can’t even keep the existing DSL service running?

The Cable Companies have the same problem, they are always having interruptions of service with their TV programming. Will they fair much better if they try to handle something so complicated as splitting the internet in two?

Can I charge back Verizon for my downtime or loss of revenue for the day? I don’t think so. But if they start charging premium prices for preferred service, I think they may just have to reimburse companies for downtime.

If they start charging Hundreds of Thousands of Dollars to companies such as Google, EBay, MSN, Yahoo for these preferred services and there are outages such as this, you can bet that they will seek reimbursements, refunds, credits, compensation and damages as well as for lost revenue.

But, this is not so much about Net Neutrality as Service.

Service the Telco’s and Cable companies already charge for, and have problems providing. What happened to the $600 Billion dollars in tax credits to improve the communications infrastructure? They say they need the additional fees for premium service to provide for a better infrastructure. If they took the tax credit then we should all have fiber optic cables to our homes and businesses already. Why would they need to charge us now?

If you charged your customers for a service, never performed said service, and came back later to install the service and and charged them again, what would happen to your business? You would be out of business, you would be facing legal fees and law suits that would bankrupt you. The Government would levy fines for double-dipping, and conspiracy to defraud. You could even go to jail.

Verizon and the rest are not only going to get away with this, they are being endorsed by the Congress of the United States.

So, instead of trying to stop them about Net Neutrality, we should hit them where it hurts. If we hold them responsible for the services they are supposed to provide, and start holding them accountable for their incompetence, they may figure it out.

For Sale… The Internet

Joe Hauckes — Wed, 24 May 2006 13:08:00 +0000

Beware: Rant Ahead

A few months ago I started using Google Alerts in trying to get information on Working at Home. I thought that the information would be fairly up-to-date, so I would be able to keep abreast of anything new.

The stories are sometimes good, and usually within a day or two of publication. Something I did notice was that they are almost always a “formal publication”, in other words MSM, Newspapers, Magazines and Press Releases.

The problem I find with that is they are all commercial ventures. I don’t mean an entrepreneur, trying to build his business, but Major Publications. Fully commercial in their all aspects.

If they happen to have anything on Working at Home, it always has something to do with Big Business and how they deal with employees telecommuting. There is almost nothing about the “little guy”, the people who actually work at or from their homes trying to run a small business.

If you Google something about Working at Home, you may or may not find something that you are looking for. If you search in the Blog Search, you will find some personal blogs on the subject, but since these major publications all have “blogs” now, you are just as likely to find an article from the Wall Street Journal.

Now, we have Technorati teaming up with the Associated Press along with The Washington Post. If you think we have problems getting indexed now, just wait…

Combine all this with the fiasco of net neutrality and the Telco/Cable Co’s, and there will not be any room for the Work at Home types, unless you work for some Big Corporation Telecommuting.

What are your feelings on this? Do you think the Small Business is getting pushed off the Internet?

Content Is King

Joe Hauckes — Fri, 19 May 2006 11:17:00 +0000

“Content is King” I am not sure who coined that phrase, but it all so true. I was going over some of my statistics on pageviews yesterday, and I found more reasons to ensure that your content is good, timely and topical.

There is a listing in the sidebar for Most Viewed Articles. I got the information from my statistics. One of my best viewed articles Help Save Internet Neutrality*, was the highest amount of pageviews/unique visitors I have had to date.

Granted it was a spike in the stats for the day, and went down slightly as time passed, but it shows me how important being topical is to getting new visitors. My PV’s have leveled off since then, but are still higher than prior to that post.

I have seen this effect when I have an article that people are interested in, but usually it is something in the content that lead them to my page. An example is that people are always searching for “scam” with various company names. That usually leads them to the Scam or Legit** page, which contains various companies I have dealt with on the internet.

Some people will tell you to make sure your content is Keyword Rich, which is an important tip, but don’t do it at the expense of your content. Make sure your posts are readable and make sense regarding the subject about which you are writing. If the keywords fit into the conversation, then use them.

There are many times that you will find new readers through searches using keywords and phrases you never thought of in regard to your posts. So, your whole post becomes a list of keywords and phrases by which people searching for your subject can find you. Remember… “Content Is King”

Related Posts:
* Help Save Internet Neutrality
** Scam or Legit