Chopstork

I’ve heard talk about this for a few months now, and it’s scary. The telecom companies want to charge web sites for boosted speed. That’s f-ed up. The beauty of the internet is that it’s the same for everyone. You pay for access to the internet, and you get the whole internet.

Yes, you can pay more for a faster connection (dial up, DSL, T1 lines), but what you get once you’re connected is the same as everyone else. Yes, the web sites pay to make their servers’ connections faster. We pay someone to host this website. If we think the service is too slow, we could upgrade or switch to something faster. That’s fine—it’s part of the business decision of the site operators. Yahoo pays for their connection to the world. If Yahoo decided they didn’t want to invest in good servers and connections anymore, people would use their website less cuz it’d be slow. By the same token, they try to design their web services so that people like it and use it.

The difference is, now the companies we pay to get access to the internet—AT&T for DSL or Comcast for high speed cable, for example—are trying to charge the websites for higher bandwidth (faster downloads, etc.). If that happens… Now you get on the web, and for some reason Yahoo’s sites runs great, but Google is slow as hell. Why? Cuz you use AT&T Yahoo! DSL as your connection, and naturally they’re gonna boost their own affiliate’s site. Your friend next door on Comcast high speed cable can use Google just fine, but he doesn’t get what’s all the rage with Flickr—it’s such a sluggish site, he claims. Why? Because Yahoo owns Flickr, and of course Comcast doesn’t want to help them out.

All of a sudden the internet’s not all the same anymore! How fucked up is that?!?!?!!!

Even worse, allowing the service providers to decide which sites work better opens the door for them to block sites altogether. Do we really want our access to the internet to be like our access to cable channels? Pay $20/month for Extended Basic Internet—1.5 Mbps downloads and “all the major websites such as CNN, AOL, Google, Myspace, plus all the major newspapers!” Pay $40/month for Premium Internet and “get the same lightning fast speeds and all the same sites as our $20 plan, PLUS access to major video sharing sites including Google Video and YouTube!” “For an additional $5/month on either plan we’ll let you see all those puny blogs too!”

Holy christ—nothing good can come of this.

I caught the end of American Inventor tonight, and a kid was pitching his idea to the panel. He was a black kid, maybe from the south. When they started asking him questions, he answered them, “Yes, sir…. No, sir…” Then one of the judges asks the kid not to call him sir, and looks appalled when the kid answers, “Yes, sir.” Hey judge: You’re a jackass. The kid’s not calling the you “sir” because he thinks you’re something special; he was raised to use “sir” to be polite. Don’t be such a conceited prick.

I worked on a project a while ago that was way behind, which means the customer comes in to “help.” On a couple occasions, I said something to him and he’d reply, “don’t call me sir.” Uuhh… I didn’t. The guy was so hung up on himself and his position (a big important customer—oooooh—working with a young new guy contractor) that he thought I was calling him sir.

If you find yourself telling people not to call you “sir” all the time (and you’re not in the military or some other organization where the use of “sir” is formalized) please get over yourself.