Chopstork

When I moved to California I had AT&T wireless, AT&T cable, and a PacBell landline. At some point PacBell became SBC and AT&T broadband became Comcast. AT&T wireless became Cingular, which is owned (60%) by SBC. Then the landline went from SBC…to AT&T. Except that switch was just a name change, so my wireless is AT&T too…again.

W. T. F. ?

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.

Folks, I have determined with out a doubt that comcast technicians that have southern accents have absolutely no idea what the Internet actually is. After spending 45 minutes on the phone listening to the low bit rate waiting music I got a hold of the technician. She asked me for my name and address and I politely gave her the information. She asked me what the nature of my problem was and I told her that my Internet connection was not working and I needed to have it fixed ASAP. She walked me through a couple standard steps - make sure the little lights are blinking on the modem, make sure your Ethernet cable is plugged into the modem, make sure your cable is actually working… Then the most amazing and insightful thing I have ever heard from a trained Internet technician was uttered, and I quote: “It looks like your high speed internet connection may not be working. Please open up your Internet Explorer window and go to comcast.net to file a trouble ticket” So to summarize, I spent over an hour of my cell phone rollover minutes and valuable time to find out that the assumption I made with regard to my internet connection was in fact correct. Brilliant! I miss the days of the telegraph. (sigh)

—Vonbadass