Burger King sets up a crude experiment to demonstrate net neutrality

While we wait for more developments on network neutrality repeal undo, Shafi Musaddique has an allegorical article in the UK Independent, where Burger King set up an experiment for fun, link. 

  

You could get your Whopper with cheese faster if you paid more than customers who waited in line.

It sort of sounds like auctioning off a cook’s time.

Senate said to be willing to look at House bill on net neutrality, with reservations

Ron Placone and Mark Stanley (Demand Progress) and Fight For the Future report that the Senate is showing signs of being willing to take up some form of restoration of net neutrality.  There is some activity going on in the Capitol today.

The best link is a livestream here.  I hope there will be a YouTube video to add later (hope it doesn’t get demonetized).

Electronic Frontier Foundation encourages contacting the Senate, here. 

Trump definitely violates "neutrality" by asking his base to boycott ATT over subsidiary CNN's "fake news" and bias against conservatives

Trump is calling for his “base” consumers to boycott ATT, which owns CNN, in order to reign in on CNN for its “fake news” as Trump calls it.  Here is CNBC’s story. 

  

Law experts are discussing the tactic, here, as to its novelty, which sounds like Erdogan. 

Here is Trump’s tweet. 

And it certainly would not be “neutral”.

I have Verizon but would not have time to change providers for “solidarity”.

  

In the meantime, FTFF accuses the Democrats with caving in on legislation.  We’ll come back to this later.

Public Knowledge documents network neutrality "violations" by telecom since "repeal"

Public Knowledge has a sponsored ad (on Google) that offers an article by Lindsay Stern, “Broadband Providers are Quietly Taking Advantage of an Internet Without Net Neutrality Protections”, here. 

   

Most of the examples cited are narrow in scope and involve throttling of streaming in some cases.

  

But getting net neutrality back in the law in the US is only a small step in dealing with all these other big problems, of censorship incentives. Think about FOSTA, and big tech takedown of conservatives. 

Why a focus only on net neutrality won't save speech on the Internet

I found a new site regarding Network Neutrality, “Battle for the Net”, here  with a lot of PR for continuing the pressure in Congress,.

It’s well to revisit an article in Cultural Weekly in January 2018 that examined prospectively the idea that without network neutrality, telecoms would individually charge website owners the right to be connected to the web. The article says that “amateur” blogs on free sites like Blogspot or Wordpress would stay because they don’t need their own domain registry. But hosted domains would be in jeopardy.

So far, that has not happened, as of spring 2019.  There is a reverse argument that at some point in the future Google could decide to pull Blogger (as it has for Google+) or that Automattic could do the same with its free service. More to the point, Blogger will remove what it considers “spam blogs” (which was a big problem between 2005 and 2008) by algorithms, although this has not been the problem (false positives) that it had been around 2008.  

It is also relevant that YouTube channels (which don't require their own domains but many people set them up anyway) are overtaking Blogger in importance (as they have since about 2014). 

Also more to the point is that there are other threats to downstream liability protection of platforms (both regular social media and hosting companies) regarding copyright (in the EU with article 13), and harmful content (sex trafficking like with FOSTA, or terror related, and more recently white supremacy related) such that the network neutrality issue, in practice, sounds less important in practice.  Activists should focus on all the problems together, which is intellectually very difficult – and it is hard to organize people around multiple problems at the same time.

Right now, it is unlikely that the GOP Senate will do anything with the House bill, unless there is some other development that more libertarian-oriented senators could come up with.

In time, telecoms could buy anti-virus companies and refuse to connect sites with poor safety ratings (or that don’t have workable https – which has gotten easier to install than it used to be).

  

Sitelock (with a close relation to the Endurance Group) has bought Webroot, which could give that Denver-based company (I chat with them sometimes) some power in this kind of an environment.

  

I noticed also that the Blogtyrant site (sold in June) recently put up a link to an old article on network neutrality but had taken it down when I looked this morning.

House subcommittee moves on Save the Internet Act, and recognizes need to "connect the dots"

EFF’s Katharine Trendacosta reports on March 26 on the crucial 18-11 victory in a House committee vote on the Save the Internet Act.

  

But what’s remarkable about this article is that finally writers and members of Congress are starting to connect the dots – that activism over one law (or reversing bad policy by the administration) won’t fix all the other problems, like privacy, overreaction to harmful content, and the effect that Europe’s recent copyright law could have here.

Update: April 10

EFF reports that the House passed the Save the Internet Act.  There had been rumors it might not happen.  The Senate is said to be unwilling to pass it. 

"The Juice" on Twitter offers this video ad about the "shitternet" featuring Alex Jones.

"Save the Internet Act" would stop telecom lobbying attempts to short circuit return to full net neutrality; I have a random conversation on Amtrak about this

Katherine Trendacosta has a comprehensive article at Electronic Frontier Foundation on the latest Save the Internet Act, March 6, here.

The article is critical of telecoms for trying to limit the scope of the bills to narrow interpretations of the concept of throttling.

As it happens, when I rode home on Amtrak this weekend from New York, I ran into a college student (apparently from Spain) who was quite knowledgeable of all the recent Internet problems, including Articles 11 and 13 in the EU, the various deplatformings of “conservatives”, fake news, and FOSTA. I suggested that the loss of formal net neutrality protections in June 2018 seemed to make little difference.    Since he was going to American University he seemed at least vaguely familiar with News2Share.

But he said that it had.  He said he had considerable experience video livestreaming and that there had been real problems before Obama helped guide net neutrality into being in 2015 and that problems had resurfaced.



I still see that most advocacy organizations (FFTF) keep after people to “donate” and “take action” for their narrow cause, while ignoring all the other problems affecting free speech (or minorities). It’s the way people in a real world work and raise money.

Here is a detailed story on the “Save the Internet Act” hearings on March 12 in the House.    It was introduced by Mike Doyle (D-PA).  It was introduced in the Senate by Ed Markey (D-MA, video).