Net neutrality

Currently the Internet gives no priority to certain websites, it’s a level playing field: Google.com loads as fast on your computer as PCSelfHelp.net does. The major telecoms want to change all that - they want to have the ability to decide whether or not a certain site loads really quickly, less quick, or not at all based on the fees that the site pays.

There was a proposed legislation in the works that called for stronger protections to the current net neutrality. The House voted NO yesterday. You can see the results of how your representative voted at http://clerk.house.gov/evs/2006/roll239.xml.

Personally I don’t believe that this will affect the consumer to the degree that the proponents of net neutrality do. From what I understand, standard HTML content like the content you receive on this website will not be slowed down. This site is rather snappy as is and does not require a lot of bandwidth. It’s the highly graphical and video laden sites that will have to pay up. I may be wrong on this one though, but I hope not as it looks like net neutrality won’t happen. The telecos are going to get their way.