[Colchester] Net Neutrality - It's the end of the world as we know it

[Wayland Sothcott]

Hello

Richard Branson wants to turn the Internet into Virgin TV.

If you think about what we have with the Internet it's pretty mind 
blowing from a freedom point of view. You can visit ANY website in the 
whole world and you can TCP link to ANY device on the Internet and 
anyone one can link to your server running at home. The tools exists to 
deny addresses or address ranges but these are fairly blunt and not 
generally used much. So far everyones traffic has been free to go where 
it wants, no questions asked. Having run an ISP, I know how easy it 
would have been to block a bunch of ad hosting sites using a HOSTS file 
and maybe a few sites I felt were a bit sick, and maybe the sites of my 
competition and maybe some sites that just annoyed me. Currently ISPs 
don't do this, but they are thinking about it. We had a letter from the 
Government DTI suggesting we as an ISP join some net nanny service to 
help save children from paedos, I chucked it in the bin.

IPv6 vastly increases the address range. In future your thumbscan could 
form part of your IP address. The routers all set to route IPv6 will 
effectively mean they will not route traffic in a neutral manor. They 
will be able to give preferential treatment to some companies and 
perhaps to some individuals and certainly some servers.

IPv6 is a tool that can be used in different ways, it's not bad in itself.

I am in favour of bandwidth management because bandwidth can be abused 
just as spam is an abuse of the freedom of email. However email is 
getting to the stage where some spam is allowed and some personal email 
is not. If you have a hotmail account you will  notice you simply get a 
higher class of spam, football tickets and Tescos vouchers rather than 
viagra and Nigerians.

For our safety and continued enjoyment of the Internet sites may be 
blocked or slowed down. You might chose a VoIP provider but find it 
works very badly with your ISP. This is the case with Internet over 
mobile phones. They don't want you to install VoIP on your phone and use 
that to make calls, so they block it. I am sure very smart people can 
get round this but the basic result is that most can't use their choice 
of VoIP on a mobile.

Jacqui Smith the Home Secretary said that she would have all paedophiles 
register their email addresses with the police who would then tell all 
the social networking sites to block these people. Technically that's 
the most unworkable idea I have heard. However imagine if all IPv6 
traffic carried your thumb print, ISP's could block that thumb printed 
traffic from particular servers. Yes you could use someone elses print 
and people probably will. The battle between those seeking access and 
those blocking access could get very complicated and the ordinary people 
would suffer, just as they do at airports.

They always tell us this stuff is good and for the children and to fight 
terror, the results speak for themselves. I think we should look into 
this Net Neutrality stuff and write letters to our MP's, except that 
Newmark never replies.

Here are a couple of links that maybe helpful:

This is a good explanation: 
http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=AA5ZR_jxdXU&feature=related
This one is nice to watch: 
http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=AA5ZR_jxdXU&feature=related
What Paul Watson says: http://www.infowars.com/?p=2640
Also I have recorded the Alex Jones radio show, skip to 3:00 hour, sorry 
it's so big I do not have an editing tool: 
http://www.sothcott.co.uk/lug/20080612_Thu_Alex.mp3


Let me know what you think.

Wayland.