Wednesday, August 20, 2008

Net freedoms offers a view of China Gate but for how long?

Much of the publicity and informed comment concerning China Gate has come from bloggers, rather than developers and council representatives, who've despite their fact finding trips, to China have seemed rather reticent to discuss the issue in public, apparently preferring to publish snaps of the "look at me, I'm on the Great Wall of China" variety, oh and photo ops with Chinese businessmen in Mayoral regalia.

For those of us that care, about such things, the present, maybe as good as it gets, for Internet freedoms. Little is heard in this part of the world, on the subject of Net Neutrality, and your thinking so what, and that's far comment since Virgin Media boss Neil Berkett stated rather eloquently "this net neutrality thing is a load of bollocks" according to Internet sources click here.

What is network neutrality, currently, when you click on your a link, to a webpage or video you would expect it to load at roughly the time same as any other page using the internet, however if internet service providers were to decide to slow down your connection to say a snails pace when you try to connect to the BBC, because they have deal with Sky TV, there's nothing you could do as currently their is no legislation to protect your freedom to access a website in this country.

How does this affect you, well at the moment probably not, but maybe some time in the future media companies will pay your Internet service providers, to load their pages fast and delay access to other sites like blogs. As far as I can tell no one in government or regulator authorites in this country, are even thinking of problem let alone doing anything.

Cannot happen? Still I never thought that a local authority contractor, running a taxpayer funded information organisation, would send me letters, suggesting I shut up or they might sue, for expressing a political point of view, so yes of coarse it could and will happen.

If you would like to know more I suggest you might like to visit this US campaign website, where some serious attempts are being made to defend a basic freedom, as in the case of Comcast a US ISP that has been blocking and delaying internet traffic.

1 comment:

  1. Some of the technical suggestions I made for stopping people spying on your connection would also mitigate such issues. Not fully but enough to make it worthless to try. The ol' Net Neutrality debate also takes in the desire to give priority to some traffic (web, ViOP, TV over others such as bit-torrent (great as hell for bandwidth))... but it's good that you've addressed to topic - we need to have at least some idea of an opinion on the wider issues of blogging here in Thanet. Thank you.

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