Internet

The FCC is finally doing something I agree with:

The head of the Federal Communications Commission said Thursday he will recommend that the nation's largest cable company be punished for violating agency principles that guarantee customers open access to the Internet.

The potentially precedent-setting move stems from a complaint against Comcast Corp. that the company had blocked Internet traffic among users of a certain type of "file sharing" software that allows them to exchange large amounts of data.

"The commission has adopted a set of principles that protects consumers access to the Internet," FCC Chairman Kevin Martin told The Associated Press late Thursday. "We found that Comcast's actions in this instance violated our principles."

Martin said Comcast has "arbitrarily" blocked Internet access, regardless of the level of traffic, and failed to disclose to consumers that it was doing so.

The traffic that Comcast was blocking was BitTorrent traffic. Sure there is a lot of pirating going on with BitTorrent, but there is also a lot of legitimate transfers, such as downloading different Linux builds. Also Comcast does not have the right to act as judge, jury and executioner in deciding what is legal and not.

This can be viewed as a small victory for net neutrality, but that fight is far from over. In the end we need to see the internet regulated more like a public utility, than a private sector service. The internet has become a too important factor in day to day operations around the world to not be benefited the same protections.

It looks like some of the larger ISPs in the country are looking at ways to filter content to their subscribers in order to fight copyright infringements. It would be nice if we had an FCC that cared about consumer rights instead of corporate America's profits.

That is essentially what new legislation that passed by a landslide (409-2) last week says:

The U.S. House of Representatives on Wednesday overwhelmingly approved a bill saying that anyone offering an open Wi-Fi connection to the public must report illegal images including "obscene" cartoons and drawings--or face fines of up to $300,000.

That broad definition would cover individuals, coffee shops, libraries, hotels, and even some government agencies that provide Wi-Fi. It also sweeps in social-networking sites, domain name registrars, Internet service providers, and e-mail service providers such as Hotmail and Gmail, and it may require that the complete contents of the user's account be retained for subsequent police inspection.

When will they pass legislation to go after the actual companies that transmit these images? A couple weeks ago I was surfing around Flick (a favorite past time of mine that goes hand in hand with being a photography nut), when I stumbled across a page that had sexual images of a girl that appeared to be around 10-12 years old. I wasn't given a notice that it maybe inappropriate content or anything, instead I was taken right to the page. I immediately reported these images to Flickr/Yahoo. Two weeks later and those images are still there and even more have been added. You still don't get any warnings that the images maybe inappropriate (or illegal).

So when will our government focus on the enablers instead of the people who may accidentally stumble upon these images? I strongly believe in freedom on the internet, but I am also strongly against the exploitation of children online. Instead of focusing on the person who may click on the wrong Flickr or MySpace page, why don't they impose tougher sanctions against these companies? If Yahoo or Murdoch faced steep fines over the storing of these images then maybe they will take more action instead of sending out automated responses.