Comments on NPR

I was listening, as I so often do, to NPR as I drove home today. A couple of things on the radio seemed worth mentioning.

First, there was the gentleman who claimed to be a “liberal progressive democrat,” but who was running an astroturf campaign to stop the network neutrality bills currently being examined in congress. Now, I will be the first to agree that I think legislating anything WRT network neutrality is a pretty bad solution…but not nearly as bad as letting the telcos start their “tiered internet” model, where the content that they (the telcos) decide is “good” gets preferential treatment, faster access, perhaps even any access at all. This would BREAK THE INTERNET. The internet works because it is a meritocracy, perhaps the best possible meritocracy ever, because for about $10 someone with a great idea can create a website and make it work for people, and change people’s lives. With the internet you don’t have to convince some suit about the feasibility of your idea. You don’t have to spend tens of thousands of dollars on market research. You just do it…and if you do it well, people will come to you. Think about it…a virtual world where any idea can make it big because of easy, instant access to anyone anywhere in the world. Now imagine instead if that idea is put on the slow, non-paying internet. People trying to access it are subjected to slow speeds, to bad loads, to broken connections because our intrepid entrepreneur with the brilliant new idea doesn’t have the funds to pay verizon, at&t, and bellsouth to put him on the upper tier of the net. So that new idea never gets a real chance…and the internet as we know it is gone.

This so called “liberal”‘s argument is that if we want all this glorious bells and whistles video and multimedia system, then why shouldn’t the content providers pay so that other people can access their content? Well, a couple of reasons. First, and foremost, that content is WHY people even HAVE an internet connection. Without that content, no one would buy a goddamn internet connection from the telcos anyway…so I think the content providers have already done their part in the ecosystem. The telcos wouldn’t be able to sell their high-speed, overpriced connections to either servers or users if there wasn’t great content out there, if the meritocracy of the net didn’t draw people online. Second, those connections have already been paid for, on both ends. When someone buys a connection, they’re not paying for connection to the ISP…they’re paying for end to end connection – with whatever end they want to reach. That is the contract. And I guarantee that if there were any real competition in the ISP space, no one would ever have been able to even suggest, in private, that they “tier” the internet for their customers, because no customers in the world are going to get their internet from someone who tells them what they can connect to. Third, because the AMERICAN PEOPLE HAVE ALREADY PAID $200 BILLION for this “broadband” access we’ve been promised since the early 90′s…and that $200 billion has simply been pocketed by the telcos. That alone is a reason to seize all the trunklines and sell them off to new companies, with multiple companies getting a share in any given area. I guess I need to go on NPR and yell at them.

Second, there was an interview with the director of cars. The interviewer, speaking of the amazing photo-realism in the movie, asked the director if all this photo-realism wasn’t somehow removing some of the fantasy from “cartoons”. In a very “to a child”-like manner, the director responded, “Well…our movie…is about talking cars…I don’t think that too much fantasy has been removed” (paraphrased, of course.

I just thought it was pretty damn funny.