Reply #46: Comcast has actually instituted a policy of capping bandwidth now. [View All]

[eshfemme]

It's mostly on the sly and not really being publicized but it is, in essence, the very policy that the Net Neutrality movement is fighting against that the companies are going ahead on their own and instituting. Comcast is one of the first companies to be doing this for certain. I don't know if it's possible but maybe switching to another ISP would be in your interest as Comcast will be imposing many more draconian practices with other ISPs looking at the reception of Comcast's covert changes.

Note that this current environment is similar to the spammers who took advantage of the legal vacuum that occurred when technology outpaced the law until various measures started to be passed to prevent their crimes. The telecommunications industry is trying to make it standard protocol for companies to control that Internet access while there is no official standard yet for Net Neutrality in the US. This is similar to making consumers get used to a substandard product so that they don't realize that there is a better product they could receive if they just worked harder for it like the car companies who have the capability of producing high efficiency cars but only sell cars that don't have nearly the amount of efficiency that they could have (like touting a 35 mpg as really good when it's actually possible to have 100 mpg).

Also, it's entirely possible that the recent problems with Internet access is because our IT infrastructure is now just as outdated as our other infrastructures. We may have been the birthplace of the Internet but we are now 15th in the world terms of our broadband access/quality because no one in the GOP dominated years re-invested in the infrastructure that had been built already (compared to our 4th place in 2001-- a lot can happen in 8 years huh?). South Korea, Japan and Finland are the top 3 and that's because they made a concerted effort in investing in technology that they knew was the future. It was a sure bet for the government to invest that money and what does the US government invest money in? War, incompetency and bad loans.

The Patriot Act is also an adverse effect on the actual establishment of infrastructure because companies are wary of establishing Internet node points, which control the flow of Internet traffic, due to the sensitive information that would need to be made accessible to the CIA and FBI under the Patriot Act, which also marks a decline in the ability of the US to combat cyber-warfare and espionage. This is a whole other topic though.

But yeah, a lot is really riding on electing Obama and this is only one of the issues.