Friday, June 09, 2006

House rejects Net neutrality rules

Read this article and you can see why I'm steaming. Now, the US has effectively drawn the battle lines - developing countries NEED net neutrality in order to be able to effectively access the Internet for develpment and economic purposes. Some Governments already consider some US activity on the Internet as tantamount to econmic warfare on their developing economies - how much more so now, when the US has effectively said - we don';t have to treat everyone equally - we can discriminate, and give some people better access than others.
Lets see how the rest of the world takes this. ICANN's MOU is due to end in September and the IANA contract has been put up for rebid. The .com agreement hasn't yet been approved by the DoC. The management of the Internet is in a difficult and uncertain place now. I hope it works out.

Article by Declan McCullagh
House rejects Net neutrality rules | CNET News.com
The U.S. House of Representatives definitively rejected the concept of Net neutrality on Thursday, dealing a bitter blow to Internet companies like Amazon.com, eBay and Google that had engaged in a last-minute lobbying campaign to support it.

By a 269-152 vote that fell largely along party lines, the House Republican leadership mustered enough votes to reject a Democrat-backed amendment that would have enshrined stiff Net neutrality regulations into federal law and prevented broadband providers from treating some Internet sites differently from others.

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