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More on Network Neutrality
The New York Times has a good article that covers network neutrality, the lousy home network service we get in the U.S., and more.
Left unmentioned in Verizon's pitch is the concentration of power that it enjoys in its service area, which would allow it to ignore the equal-access principle whenever it wishes. We are asked to take on faith that it and the other telephone companies with similar plans will handle ordinary network traffic with the same care they would show if they had not begun parallel businesses for the carriage trade. How likely is that?Continue reading
Why we should care about network neutrality, now.
As we in depository libraries rely more and more on access to information that is not in our possession or control, we must rely on the Internet as the "pipe" that allows us and our users to get at that content that is on the servers of government agencies and others. And, when we do get digital files and we want to make them available over the Internet to users at home or in their offices, our users will be relying on the Internet as the pipe from them to us that allows them to get that content we want to deliver to them. So, what will happen if the Internet is no longer a neutral "pipe" that treats all bits equally? What happens if phone companies, cable companies, and other network service providers begin to give priority and higher bandwidth and speed to some services, some sites, and some information and, at the same time, reduce the bandwidth and speed of access to other sites, other content? Recent events and statements by the key players show that is exactly what they want to happen. For example, Ed Whitacre, the CEO of the large telephone company, SBC, caused a stir last November when he said that companies (such as Google and Yahoo) that make money using SBC's broadband connections should pay him. Continue reading
Citizen-based Semantic Web of Government Information — The Ultimate ReMix?
How can anyone deal with 368 million Web pages under the federal .gov domain? Researchers have a very interesting proposal for using wikis to enhance and enable government information. Use of wiki technology would "allow outside parties to add contextual information and pull together disparate strands of data." They see this as an implementation of the semantic web concept. Their paper is here:
IRS data goes from free to $12,000 per month
In 1976, a court ordered the Internal Revenue Service to disclose records showing how thoroughly it audits big corporations and the rich, and how much it discounts the additional taxes assessed after audits. And, "For decades, the information was given at no charge to a professor at Syracuse University, Susan B. Long, who made it available on the Internet at trac.syr.edu, with tools for people to conduct their own analyses." But, "In May 2004, the service told her that it would not provide the information and ordered its statisticians to stop answering her questions. It also advised her that if it ever did make the data public again, the information would cost $12,000 a month to receive electronic copies."
Much of what the public knows about the efficiency, effectiveness and evenhandedness of the revenue service and other big federal agencies is based on the figures that Professor Long collects and posts. Continue reading
Google DRM
At the Consumer Electronics Show last week, Google announced its new video service google video. Part of that service involves yet another media player and yet another Digital Rights Management (DRM) technology. Will Google's entry into the DRM field lap over into other areas, such as Google Book Search? Will government information that is in the public domain and scanned by Google for its full text service become DRM'd? We just don't know. While we can imagine that our good buddy Google will do no evil, as Siva says, we have no guarantees. It is by definition, the job of libraries to provide access to information. If libraries choose to rely on the Google's of the world to take care of the hard part of this process, libraries and the public will get only what those private companies find it in their commercial interest to allow us to have. Continue reading
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