With These Words I Can Sell You Something

By the time a kid hits high school, they will have spent 11,000 hours in classrooms and 15,000 hours watching television, during which time they will have seen as many as 350,000 advertisements on television....This little fact alone is startling.  Advertising is a large part of our lives, because its surrounds us everywhere we go.  The T.V., billboards, product placement, the radio...We are all just part of one big project for companies to take advantage of.  Hour long television shows are really almost about 45 minutes, the rest of the time we are stuck trying to be brainwashed to buy certain services or products.  Events like the superbowl is beautiful thing for advertising companies.  Everyone knows the superbowl is known for amazing commercials.  Millions of dollars are spent for 30 or 60 second time slots, just to show a unique commercial.  Seeing these commercials advertise "new and improved" products that do something amazing for you is just the tip of the iceberg.  How well is it actually improved? How can it be new when there are 5 other competing brands at your local store (different product, same function).  We are all just lab mice for these companies.  What can they say to lure us in? What kind of product could they possibly have that will have us going nuts for?  It's up to us to decode what these commercials say, and how they wrap lies around their claims.  Can this product really do that? Well of course, to a certain extent...We need to do what we can to avoid crappy advertising, and to pick out the real truth behind these claims.  Its all a business, and we are not the investors, just simply the consumer.

All the News that Fits

In this reading they talk about the American people believing everything that the news says.  The opening statements talk about a student saying “how can you believe what the Russians say”, and the argument of how can you believe what America says comes up.  We believe that we are in such a free and democratic country that what we hear in our news and everyday lives is true.  Television does its job of showing entertainment, not necessarily informing.  The news is there to present certain topics to certain extents, to create a need of want by the viewers.  The description of Happy News I believe is also very true in the news.  Shows always will show some horrific stories or scenes, but they instantly follow up with a cute or heroic story that changes peoples mind.  This distracts the viewer from what is really going on and lets them end their viewing experience with good news.   They then describe how the use of technology creates a sense of realism and truth, no matter what is being said.  Investigative tools, green screens, and other tools make people believe that with the use of this the information must be true.  This country believes most of what is said because of the government we have and the theoretical truth behind it.  People are exposed to what T.V. stations want you to see, and manipulate how you see it and in what form you see it.

Net neutrality or censorship?

Last week a United States court ruled the United States government cannot regulate the bandwidth allocated to internet sites. This move sparked strong reactions from supporters of both free enterprise and free speech. Does this mark the end of net neutrality? 

From a business perspective, one would want to be able to pay communications companies to favor their services or devices, but from an end user view, I feel it is taking advantage of our rights and abilities.  No matter what service I have , what device I am using, I want to be able to view and have the same access to everything equally.  Being limited only creates tension, jealously, and competition, nothing which good can come from.  people will fight for their rights, companies will fight for their profits, and the government will be forced in between the two to make a decision.  Will this be the best decision?  Probably not, but at least it will give some sort of legality to the question, forcing us to live with an answer, rather than rebel against "what could be" if things were done a certain way.  In my opinion, I think companies should face the fact that they need to create equal services for every person who is paying to use it, without and limitations or censorship.

What is "Net Neutrality?"

Watch this video from SavetheInternet.com on net neutrality.

Net Neutrality - Google & Verizon

Google and Verizon have recently made a net neutrality agreement, and this can effect what kind of information we'll be receiving through their services in the near future.  the companies agreed that net neutrality was a good thing and that the FCC should be able to enforce fines for companies that don’t abide by it, and that carriers should be forced to share information on how they route traffic for transparency.  They also created a lot of loopholes and exceptions, which is why a lot of people are all bent out of shape by it.  Two of the major loopholes are as follows: 1) exempts wireless carriers from all the rules except transparency. In other words, they can play favorites and route traffic however they want, as long as they tell us how they’re doing it. Only wired carriers would be subject to net neutrality principles, and even they would have some creative leeway. 2)allows for “differentiated managed services” that would be exempt from the neutrality given to other traffic. The document gives the examples of “health care monitoring, gaming, smart grid, and advanced educational services.” Although it explicitly claims these could not be use to circumvent rules, it provides no guidelines for which types of services warrant exemption and which belong in the same stream as everyone else.

The SaveTheInternet.com coalition says “Google is about to cut a deal with Verizon that would end the Internet as we know it.” Putting it more bluntly, “this deal puts the company in bed with the devil.”

Public Knowledge, a public interest group concerned with digital issues, has made “Google sold you out” its war cry. “This agreement would, among other things, allow Verizon to prioritize applications and content at whim over its mobile broadband network,” the group claims.

And what happens if we lose net neutrality?  Well basically, as an end user, that might mean that Mapquest and Bing Maps now load much slower than Google Maps. Hotmail and Yahoo mail load slower than Gmail. Yahoo and Bing searches take longer than Google searches. The plethora of choices you take for granted on the Web begin to evaporate when the biggest player in any space is able to pay for priority handling, shutting out competitors. 

Jump to the article yourself for more information about this agreement and how if will affect us...Verizon & Google's Net Neutrality

Net Neutrality and You

Net neutrality can be explained in a way by the following cartoon.  The man on the pole is assumed to work by Bell (notice the tie), which was a very powerful telecommunications company some years ago.  The internet cable contains wires of different information, such as new content, innovation, and consumer choice.  The fact that this man is cutting them shows that they are purposely trying to limit what goes over their internet to the customers, providing them with only what they want.  This goes from being an unlimited market of freedoms to a business design for companies.  The people on the ground assume that leaving everything the way it is, to create an equal world, is the way it should be.  This example of net neutrality gives an insist to how companies can control our forms of communication.

Net Neutrality

Net neutrality means that the telecom/cable/satellite/wireless networks that connect you to the Internet have to allow you to access anything on the Internet equally, without making it easier to connect to one site vs. another.

But first, let’s break network neutrality down into a real world example.  Say you’ve just launched a website that focuses on delivering the best reviews and news about apps, games and devices.  Pretend you call it AppConsumer.com, like I did mine. Let’s say the traffic is going thru the charts in just the first few days, blowing away even your highest expectations for the site.

And then let’s say since you use Google Ads and since Google searches are starting to drive traffic to your awesome app review site that somebody at Google says, “Hey, we should get into the app, game, and device reviews and news business like those guys at AppConsumer.com.”  Google also knows just how huge the growth in searches for app reviews and news that I’ve cited on here many times lately is.

Anyway, the point is, let’s say Google decides to start a direct competitor to your company.  Google starts adding lots of very expensively-developed technologies to their app reviews website, but the networks are clogged because of people still coming to your site and other small-business-owned app reviews and news websites, so Google says to Verizon and the other carriers: “Look, we’ll pay you if you’ll carry our content and make it work better on your networks than anybody else’s.  Especially those damn rebels at AppConsumer.com!” (http://blogs.marketwatch.com/cody/2010/08/12/net-neutrality-explained/)

History

By 1907, the US government openly agreed that the “One Policy, One System, Universal Service” model touted by AT&T President Theodore Vail could best provide the telephone to the public without the trouble of competitors developing incompatible systems. And the rest, they say, is history.

Throughout the next 70 years, AT&T would enjoy its status as a government-sanctioned monopoly. Through control of telephone manufacture and connection, 22 Bell Operating Companies, the decisions of local municipalities, government encouragement and insurmountable incumbency, AT&T was unmatched until its empire crumbled on January 8, 1982.

In 1974, the US Department of Justice alleged that profits from the dominant phone manufacturer and wholly-owned subsidiary, Western Electric, were being used to subsidize AT&T’s network in violation of antitrust law.  The ensuing United States vs. AT&T case stretched eight years until the winter of 1982, when Judge Harold H. Greene decreed that AT&T’s 22 Bell Operating Companies would be split and reorganized into seven separate Regional Bell Operating Companies, or RBOCs. The monopoly breakup took effect on January 1, 1984, and several big names in corporate history were born: Ameritech, Pacific Telesis, Southwestern Bell, Bellsouth, Bell Atlantic, Nynex and US West.

The Telecommunications Act of 1996 was the first major rework of US telecom law since 1934. The TCA was at the time considered an act to provide a new competitive telephone market in the United States.A 1995 House report optimistically wrote that the Act was “to provide for a pro-competitive, de-regulatory national policy framework” designed to rapidly accelerate information services deployment “by opening all telecommunications markets to competition.”

Unfortunately for consumers, the Telecommunications Act of 1996 had several fatal flaws that continue to have a chilling effect on US telecom policy.  Foremost, the act was primarily concerned with the traditional telephone. Neither broadband nor cellular services were substantial at the time the bill was created. This means that a patchwork of FCC rulings, minor legislation and snap judgments have served in place of real policy for nearly a decade.  The act also draws a distinction between a “common carrier” and an “information service.” Carriers that offer information services, e.g. broadband, are not subject to the interconnection and pro-competition clauses of the act. (http://tech.icrontic.com/articles/a-net-neutrality-history-lesson-how-us-telecom-became-such-a-trainwreck/)