I pay just under $60 per month for internet service, compared to some users in other parts of the country that price would be fair for 12Mbps download speed, unfortunately my ISP provider (Mediacom – http://mediacomcc.com) could possibly be one of the worst providers for internet service in the United States.

Let me explain, over the last several months I have called/tweeted the company (they are better help on Twitter then over the phone) on at least two dozen occasions, typically around Midnight to report outages. Unfortunately the company finds midnight to be a relatively “off-peak” time and often shuts down its network to make changes. Strangely enough during “off-peak” hours when I try to call the company I’m often met with the message “our lines are full please call back later.”

When the network isn’t completely shot to hell my average download speed ranges from .87Mbps to just over 5.3mbps. When I do get a hold of a customer service rep on the phone or through @MediacomSupport (Twitter), I am told “we are aware of the issue and are working on it” a message that has rang false for the last 6 months.

In the good old days of DSL and even traditional landline phones if I wasn’t happy with the service I could simply choose a different provider. As many of you may recall when Ma Bell was split apart the telephone lines running to homes were easily accessible to other providers, if you were for example sick of Verizon home phone service you could pick up AT&T or Fairpoint or any number of other providers in your area. Unfortunately for cable users that isn’t the case for cable service, that’s because cable companies own the lines that run to your home and therefore own your business. In my little town of 2800 people (we are 14 miles from a larger set of twin cities) our only choice is Mediacom or the much slower and expensive DSL service provided by Fairpoint Communications.

Yet there are no laws in my state (or others that I am aware of) that would allow me to simply call another company (Comcast is located 14 miles away) and switch to their service.

The problem is that cable companies have traditionally been franchises or “leased” by local government or utilities commissions, this has typically meant that you have one provider in your area (this fact has begun to change in larger cities and suburbs). Sure you can change to a satellite provider however broadband internet is not yet a reality with satellite systems.

What that essentially means is that local governments can create “mini-monopolies” in which one cable provider is given free reign over the network. You may have noticed on your cable bill a “franchise fee” that part of your bill is going directly into the city’s bank account. Essentially your local government is reaping the benefits regardless of what provider they allow. There is a federal guideline created by the FCC that states a local cable company is subject to “effective competition” in the area, however with the advent of satellite providers it’s easy to call something “effective competition” even when it doesn’t offer basic tenants of that competition including high speed internet.

In fact the FCC on its own website states:

If you are not satisfied with your cable rates, look for alternative multichannel video programming services that may be available in your area, such as competitive cable services, satellite television services and open video system services.

Furthering the dilemma is the fact that the FCC does very little in the way of regulating “customer service” in fact in the FCC’s cable television regulations they specifically state:

The FCC has developed general guidelines for customer service that deal with, for example, how quickly a cable operator must answer its phone or respond to requests for service, and how a cable bill should be written. It is up to your local franchising authority to enforce the guidelines in your community. Therefore, complaints about customer service and billing disputes should be directed to your local franchising authority. (this guidelines dates back to 1994 and can be found here: http://transition.fcc.gov/Bureaus/Cable/News_Releases/nrcb4009.txt)

Essentially your local franchising authority is responsible for your satisfaction with your cable provider. This is often why cable rate increasing, basic cable pricing and other issues are heard during city council meetings.

Unfortunately because the cable provider is not necessarily answering directly to the FCC on all issues regarding the operation of its network and because cities are often ill-equipped to deal with complaints customers in areas with only one cable network franchise are for better lack of a word screwed.

From a business standpoint running cable/fiber optic is not cheap and franchise owners have long argue that they can only recuperate their expenses for service lines by controlling territories, however the company’s have done a fine job of dealing with expenses by charging for everything from DVR and HDDVR boxes to early termination fees. In fact after more than 12 months of incorrect billing in which Mediacom was charging me for options that were listed on my contract as free I was only able to remove my cable TV service (I now use Netflix and Hulu Plus) after paying half the early termination fee, they decided to eat the other part out of “respect for my situation” which is ironic because they created the situation.

When all is said and done I was overcharged by Mediacom by more than $100 because of the services incompetence, I was forced to pay half the termination fee to end cable service even though they fully acknowledged the issues were related to problems on their service and I was left with cable service that under delivers by 60% of it’s promised 12Mbps download speeds.

My anger over Mediacom has quelled in recent weeks as I near the decision to contact a representative willing to go after the company for failing to meet their advertised speeds. Whether my journey ends with the start of a class action lawsuit or other measures being taken against the company, what I do know however is that increased competition in my area would have saved Mediacom and myself over 100 hours of phone calls, troubleshooting and other issues if I could have simply said goodbye to a worthless service provider and picked up Comcast (by all means not perfect either) which is just 14 miles away from my tiny little town on the outskirts of a much bigger city.

Have you had similar issues with your ISP/Cable Provider? Share your comments below and feel free to reach out in frustration through my Twitter handle: @Techobsessed.

[Op-Ed] When Your ISP Fails You And There Are No Other Choices is a post from: The Inquisitr

Over the years of the Harper Conservative government in Canada there has been a constant push to give the police more power when it comes to getting information about you from your ISP. For the most part they have failed in being able to push any legislation through the House of Commons but for the last four years or so that was because they didn’t have a majority government.

Well as of the last election that changed and now Harper is back trying to push a revamped “Investigating and Preventing Criminal Electronic Communication Act” through the Parliament; and you should be really afraid.

C-52 requires all telecommunications company to provide to law enforcement “any information in the service provider’s possession or control respecting the name, address, telephone number, and electronic mail address of any subscriber to any of the service provider’s telecommunications services and the Internet protocol address, mobile identification number, electronic serial number, local service provider identifier, international mobile equipment identity number, international mobile subscriber identity number and subscriber identity module card [SIM card] number that are associated with the subscriber’s service and equipment.”

To get that information, law enforcement won’t necessarily need a warrant. Each agency can designate up to 5 percent of its total employees as authorized to request the information, and it can ban telcos from admitting that they have provided any such information. Bill C-52 looks to be a key part of the upcoming “omnibus” bill that will include a host of other security-related material.

via Ars Technica

Even our country’s Privacy Commissioner considers this to be a bad bill saying that it is too broad and gives the police too much power.

We are concerned that clause 16 of Bill C-52 would give authorities access to a wide scope of personal information without a warrant; for example, unlisted numbers, email account data and IP addresses. The Government itself took the view that this information was sensitive enough to make trafficking in such ‘identity information’ aCriminal Code offence. Many Canadians consider this information sensitive and worthy of protection, which does not fit with the proposed self-authorized access model.

Given that Harper has a majority government now things don’t look very good at this point for Canadians when it comes to their privacy on the web.

Canadian internet privacy getting another screwing by the Harper government is a post from: The Inquisitr

I can’t count the number of time over the years that I have been on the Web where some bright politician or bureaucrat has this great suggestion about applying some sort of ratings system for websites on the Web. Well as a follow-up to the brilliant Digital Economy Bill it seems a British ISP thinks it would be a great idea to have movie style ratings for websites.

UK based Tibboh (now there’s a great name) is using a rating systems similar to the British Board of Film Classification on the grounds that they are trying to make the Web safer for our children (how often have we heard that line of crap before?). The idea being that people using Tibboh can rest easy as their children will be blocked from accessing websites that the ISP thinks is unsuitable for them using the BBFC style rating.

As Martin Bryant at The Next Web points out

While the idea may appeal to some parents, there are inconsistencies and some confusing decisions. IT Pro reports that the site deems Facebook as a ‘12′ certificate, despite the fact that Facebook’s terms and conditions say that you actually have to be 13 to use the site. Meanwhile, WordPress.com is limited to people aged 15 and over. It’s truly insane to apply a domain-wide certificate on a blogging platform with wide-ranging content, much of which will be perfectly acceptable for people younger than 15 to read.

Me .. well I’ll just call the whole idea brain dead and moronic.

Those wacky Brits now with movie-style Web rating is a post from: The Inquisitr

I have for the longest time proposed that if we ever want real innovations and world class Internet connectivity it would take a company with the balls to be happy just being a dumb pipe. I said as much again in a podcast last night with Sean P. Aune but little did I realize that today Google would be the company I was suggesting.

To clarify what I mean by a dumb pipe: it is an Internet provider whose only business is providing its customers with the fastest speeds possible at the lowest price possible. They are not a cable company slash television network. They are not a telecommunication company with built-in prejudices. They are not an entertainment company looking to maximize their profits.

They are strictly a dumb pipe.

So what do I wake up to this morning but Google’s announcement  that they are going into the ISP business at 1Gigabit speeds and they are making it open to boot.

Dumb pipe anyone?

Granted Google is a provider of all kinds of data but they are the only company so far that is willing to accept the fact that once the data hits the pipe there is no difference from one piece of data to another. Whether it be a VoIP call, a cellphone call, a stream of music, or a blog post. They are all the same ones and zeros.

The pipe doesn’t need to make any differentiations. There are no such things as bundled services to a pipe. There is no need to charge a separate price for your Internet phone from the price charged for your Internet connection or even your television signal.

To the dumb pipe there is no difference and in one simple announcement Google has acknowledged that and at the same time told the incumbent broadband providers that the 800 pound gorilla has just entered the game.

Granted I would have much preferred a company with less skin in the game than Google has but if this move forces some real change in favor of the consumer then I’ll take my change where I can find it.

Google’s real buzz – the shot across the bow of broadband providers is a post from: The Inquisitr

For the longest time broadband providers claimed that there was a pending doomsday of Internet congestion where the Internet would breakdown because of all the traffic. Unfortunately for these broadband providers that claim has been dis-proven six ways of Sunday which has sent them scurrying for some other fear inducing term that would let them justify increasing prices and the introduction of caps – yet another way to provide less service for more money.

With the rise of streaming and downloading of video – which everyone says is the biggest growth area for the Internet – these providers found their new term. Bandwidth Hogs. Yes, all those people who are doing exactly what is expect of them by the media industry are now the scourge of the Internet. It is their fault that the Internet slows down and providers have to increase their prices.

Not everyone is falling for this new argument. One such person is Benoit Felton a Yankee Group analyst who covers the whole fiber to home segment of the industry, and he says that the Bandwidth Hog argument is nothing short of a myth.

Not satisfied with just making the statement Felton is calling out the broadband providers to prove their case by providing data that can be analysed.

ISPs “claim that bandwidth hogs steal all the bandwidth and cause network congestion, and therefore their behavior harms all the other regular and peaceful law-abiding users,” he writes. “And to add insult to injury, they pay the same price as the others! No, policing and rationing must be applied by the benevolent telco to protect the innocent. Unfortunately, to the best of our knowledge, the way that telcos identify the Bandwidth Hogs is not by monitoring if they cause unfair traffic congestion for other users. No, they just measure the total data downloaded per user, list the top 5 percent and call them hogs.”That is, ISPs are going after “heavy users” simply for being “heavy users,” not necessarily because their usage causes problems for anyone. Imagine that some of these crazed downloaders are BitTorrent fiends (not a real brain-stretcher, that idea) and that they have their client set to do most of its downloading in the wee hours. At the end of the month, they may end up in the top tier of ISP subscribers even without causing problems for anyone. So why cap based on total monthly data transfer, rather than capping or throttling based on actual congestion problems?

Source: Ars Technica

Every argument that the broadband providers have used to squeeze money out of the consumer and/or the government has been proven to be either outrageous exaggerations based on questionable data or just downright lies. It’s good to hear that someone knowledgeable about the business is trying to get some real transparency when it comes to how these companies are doing business.

Analyst challenges ISPs to prove ‘bandwidth hogs’ exist is a post from: The Inquisitr

Anyone who has taken even a modicum of history will remember the age of the Robber Barons in the United States. What it boiled down to in exceedingly simplistic terms was vast amounts of wealth and power concentrated in the hands of a few extremely powerful businessmen. It was a wealth and power accumulated by whatever means necessary and lead to increasing monopolistic activity that ended up with the government having to step in and break up this monopolies.

The most powerful Robber Barons were the industrialists who first controlled the railways that provided the majority of continental travel and transfer of goods around the country. This same type of predatory types of businesses practices occurred with the fledgling oil industry (Standard Oil and the Rockefeller family) which brought in a whole new flock of robber barons.

Today the idea of robber barons might seem a rather foreign concept but the reality is that we could very well be seeing the creation of a whole new set of Robber Barons – The Internet Robber Barons. Unlike the industrial robber barons before them though this generation of the Internet Robber Barons are operating in two different realms. The first are the corporations that control the how, why and where of accessing the the web whereas the second and maybe even more insidious group are those collecting and keeping every bit of data on the web.

Whether it be Google who’s stated mission is to index all the information in the world through to Facebook who is collecting one of the largest databases in the world on human thought, behavior and interaction the idea is to lock that all away in computers that they control.

The Electronic Gatekeepers

The Internet is one of mankind’s greatest achievements to date. The changes it has wrought on our society are only just beginning to be felt and even at this point there is a feeling that this beginning is only a tsunami of change yet to come.

As incredible as what the present provides and the future portends it all hinges on one simple thing – ease of access. This ease of access though covers many different areas but in the end they are controlled by those corporations that hold the keys to tollbooths we all have to pass through in order to be a part of something that is quickly moving from a luxury to that of being a necessity.

Whether it be via means like cable, DSL or even WiFi the giant telecommunications, and increasingly media providing, companies can control who can access the Internet, how they can access it, for how long they can access it, and increasingly what they can access. With control of access held in the hands of a few companies; which grow fewer with each acquisition and merger, consumers have increasingly little voice in what is suppose to be the vehicle of free distribution and sharing of information.

Matthew Lasar at Ars Technica had an excellent post that looked at the era of robber barons of the past and echo a nerve racking similarity to what we face now and will continue to face well into the future. In the post he wrote the following:

In many ways this story is far field from our contemporary debates about network management, file sharing, and the perils of protocol discrimination. But the main questions  seem to remain the same—to what degree will we let Western Union then and ISPs now pick winners and losers on our communications backbone? And when do government regulations grow so onerous that they discourage network investment and innovation?

Already we are seeing a shift towards the consolidation of access provider and content creator with the recent deal where Comcast, one of the largest Internet access providers in the US, is buying controlling interest in NBC a national content producer. There is no doubt now that this Pandora’s Box has been opened that other access providers will look to do the same thing or possibly the content producers looking to control the access by purchasing access controllers.

In either case this consolidation doesn’t bode well for the consumer and we are forced to stand by as this new set of Robber Barons consolidate their position and power.

Information is power and we willingly hand it over

As worrisome as the consolidation of power and the ability to control access to the Internet is falling into the hands of fewer and fewer companies there is always the stop-gap measure of government intervention. As in the past when the public outcry has gotten loud enough the government has been forced to step in and break up this type of power base.

Unfortunately there is no such remedy when it comes to the accumulation of data in the hands of a few powerful companies. Companies who give the illusion of altruistic reasons for spending millions upon millions of dollars to supposedly store all this data collected every minute of the day.

Except there is nothing altruistic in this apparent madness because these companies have taken one of the modern axioms to heart. Information is power.

The one problem up until the increasing popularity of the web, specifically social media and all the data collection tools hidden under the guise of names like Twitter, Facebook and a continually growing number of tools, was that while storage of the data was relatively cheap; and getting cheaper all the time, the act of collecting the data was expensive. Collecting data on the scale never before imagined would require armies of people working non-stop to collect and input all that information.

Enter user-generated content.

From uploading images to Flickr, to non-stop transmission of 140 character tidbits of information, to creating and maintaining the world’s largest encyclopedia this work could be done by the average person – and all for free.

Even though there are many hopefuls that are dreaming to be the next Facebook, the next Google, or the next Wikipedia the fact is that as we progress forward the chances of this happening become slimmer and slimmer. In effect all the world’s information is very rapidly coming under the control of a few increasingly powerful companies and no amount of warm and fuzzy social media juice is going to dethrone them.

A new generation of Robber Barons are being created. A generation who will in effect control how it is shared and who can have access to it as well as controlling how much of that information they will be allowed to see, read or use. They will also control the value of that information and like everything else in the world it will have a price on it – a price which they control.

The open and ubiquitous web

As much as we might like to believe in the illusion of an open web that can be access by everyone in the world from anywhere in the world by any possible method the reality is that right now, and for much of the foreseeable future, this ideal is nothing more than a pipe dream.

The new Robber Barons are coming to town and as history has shown us nothing good can come of it. Yet we are handing them the keys to the vaults without asking ourselves if this is such a good idea. This unfortunately will only result in us once again repeating history – a history that should have been our warning signs instead of our tombstones.

The Internet Robber Barons is a post from: The Inquisitr

Well color me surprised but not all of the record companies are happy with UK ISP Virgin Media’s planned subscription service for downloading music.

The UK company believes that consumers want to be able to download as much music as they want and without it being loaded down with DRM restrictions. It’s newly announced subscription service is built around this idea that will allow their subscribers to download as much music as they want for an additional monthly fee and allow them to keep it permanently. The fee for the service hasn’t been announced but people in the know are suggesting it will be around the £15 mark.

At this point only Universal and some smaller indie labels have signed up with the ISP’s service. The other record companies, like Warner Bros, EMI, and Sony Music aren’t too happy with the service as they believe that it will cannibalize their existing digital sales. They also don’t believe that it will do anything to convert persistent file-sharers.

A Virgin Media spokeswoman said it’s committed to launching a “comprehensive” service this year. “We’re making good progress in developing the service and are on track to launch before Christmas,” she said. “We’re in talks with both major and independent labels and are committed to launching a comprehensive service.”

However, while record labels are keen to work with Virgin because of the reach it offers via its 3.7m broadband subscribers, they argue the music download service needs to make commercial sense.

A label executive involved in the negotiations said the labels support Virgin Media’s music plans in theory, but any service must deliver both feasibility and scale.

“We want to work with Virgin Media as a partner but any deal has to sit comfortably with how we value our assets against how it values its customers,” he said. “We have to evaluate each deal as it comes in and make sure we’re happy with the overall value of the proposition.”

Source: New Media Age – Record labels cast doubt on Virgin Media’s music model

Somehow I don’t hold out much hope that the Virgin Media subscription idea will end up seeing the light of day.

Virgin’s solution to piracy not sitting well with all record companies is a post from: The Inquisitr

The United States FTC issued a statement today announcing a rare takedown of rogue ISP Pricewert, LLC. (Aliases include 3FN and APS Telecom.)

Besides sounding vaguely like an obscure German-industrial band, Pricewert stands accused of actively recruiting and colluding with cybercriminals to infect computers with spyware, viruses, trojan horses, Jonas Brothers tracks, and according to the FTC statement, pornography containing bestiality, incest, and violence. The FTC alleges that Pricewert advertised its services on the “darkest corners of the internet” (4chan?) and even set up a forum to allow criminals to exchange information more readily.

According to the FTC, Pricewert either ignored take-down requests or moved criminal elements to other IPs to thwart detection. Further dastardly acts cited in the complaint include DOS attacks, botnet deployment and spam distribution.

The FTC have backed up their case with IM transcripts that show senior employees conspiring to configure botnets with bot herders. The court issued a temporary injunction barring upstream providers from enabling the alleged bad guys, and froze Pricewert’s assets pending a hearing on June 15th.

FTC swoops in and smacks down rogue ISP Pricewert is a post from: The Inquisitr

I have said this before and I will say it again without a second of hesitation – metered broadband is bad for the Internet. It is bad for innovation on the web and it is especially bad for any video business online. This will be especially true as the quality of downloadable, or streaming, video – be it movies or television shows – increases in quality. With every increase in quality you will have larger and larger file sizes being transferred via the web and every single byte of those files will count against your download cap.

Stacey Higginbotham made this point the best today in her post at GigOM where she used the example of downloading the HD version of Twilight from iTunes

Time Warner Cable: Time Warner’s price per GB for its proposed tiers ranges from 75 cents to $15 (unless you max out the overage fees on the 100 GB per month tier and default into unlimited service for $150). This means the bandwidth for “Twilight” would cost between $2.85 and $20.60. After adding in the $3.99 rental fee, the evening at home costs between $6.84 and $24.59.

At a time when just about everyone and their brother is spouting off about how big video is going to be we have broadband providers talking up the supposed need to move to a metered broadband. The only need that I can see is the need to find more ways to gouge their customers.

So it was interesting to see this story on SA Business by David Saleh Rauf reporting that Time Warner is postponing the implementation of their metered broadband program

Officials with the cable company said Monday they are postponing implementation of a new billing format for San Antonio and Austin customers based on Internet usage until October.

A trial program intended to charge varying rates depending on usage was slated to begin this summer. The decision to delay the meter program was prompted mostly by customer reaction, said Gavino Ramos, Time Warner’s vice president of communication for South Texas.

I don’t see how Ramos figures that customer reaction is going to change between now and October. The point is that metered broadband is just a bad idea all around.

Metered broadband will kill online video is a post from: The Inquisitr

So, the RIAA is getting much press about how it has figured out that suing grandmothers, dying children and single mother’s on the poverty line isn’t such a great idea. At least that is how it seems from what is being written up about this newest announcement of theirs. The reality of the matter is that they have only decided not to pursue wholesale lawsuits.

Their new method of attack is to strong arm ISPs to follow the French example of three strikes and you lose your internet connection.

In deals that are being brokered by Andrew Cuomo – the same person who threatened ISPs with public shame if they didn’t censor USNET – the ISPs agree to become RIAA enforcers. Based on information that will be provided by the RIAA our ISPs will issue consumers two warning emails letting them know that they have been caught downloading pirated digital goods.

The third will be to notify the consumer that their access to the Internet is being cut off. After which you could still find yourself being sued by the RIAA who will use your ISP termination as evidence against you.

It doesn’t matter that this will be the same type of questionable information that the RIAA used to sue people with. It doesn’t matter that it is the same information that has resulted in the RIAA losing more and more court cases as people begin to fight back. Unfortunately though when it comes to RIAA backed ISP action we don’t have the same legal recourse that we do when the RIAA sues people.

While a lot of people might want to herald the fact that the RIAA is dropping mass lawsuits as some kind of victory nothing could be further from the truth. The real truth here is that if this type of ISP interference goes ahead consumers will be in an even worse position. First we will have a private corporation deciding whether or not you deserve having an internet connection based of highly suspect information provided to them by the RIAA. Second we have no way to prove our innocence like we would in a court of law.

In other words – if this plan goes ahead we are screwed – royally.

[hat tip to TechWag and Techdirt]

RIAA makes your ISP the judge and jury is a post from: The Inquisitr

Up to this point your service provider for that connection to the web has generally restricted themselves to only managing the pipe in the way that will make them the most profits. The majority of the time; unless it was in their best interests, the ISPs have stayed away from policing the data that goes through their pipes.

That could change in the very near future if Andrew Cuomo; New York’s Attorney General, has his way and if either; or both, of the bills before Congress are passed.

In the first instance with Andrew Cuomo it looks like he has made it his life’s mission apparently to force Internet Service Providers to block child porn. On the face of it this is a noble idea but knowing that it would be next to impossible to legislate them into doing this Cuomo has taken to publicly shaming – or at least threatening to – ISPs that don’t check all the data going through their pipes for child porn and then reporting the offenders. To a point his plan has been successful in that the majority of ISPs have been blocking all USENET access but that in itself is a joke considering that 99% of all USENET is actually legitimate content.

However not satisfied with that, it appears the Cuomo got a hold of some promotional literature from an Australian company called Brilliant Digital. It seems that the company is promising that is able to inspect every single image, every single movie, every document whether it is attached to an email or found in a search as it moves through any Internet Service Provider’s network. This information was then passed on to the companies that Cuomo is trying to pressure into policing their networks to the Attorney General’s satisfaction.

Then today Doc Searls had a post where he pointed to two pieces of legislation that would make this enforced policing easier to thrust upon ISPs. The first one S.173B; which Doc describes as nothing more than a great big expensive kludge that would create more problems that it would solve, reads in part

A bill to require the Department of Justice to develop and implement a National Strategy Child Exploitation Prevention and Interdiction, to improve the Internet Crimes Against Children Task Force, to increase resources for regional computer forensic labs, and to make other improvements to increase the ability of law enforcement agencies to investigate and prosecute child predators.

The second piece of legislation; S.519, is in doc’s opinion nothing more than legalized wiretapping of the Internet and it reads in part

A bill to modernize and expand the reporting requirements relating to child pornography, to expand cooperation in combating child pornography, and for other purposes,

As Doc says in his post regarding the last one

The other is a wiretapping bill for the Internet. I get that from Section 103, which says one Task Force purpose is “increasing the investigative capabilities of state and local law enforcement officers in the detection and investigation of child exploitation crimes facilitated by the Internet and the apprehension of offenders”. Hence the move by Andrew Cuomo in New York.

Like I said in the beginning the idea of fighting child pornography is a good and righteous fight but when do we cross the line between the good fight and overt surveillance of all your online activity regardless of what you are doing. Given how bad even the current so-called sophisticated nanny software is when mothers can be blocked from site talking about breast feeding, or some young person trying to understand themselves by searching for gay pride information.

While Doc Searls frames his post by tying this nettapping to the idea that these types of policing ideas happen because we are still trying to frame the web as just another arm of the telcom business I think this paragraph of his says it better

This is one more slippery slope at the bottom of which the Internet is just another breed of telecom service, subject to ever-expanding telecom regulation, all for Good Cause.

To me moves like this smack more of the ever encroaching nanny state where everything we do, say or think is being governed by goodie two shoes who think they know what is best for us. How much longer will it or how much more will we take before we stand up and tell them all to piss off.

Opening door to Internet censorship under guise of Saving the Children is a post from: The Inquisitr