Wee hah!

First, I know you’re liberal enough to be against the Bush regime using torture as an interrogation tool. Cyberbullying is a form of psychological torture. It is intended to harrass, humiliate, and distress the victim. It can cause depression, feelings of persecution and paranoia, and has led in some cases to suicide.

Making the schools or cops nannies in this instance may not be the solution, but these cyberbullies are predators no less dangerous to a child’s emotional well being than sexual predators. Parents need tools to combat this.

Instead of merely complaining about what you don’t like, why don’t you propose a workable system for combatting cyberbullying?

What statement has anybody ever made that comes within 100 miles of that?

Network neutrality is the idea that after ISP users have already paid for the ability to download content from the Internet, ISPs should not attempt to charge *publishers* on the other end, for publishing content over those wires. This essentially amounts to double-billing for the same service.

Brad Templeton’s comments on his blog sum up the problem:
http://ideas.4brad.com/node/373
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Once again, the goal is to violate the contract. The pipes start off belonging to the ISPs but they sell them to their customers. The customers are buying their line to the middle, where they meet the line from the other user or site they want to talk to. The problem is generated because the carriers all price the lines at lower than they might have to charge if they were all fully saturated, since most users only make limited, partial use of the lines. When new apps increase the amount a typical user needs, it alters the economics of the ISP. They could deal with that by raising prices and really delivering the service they only pretend to sell, or by charging the other end, and breaking the cost contract. They’ve rattled sabres about doing the latter.
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Even your old colleage Paul Vixie wrote the same thing, and for once I agree with every word he said:
http://fm.vix.com/terra/rights/commonwealthclub.html
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Recently SBC (I mean AT&T, I think, is it Wednesday?) rattled its sabre and said that Google and other content supplying companies should be paying for the use of SBC’s backbone to reach SBC’s eyeballs. Most of us said, uh, what? “Aren’t SBC’s own customers paying SBC to carry that traffic?” Some of us even said “I am not an eyeball, I am a person!” But anyway, from time to time these Internet companies shut down interconnects in hopes of creating new cash flows among eachother, and until the government regulates this, we’re all at risk of higher prices or lower service with zero notice. Some well meaning democrats are trying to challenge this with “network neutrality” legislation, but this probably isn’t their year. Or their decade.
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