Tim Berners Lee slams Internet fast lanes: ‘It’s bribery.’

So the man who decided that DRM in HTML5 was a good thing has an opinion on the well-being of the world wide web, eh?<p>Sorry if this sounds bitter. I&#x27;m just posting from a browser unable to access HTML5 content at a regular interval. It&#x27;s an open source browser, and the suggested &quot;fix&quot; is always using a closed-source browser, OS or both.<p>I thought this web-thing was supposed to be open and cross platform?

I am in favour of net neutrality but worry that everyone is defending a status quo that is still bad. For most consumers and buisness access to the net is hardly free in a financial sense. Entry level bandwidth on AWS&#x2F;Azure&#x2F;App engine is still very expensive and seems completely overpriced compared to storage.<p>For the consumer lack of last mile competition and monthly contracts make competition almost impossible on a day to day basis. An entrepreneur could setup a WiFi hotspot in an area with poor coverage but no one would use it because we are all trying to do everything on a 3g data plan.<p>I want competition for last mile access that allows the consumer to connect based on the best connection available regarldess of who has provided it. Companies should be paid for providing bandwidth and it makes sense to ask large players like Facebook and Nextflix to pay the bill ($0.2 per GB to guarantee a fast connection to the user should be reasonable). The only way to break the telcos is to fund open compeition.

I can&#x27;t help but wonder if the fate of Internet infrastructure will follow that of transport infrastructure (Build-operate-transfer : <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Build-operate-transfer" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Build-operate-transfer</a>)<p>Based off history, it seems that private ownership of common property is doomed to fail.

See, telling Congress that something is &quot;bribery&quot; and expecting Congress to think that&#x27;s something bad is just wishful thinking on TBL&#x27;s part, bless his heart.

How does this ISP issue affect the internet outside the US? I&#x27;m guessing it&#x27;s not really going to change &quot;The Internet&quot; as a whole, just us in the US.

More like a protection racket, really.

M-W defines &quot;bribery&quot; in relevant part as: &quot;money or favor given or promised in order to influence the judgment or conduct of a person in a position of trust.&quot;<p>It&#x27;s only &quot;bribery&quot; if the recipient is in a position of trust. The ISP&#x27;s are not. They are just businesses operating their wholly private networks. Paying someone to use their private property for your benefit isn&#x27;t &quot;bribery.&quot; It&#x27;s a basic commercial transaction. E.g. it&#x27;s not &quot;bribery&quot; for me to pay an Uber Black driver more than an Uber X driver to take me somewhere.

What ISP&#x27;s say to companies who want to use the internet, &quot;Either you pay us to access your customers, or we break your kneecaps.&quot; This is about both monopolies and mafia business tactics.

Internet has long provided the opportunity for a new comer to challenge the status quo because of net neutrality. Now we are creating a barrier of entry and it is going to be hard for new startups. American dream is correlated to equal opportunity for everybody irrespective of the background. That&#x27;s what is stake at here.

Simply use DRM. Some media can be marked as &quot;slow download&quot; and the web browser has to respect this.<p>Write it into the HTML spec et voila! One happy Tim Berners-Lee.

<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Modern_Colossus_of_Rail_Roads_-_Keppler_1879.jpg" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;File:Modern_Colossus_of_Rail_Ro...</a>

Not to be feared. Let it pass. Please let it pass. This is all that is needed for a company like google or someone else to disrupt the system. This is the final chess piece for Verizon and similar scum to finally get run over.

If we don&#x27;t allow ISPs to throttle things like Netflix, isn&#x27;t the impact that all other packets might suffer latency? In that case, is NN a subsidy to large content producers?

Did Tim envision internet bandwidth consumed by Netflix? Is the current mix of content we consume something he approves of?<p>Instead of staking out absolutist positions it would be helpful to come up practical solutions now. Some form of fast lanes is inevitable over time and just maybe it could improve the situation of people like me who would likely remain on the &quot;normal speed&quot; lanes.

I think that offering a range of diffrent models of threwput and latancy can only be good for the internet as a hole.<p>What I am conserned with is this, I want to tell the ISP what packets should run with what characterisitcs. I am completly against the ISP making deep packet inspection and deciding the selfs what packets to drop or dely.<p>I think like in everything else, when you have a finite resources you need a market. Having every packet be the same and then just randomly drop them, is just bad for the internet as a hole. We need QoS we need to be able for some services to run with priority.<p>When I play video games or skype I dont wanne wait, if I torrent every episode from a podcast the latency does not intrest me so much.<p>So Im am PRO net neutrality in this sence, the ISP is not allowed to look into my packets and change there priority.