[TriLUG] Move over Google: Wilson, NC did it a long, long time ago

[Gregory Woodbury via TriLUG]

I recall in the early days of networking that there was a widespread
mythbelief that non-dialup networking was *already* covered by the
Title II Common Carrier status.  It took a great deal of explaining
and refocusing of education to educate the users that this wasn't
true, that the ISPs and infrastructure providers had bypassed the
Common Carrier thing and could do business any way they wanted.

This is similar in many ways to the mythbeliefs about Copyright.
Before the USA signed on to the Berne Convention on Copyright the USA
had a rather different set of limitations on terms and lengths of
copyright -- such as the requirement for labeling and shorter periods
of exclusive use. After Berne, the labeling requirements changed, but
the lengths of exclusive use and extensions got much longer.

I am really quite in favor of treating the ISPs and infrastructure
carriers like the telephone service providers -- it makes them treat
all the information the same, without regard to the type of content.
While it has potential to open the door to some possible governmental
regulation of content (as in the broadcast bans on the "7 words you
can't say on TV or radio") the basis in legal dogma that lead to such
bans are not present in the non-broadcast nature of Internet Protocol
packet routing.

In any case it is going to come down to what the judicial branch
determines about the applicability of Title II to the new technology
of the net.  If the courts find for the corporate masters it won't
mean a damn thing, but just maybe the courts will be cognizant of the
history that made Title II necessary in the first palace.

-- 
G.Wolfe Woodbury
redwolfe at gmail.com