This issue has nothing to do with a free/unfree country. It should have never gone to congress.
If all of the "big" websites refuse to pay ISP's for premium access, then the program will die.
Also, if your DSL provider is giving you crappy performance to the non-premium sites you want to visit, you might just switch to cable where your connection isn't regulated as much. (or whatever other hypothetical you can think of)

Who cares if an ISP gives priority to sites no one wants to visit?
I don't think consumers are driven by premium access speeds to websites. They're driven by things they want to use.

This could also help to encourage a lot of fun hackerisms by content providers to save bandwidth, try different protocols, etc.

> This issue has nothing to do with a free/unfree country.

Uhhh... This issue has EVERYTHING to do with the freedom to make our own choices, instead of allowing folks to buy their way into our "choices" by having our choices limited to those willing to pay the most money.

In short... I couldn't disagree with you more.

Daragarrd: What you say is true only for attacks targeting IE vulnerabilities such as the one used on the blog in question. Thse are certainly not the only vulnerabilities Windows users face.

Microsoft has always had a rather cavalier attitude towards security and honestly appeared to be pretty clueless when it came to security in general until Server 2003 came out. In general a UNIX/Linux environment, if configured properly and kept updated, will offer superior security to Windows. For the desktop user life is just plain easier from a security standpoint running a modern, user friendly Linux distribution

http://www.tiffany-lamp-lighting.org

fine artical, This issue has nothing to do with a free/unfree country. It should have never gone to congress.
If all of the "big" websites refuse to pay ISP's for premium access, then the program will die.
Also, if your DSL provider is giving you crappy performance to the non-premium sites you want to visit, you might just switch to cable where your connection isn't regulated as much. (or whatever other hypothetical you can think of)

Who cares if an ISP gives priority to sites no one wants to visit?
I don't think consumers are driven by premium access speeds to websites. They're driven by things they want to use.

This could also help to encourage

good

Right. That is the meaning behind "intelligence doesn't scale". It is another way of saying the effect of any long tail distribution is to create locales of competence (where a locale may not be physical but topical space). If members of these cooperate, one can build fantastically complex vertical applications or enable the interoperations of many horizontal applications. On the other hand, the same people will also be competing at some levels so as I said, the manifold becomes lumpy. That's ok as long as on balance, the ecology is self-sustaining. Study models of ecologies where for disease or invasion, the ecology drops below some population threshold and can't recover. Information does that as well depending on the energy model for supporting it. That is why I study low energy transport systems. The human brain is the gold standard for such systems. Open source is the manifestation on the web.

As for AJAX, XAML, XUL, yes. Presaged by MID. (for which I am glad because that project does away with any IP someone might want to grab for those ideas). So depending on the model of one's own economic reciprocity, it is a good idea to expose to visible web if one doesn't mind giving it up for the sake of securing a future (homo parochius) in an open source environment of reciprocal contribution (homo reciprocans

Uhhh... This issue has EVERYTHING to do with the freedom to make our own choices, instead of allowing folks to buy their way into our "choices" by having our choices limited to those willing to pay the most money. http://www.glass-products.org