The Register® — Biting the hand that feeds IT

Feeds

Obama pledges Net Neutrality, Ewok safety

Your virtual candidate calling

Regcast training : Hyper-V 3.0, VM high availability and disaster recovery

Comment Politicians long ago gave up on politics. Instead of articulating great ideas, the choice that faces voters today is between identikit managerial bureaucrats who've never had a job outside politics. Most of their adult lives have been spent in the hermetic world of wonkdom. So it's little wonder, then, that they have trouble distinguishing between fiction and reality.

And it's no surprise at all to hear that a virtual Presidential candidate is throwing his electrons behind a virtual cause, to repeal a virtual law that never existed.

What else would a cypher do?

Asked whether he'd "re-instate Net Neutrality" as "the Law of the Land", trailing Presidential Candidate Barack Obama told an audience in Cedar Rapids, Iowa pledged that yes, he would.

He also said he'd protect Ewok villages everywhere, and hoped that Tony Soprano had survived the non-existent bloodbath at the conclusion of The Sopranos.

(So we made the last two up - but they wouldn't have been any more silly than what the Presidential Candidate really said.)

There are several problems with Obama's pledge.

Firstly, the network of networks we call the internet has never been neutral in any technical sense - it wouldn't work if it was. Network managers have always performed "shaping".

Nor has this "neutrality" ever been "the Law of the Land". Campaigners like to point to the ominous portents of a Federal court decision known as Brand X, from 2005. But guess what? This turns out to be a fiction, too: the court simply maintained the status quo, upholding FCC cable regulations that permitted cable to share their pipes with ISPs. So no change there.

Campaigners say comments by AT&T boss Ed Whitacre indicated he wanted to charge different prices for different websites. This is something Obama picked up on.

What you need to know about cloud backup

More from The Register

 breaking news
UK telcos chuck another £1m at online child abuse watchdog
Web enforcers IWF gain power to seek and destroy illegal content
 breaking news
Pttow! Ofcom kicks hams out of MoD bands
Geet off my land, you, you ... 'secondary user'
 breaking news
Now you can use your phone instead of your wallet at the ATM, too
Blimey, these little paper towels out of the vending machine are really expensive
 breaking news
UK.gov's £530m bumpkin broadband rollout: 'Train crash waiting to happen'
Whitehall whispers of damning watchdog report next month
Google launches broadband balloons, radio astronomy frets
A careless Loon could blind the square kilometre array
 breaking news
MySpace zaps millions of teens' tearful rants, causes wave of angst
'Your crappy redesign SUCKS, I wanna read my blogs' screech users
 breaking news
Microsoft Office 365 on iPhone NOW: No, we're not making this up
Word, Excel, Powerpoint for your pocket-stroker
Increased cell phone coverage tied to uptick in African violence
'Significantly and substantially increases the probability of violent conflict'
 breaking news