Sincerely,
Charles Deuter.

@Mark If cable companies had their way, Boxee, Netflix, and Hulu traffic would be de-prioritized so badly that it would take two hours for your one-hour episode of Lost to load. And of course, AT&T would be offering a prioritized service for an extra $20 a month for their own on-demand service, or an extra $30 a month for unlimited HTTP downloads. Great deal!

You don’t seem to understand that services such as Boxee, Netflix, Hulu, and Wikipedia (yes, even wikipedia) rely upon neutral network carriers in order to function correctly. If network carriers cannot reliably be neutral, then I’m (the entrepeneur) am not going to build a new service that uses the internet. Too risky.

Oh, and about the wikipedia bit: http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2010/09/wikipedia-now-distributes-its-videos-using-p2p.ars

Oh goodness, foxnews might run faster? Looks like DailyKos even runs faster than foxnews. Someone call the police!
http://www.digitalsociety.org/2010/07/call-the-net-neutrality-police-dailykos-loads-faster-than-foxnews/

In some cases prioritization is needed to deal with span, viruses etc and threats to the network but paid prioritization that AT&T wants to implement would result in the creation of two Internet(s) a slow lane (public Internet) and a fast private for profit lane — resulting in an unequal two tiered Internet where websites pay ISPs for faster access.

Any webmasters who cannot afford to pay for priority access will have their websites under this model restricted to a slow lane — without openness future webmasters and future Internet entrepreneurs would need permission to innovate. Keeping the Internet open means preserving the Net as a level playing field where all businesses, old and new, big and small have equal access.

With Net Neutrality AT&T cannot speed up FOX News.com and slowdown HuffingtonPost.com or give priority over Huffington Post.com to have their website load faster.

All websites get to load at the same speed. Furthermore AT&T is trying to mislead the FCC into thinking the Internet Engineering Task Force is against Net Neutrality. The Internet was built on openness, maintaining Net Neutrality is about preserving the Internet in its current form. The Internet Engineering Task Force has rejected AT&T’s claims. This is a monopolist telecom company broken up over a decade ago — to create new competition in the wire-line long distance phone market — AT&T should never have been allowed to put Ma Bell back together.

As a condition of its being allowed to re-merge with SBC Communications and Bell South (two Baby Bells) during the Bush Cheney Administration AT&T agreed not to mess with Net Neutrality for at least 2 years, and in that time never tried to mislead the FCC, Congress or the public about it, nor did they try to lobby against it. After the two years ended AT&T made it clear they wanted Internet freedom killed so they can become a corporate gate keeper on the web and censor the free flow of communication and information made possible by an Open Internet.

AT&T are lying thru their teeth — they are a shameless greedy, evil corporation only caring about their bottom line. When broadband was regulated during the Clinton Gore years under Title II there was more jobs created and more investment in the sector.

No corporation should be able to control the Internet. Microsoft tried to monopolize the web browser market in the 1990s when broadband Internet access market was still competitive and regulated to ensure competition the Clinton Administration’s DOJ came down hard on Microsoft for antitrust violations and sought to enforce penalties on them. Thanks to Bush’s election Microsoft got a sweet deal to settle charges without sufficient punishment and broadband Internet access market became a duopoly of big cable and phone companies.

Under Title II there were more jobs and investment, and more competition resulting in higher consumer choices under deregulation we see fewer jobs and investment but higher revenues for the greedy big cable and telecom companies.

The Internet must remain an open and democratic medium. As a U.S. Citizen I am fed up with corporate control of our media and now our democracy. The Internet represents the future of all media and we the people have to take our media back from corporations like AT&T, Verizon Communications, Clear Channel, Sprint Nextel, Verizon Wireless, CBS, Disney/ABC, Viacom, GE or Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp., The future of our media belongs to the entire American public — it belongs to us — all of us responding to AT&T’s baseless letter and everyone else nationwide; even Americans serving abroad in the military.

AT&T if your reading this quit trying to mess with the Open Internet. Quit trying to screw us over. We need consumer protections — we need government regulation — deregulation can be just as bad as too much regulation — we have to have some regulation of ISPs and it should extend to mobile broadband — it matters not how we connect to the Internet we should have same open, nondiscriminatory experience on a computer and/or a mobile device.

When you have enough bandwidth, traffic prority becomes a non-issue (or at least reverts back to a technical issue).

What we need is a real political movement that will bring the telecoms under government control again, so they can be used to lay fiber optic cabling all over the place. The cost of deployment would be borne, not by the telcos, but by the taxpayers. We absorb that risk, and in return, we finally get real high speed internet.

We need the jobs in this lousy economy.

If there was any validity to his claims, you’d think we’d have heard from AT&T Labs Research by now, and not just some whacko. I remember when AT&T used to innovate and impress the industry with impressive research. It’s a real shame you’ve stooped to this level, and I hope someone in corporate will wake up and give Digital Society the boot.