Seven Generational Ruminations

Attorney General Gonzales is proposing a mandatory labeling requirement for web sites publishing sexually explicit material. A web site operator not labeling their sexually explicit web site would face imprisonment.

I just listened to an National Public Radio piece that presents one mans concept of utopia. Namely, individuals or small scale organizations working on small scale work projects.

In AT&T chief, FCC chair clarify on Net neutrality a C|NET News report offers a confused picture from the AT&T CEO. At issue are statements by several telephone company CEO's saying they need to charge large bandwidth users for access to their networks. That is, there are several bandwidth-hungry large and popular Internet services which represent a large amount of the Internet traffic. For example:

This is an issue I've been tracking, namely how well do the VOIP providers provide emergency dialing service. The VOIP providers want to replace the normal telephone companies, so the VOIP providers had better be able to provide all those services. But as I've noted in previous postings, some of the VOIP providers are dragging their feet.

Earlier I wrote about plans by BellSouth and other ISP's to discriminatorially throttle 3rd party Internet traffic. The BellSouth CEO was quoted saying, essientially, those other companies (such as Google) need to pay to use their lines. And that if those 3rd parties did not pay up, they'd throttle however much of their lines those 3rd parties can use.

The VOIP providers have seemingly been worrying the telephone companies. According to Skype and Vonage: thank you, and goodnight, VOIP competition forced the telephone companies to increase services over broadband connections such as adding VOIP service. That's not quite accurate since I recall AT&T offering local "phone" service over cable TV back when they owned the cable network that is now Comcast (@HOME).

Okay! Vonage files for IPO I guess it's a sign of maturity for some technology when the startups that implemented the technology become "Public Companies". Here we go with VOIP, first it was Skype being bought by eBay, now it's Vonage filing for an IPO.

The article discusses how Vonage is still in the "losing money" stage of startup-hood. Of course a company that's eternally losing money is not a stable company.

Over the last few months the VOIP providers have been facing a requirement to provide emergency dialing. In the U.S. this is '911' but in other countries a different phone number is used. There have been a few cases where people buy VOIP service, cut off their regular telephone service, then end up having an emergency and then they died because the VOIP service routed them to a non-emergency phone.

Microsoft Confirms Turning Over Search Data to Feds: This covers not just Microsoft but the other search engines as well. The story is there's an obscure court proceeding going on, under which the Department of Justice (DoJ) has subpoenad records from the search engines as to search terms. MSN, Yahoo and AOL have apparently cooperated with the request, while Google has refused to cooperate.

The VOIP providers have been required by the FCC to provide correctly functioning "911" emergency dialing services. In some cases the VOIP providers have been kicking up a fuss, claiming they shouldn't be required to bear this burden. What I've been saying is that if they want to replace the regular telephone system, then they should be providing the same functionality as the regular telephone system. In particular 911 emergency dialing is a vital part of society, widely known, and widely expected to be part of telephone service.