<story><title>Protesters Gather At Google; 600 Employees Sign Petition, Organizers Claim</title><url>http://blogs.sfweekly.com/thesnitch/2010/08/google_protest_net_neutrality.php</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>gojomo</author><text>The internet does not need &apos;saving&apos; by a bunch of people chanting outside Google with picket signs and petitions.&lt;p&gt;If the internet were as fragile as the neutrality-activists thought, it would have never gotten where it is today. Compuserve, Prodigy, and AOL would have won.&lt;p&gt;And the neut-advocates very worst nightmare scenarios -- rampant blocking and throttling by the last-mile incumbents -- would quickly provoke a necessary next-step emergence of new competitors and route-around technologies.&lt;p&gt;That is, &lt;i&gt;if&lt;/i&gt; the nightmare scenarios ever happened. Which they won&apos;t, because even in a local duopoly, being known as the option which gives you less of the internet will be profit-destroying.&lt;p&gt;The alternative neut-advocates offer -- the FCC riding in as a white knight with new rules to save us -- is a dangerous child&apos;s fantasy. Any rulemaking by the feds will involve backroom deals between companies large enough to send lawyers to DC -- just like the Google-Verizon talks,  hosted by the FCC!&lt;p&gt;Any rulemaking by the feds will generate stacks of hard-to-interpret regulations that inconvenience everyone -- but hinder novel services and upstarts that are hard-to-classify the most, so the giant incumbents won&apos;t mind them so much.&lt;p&gt;That is, neutrality rules would freeze into slow-changing, confusingly-enforced law a currently-fashionable, romanticized notion of the internet that manages to make big companies and the political establishment comfortable.&lt;p&gt;It only &apos;saves&apos; the internet in the same way you could &apos;save&apos; a wild animal by putting it in a cage. Don&apos;t let the FCC neuter my internet!</text></comment>
<story><title>Protesters Gather At Google; 600 Employees Sign Petition, Organizers Claim</title><url>http://blogs.sfweekly.com/thesnitch/2010/08/google_protest_net_neutrality.php</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>tlrobinson</author><text>It would be amusing if this was one big Machiavellian plan by Google to rile up internet users to put more pressure on for net neutrality...</text></comment>