SavetheInternet Musicians Release Exclusive Song
June 13th, 2006 by tkarrAn alliance of singer-songwriters has come together to urge fans to take action before Congress scraps Net Neutrality and harms independent music.
Led by independent singer-songwriters Jill Sobule, Kay Hanley (founder of the band Letters to Cleo) and Michelle Lewis the musical alliance seeks to show the importance of Internet freedom to new and independent artists. The trio’s new group — dubbed “The Broadband” — today released a new song with the SavetheInternet.com Coalition to promote “Net Neutrality” and rally people to contact Congress before it hands over control of the Internet to the nations largest phone and cable companies.
Their song, “God Save the Internet,” can be downloaded for free exclusively at www.SavetheInternet.com/broadband
“While ‘God Save the Internet’ is tongue-in-cheek, it’s scary because it’s true,” said Jill Sobule. “The telecommunications industry is really trying to destroy our Internet. Take action now while you still can.”
“The idea that the citizens of the world are somehow squatting on the telecom giants’ pipes is ludicrous,” said Kay Hanley, founder of the alternative rock band Letters to Cleo. “I found out what these guys were up to, I jumped at the opportunity to get involved. This is a fight for our generation, if ever there was one.”
Special thanks to SavetheInternet.com Coalition member Scott Goodstein for his work with the musical community on this. To listen to “God Save the Internet” or learn more about how Network Neutrality affects artists and musicians, visit www.savetheinternet.com/broadband
Also check out the article written by SavetheInternet.com Coalition partners Jenny Toomey and Michael Bracy From the Future of Music Coalition.
June 13th, 2006 at 2:26 pm
This is one of the dumbest things that I have ever heard of. Making a song about Net Neutrality…Are you serious??? This ain’t helping the problem any, infact it’s probably making it worse. Yeah, Net Neutrality is a big deal, but this isn’t the way to solve it.
June 13th, 2006 at 3:00 pm
Oh Red, lighten up. The song was tongue in cheek and all in fun.
June 13th, 2006 at 5:57 pm
I think the analogy is a bit different than is being stated.
It would be like cable companies decreased the quality of some channels that were not as popular, in order to improve the quality of stations that were very popular, and could therefore afford to pay more.
The problem with this is that the quality of the access to the stations, or the websites in this case, affects the popularity of the website. A slow website would be less desirable than fast websites and thus small ventures would have a much harder time becoming popular. Startups would therefore be in the slow lane and then have a new hurdle in their work to grow and become successful.
Adding this hurdle to the ability for a small company to grow and become popular could represent a significant change to the economy, and is actually short sighted on the part of the supporters of this change. It means that small companies will have a harder time becoming large.
Also understand that companies like Google already have the ability today to deliver superb service by buying substantial bandwidth for their server farms. The telecom companies receive extra money for such access by Google and their job is to have adequate backbone capacity to move the data that people are paying to place on the Internet.
So where is the problem? This really seems like an attempt to stifle the competitive landscape of ideas and services available on the Internet.
June 13th, 2006 at 6:54 pm
You raise an interesting point about TV QoS. ron:
It would be like cable companies decreased the quality of some channels that were not as popular, in order to improve the quality of stations that were very popular, and could therefore afford to pay more.
Actually, this is common practice in digital TV today. DirecTV allocates more bandwidth to some channels than to others. Originally, their standard was 1.5 Mbps, with some channels getting 3 Mbps. Their stuff is all MPEG compressed, of course.
There isn’t a visible difference in picture quality between the low-bandwidth channels and the high-bandwidth ones, because they have different programming.
MSNBC and Fox News look just fine at 1.5 Mpbs because there’s very little motion - just some yahoos jaw moving, and an occasional camera switch from one yahoo to another. Sports is whole different deal, however, as you get a lot of scene changes and a lot of motion, so they allocate extra bandwidth.
Is this a neutral practice or a non-neutral one? Is anyone harmed by it? Is it a fundamental change to the practice of TV broadcasting as it was defined by our tribal elders in the mists of time? Should we start a movement to regulate DirecTV so as to make them stop this “discriminatory” practice?
June 13th, 2006 at 7:19 pm
Oh Susan, are you high?
Who the hell says “tongue in cheek and all in fun”???
June 13th, 2006 at 9:43 pm
[…] Save The Internet writes today that "An alliance of singer-songwriters has come together to urge fans to take action before Congress scraps Net Neutrality and harms independent music." […]
June 13th, 2006 at 9:48 pm
[…] Save The Internet writes today that “An alliance of singer-songwriters has come together to urge fans to take action before Congress scraps Net Neutrality and harms independent music.” […]
June 13th, 2006 at 10:30 pm
Cute song, but doesn’t do much to advance the cause. More important, as we argue that networks should not “charge” for advanced services — or that those who own the pipes should not be allowed to use their competitive “advantage” — Google is doing exactly that in the midst of this debate…not helpful. Agree with Net Neu, it’s a public service, disagree, pay top dollar. This pisses me off:
Broadband
Google E-Mail Highlights Division Over Net Neutrality
by Sarah Lai Stirland
At a time when telecommunications providers, Silicon Valley companies and public-interest groups are battling fiercely to sway lawmakers’ opinions about network neutrality, every potential misstep can be freighted with menacing connotations.
On Monday, for instance, a member of the public affairs group LawMedia Group e-mailed a story to reporters that quoted Google’s Washington policy counsel Alan Davidson as saying that his firm is running “a set of what I would call public-service-announcement-type advertisements.”
“If you type in net neutrality at Google, you’ll see advertisements for the ‘Its Our Net Coalition’ or other sites we may be pointing to,” Davidson was quoted as saying.
In forwarding the message, LawMedia’s Doug Thornell wrote, “I thought you might be interested in this story about Google, who, in leading the net neutrality fight, is engaging in behavior that some may question as not being ‘neutral.’”
Network neutrality refers to the concept of a platform provider, such as a high-speed Internet company, offering unfettered access to information and services online. EBay, Google, Microsoft and others are fighting to have specific language incorporated into telecommunications legislation to codify the concept. Opponents say the language is not needed because there is no evidence of Internet providers treating content from different firms unequally.
Google spokesman Jon Murchinson said Google participated in its own auction for the keywords “net neutrality” and that if opponents of the concept wanted their ads to appear higher in sponsored Internet search results, they could have decided to pay more.
But the incident illustrates the complexities of the debate and highlights the fact that the kind of potential “discrimination” that Silicon Valley companies and public-interest groups fear could happen at different points of access to the Internet. One observer said the incident also shows that broadband providers alone do not always wield the most control.
“With a company with a lot of stickiness, like Google, you could say you’ve got a very significant leverage over your customers,” and therefore you should be regulated, said Kyle Dixon, a senior fellow at the Progress and Freedom Foundation. “But Google [would be] absolutely right to fight back against that by saying that there’s a competitive dynamic that’s exactly the same argument for broadband, but the network neutrality proponents won’t accept that.”
Yochai Benkler, a Yale University law professor who believes the telecom market is not yet competitive, rejected that premise — although he criticized Google’s reported ad placement as “not a smart move.”
“If Google goes wrong, there will be market discipline,” he said. “The same thing can’t be said of last-mile broadband.”
“They’ll quickly understand that this is a bad idea,” he added. “If you look at the direction in which they’re moving with online applications, and all of the things they’re doing so that people can perform tasks better, it requires their trust.”
June 13th, 2006 at 10:49 pm
FYI, if want to watch a great 15 min. TV news piece on Net Neutrality. Brought to you by NOW (formerly NOW with Bill Moyers) from PBS.
http://www.pbs.org/now/shows/222/index.html
Must have Real Player.
Cheers,
IndyjournalistNYC
June 14th, 2006 at 11:41 am
I think the song is super cool. I put a part of it on my website this morning. it points back here.
http://www.technofolk.com
thank you.
June 14th, 2006 at 2:18 pm
[…] More here. […]