The U.S. Senate Commerce Committee approved sweeping communications reform legislation on Wednesday 1that, amongst other things, insures “we are going to have a two-tiered Internet” (Maine Republican Sen. Olympia Snowe), which is the opposite of a principle know as Net Neutrality. This also gives every single ISP out there the ability to effectively censor all web sites. Here some more information about Net Neutrality.
In the same legislation they also forbid cable companies from ala carte’ pricing for cable channels and gave Large ISP’s waivers on Television station liscenses.
The vote mostly went along party lines with the majority republicans voting against the people and in favor of large corporations. The measure is in part a result of pressure from AT&T and Verizon Communications for Congress to simplify the process for them to get licenses to offer television service. They argue it can take years to get permission from thousands of local cities and counties.
Still, AT&T’s corporate political action committee was second in donations to candidates so far during the 2005-2006 election cycle, giving $1.3 million to candidates — mostly to the Republicans who control Congress, according to PoliticalMoneyLine, which tracks money in politics.
The bill included provisions aimed at preserving consumers’ ability to surf anywhere on the public Internet and use any Internet-related application, software or service, similar to a bill that passed the House of Representatives. However the ISP’s are wanting to put web sites that don’t pay whatever fee they charge (which may be different based on a web site or the web site owner’s politics, content, business connections etc), on a slower version of the internet. How slow? Well that’s up to them.
As all Webmasters know, there’s only a short period of seconds for a web site to load before you start loosing lots of visitors.
I guess it’s true that internet advertising goes in cycles. First it was “pay per exposure”. When advertisers figured out that doesn’t work very well, it was changed to “pay per click”. Now that Google and other pay per click advertising systems are rife with fraud reports, they are moving into another system that’s been done before. Affiliate marketing. Google calls it “cost-per-action” it’s really just commissioned based advertising or “Affiliate Marketing”. In other words the advertiser doesn’t pay unless the person who clicks on the advert actually buys something, something in particular.
