Below are my prepared remarks for the ALA MidWinter President's Program, billed as a debate on the question of Are Libraries Neutral? I was on the Hell No side. Please be sure to also read Emily Drabinki's remarks -- she was a designated commenter and she slayed. There will apparently be a video available later,…
Long Live the Web: A Call for Continued Open Standards and Neutrality
The Web is critical not merely to the digital revolution but to our continued prosperity—and even our liberty. Like democracy itself, it needs defending
By Tim Berners-Lee
Make your voice heard by responding to the European Commission's public consultation on Net neutrality! The more citizens and NGOs submit their own responses to the questionnaire, the more chance we have to collectively weigh in the EU policy-making process to ensure that the Internet remains a free and open communications architecture. You have until September 30th to send your submission and tell the Commission to protect the Internet.
Ars Technica is running a story by Matthew Lasar about how Disney's ESPN360.com is charging ISPs for 'bulk' access to their content. According to the article, if you visit ESPN using a 'non-subscribing' ISP, you're greeted with a message explaining why access is restricted for you. This raises a number of issues: '... it's one thing to charge users an access fee, another to charge the ISP, potentially passing the cost on to all the ISPs subscribers whether they're interested in the content or not.' Ironically, the issue came to the fore in a complaint from the American Cable Association (ACA) to the FCC. A quoted ACA press release warns, 'Media giants are in the early stages of becoming Internet gatekeepers by requiring broadband providers to pay for their Web-based content and services and include them as part of basic Internet access for all subscribers. These content providers are also preventing subscribers who are interested in the content from independently accessing it on broadband networks of providers that have refused to pay.' So, is this a real threat to net neutrality (and the end-to-end principle) or just another bad business model that doesn't stand a chance?
T. Weise, M. Zapf, and K. Geihs. Proceedings of the 2nd International Conference on Bio-Inspired Models of Network, Information, and Computing Systems (BIONETICS'07), page 8--15. IEEE Computer Society: Piscataway, NJ, USA, (2007)
T. Weise, M. Zapf, R. Chiong, and A. Nebro Urbaneja. Nature-Inspired Algorithms for Optimisation, volume 193/2009 of Studies in Computational Intelligence, chapter 1, Springer-Verlag: Berlin/Heidelberg, (2009)
T. Weise, and M. Zapf. Proceedings of the First ACM/SIGEVO Summit on Genetic and Evolutionary Computation (GEC'09), page 577--584. ACM Press: New York, NY, USA, (2009)
T. Weise, S. Niemczyk, H. Skubch, R. Reichle, and K. Geihs. Proceedings of the Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference (GECCO'08), page 795--802. ACM Press: New York, NY, USA, (2008)
E. Ricalde, and K. Vázquez. Late breaking paper at Genetic and Evolutionary
Computation Conference (GECCO'2007), page 2565--2571. London, United Kingdom, ACM Press, (7-11 July 2007)
T. Yu, and J. Miller. Late Breaking Papers at the Genetic and Evolutionary
Computation Conference (GECCO-2002), page 512--519. New York, NY, AAAI, (July 2002)