What is Net Neutrality?
Net Neutrality is the idea that any data should be generated and retrieved to the end user — you, without any kind of discrimination such as in having to pay more in order to get it a little bit faster. Net Neutrality is what makes possible for you sitting at home to watch a live stream on Youtube, and at a restaurant from any device connected to a Wi-Fi, not having to face bandwidth throttling, which is the intentional slowing or speeding of the live stream by an Internet service provider (ISP). This level of equality has been challenged for years by corporations such as Comcast, Verizon, AT&T and National Cable & Telecommunications Association, whose representatives have donated more or less a 5 figure payment to either senators or congressmen to try and kick Net Neutrality to the curb.
In legal terms, without Net Neutrality ISPs can create pay-to-play “fast lanes” that only some content providers can afford to pay e.g. Netflix, Twitch, Youtube, a dozen others, while the majority can’t. So, the delivery of the content of those who can’t afford is not prioritized, it’s actually slowed down, whatever that content may be, from porn to anime, whichever the source is, from LinkedIn to a new launched start up. In short, Internet Service Providers, such as Comcast, want all previous and new small business that provide content, to pay for the delivery of their content faster. The remaining issue is, customers will absorb additional costs 100%, inevitably the end user, the consumer — as usual, will have to pay more for bandwidth speed, if not for a bundle of all the things that you look on the Internet.
Does Google really support Net Neutrality?
Google is a Hosting ISP
The list of hosting Internet Service Providers is usually filled with small businesses, but also big companies, on this list you can find GoDaddy.com who host websites and email, Oracle, Amazon, Google and others engaged in cloud storage, SaaS or PaaS computing. These are big companies who currently support Net Neutrality, as they claim to do so, though this could be dubbed as theatrics, and any amount they pour by lobbying for senators and congressmen in favor of Net Neutrality may as well be covered by renewed contracts with the government and its unclassified science projects by the end of 2017. (And we are already in 2018, as I review this article to post on Steemit.)
What does exactly a hosting ISP? A hosting ISP provides the servers necessary to host websites, its content, email, the free digital storage such as OneDrive, and cloud services like those from Adobe, that are used daily.
A random top 20 small web hosting ISPs list for small businesses:
HostGator
1&1
InterServer
HostFav
WP Neuron
Limitless Hosting
HostSlayer VPS
QuickBooks Hosting — Powered by Techarex Networks
WebHost.UK.Net
PlotHost
SiteGround
Dreamhost
Arvixe
InMotion Hosting
iPage
Namecheap
HostMonster
Hostwinds
Bluehost
A2 Hosting
Some may not be from the U.S., I didn’t check it out.
There are no laws in the U.S. to impede big corporations like Google, Microsoft, Facebook, and Amazon to donate to senators or congressmen so they stand for Net Neutrality, and we feel like it’s okay, because it is in our best interest to keep Net Neutrality. However, we must consider the perennial relationships of all of these companies with the government itself, we face here the same ethical conundrum companies often face in Russia and China, as the often criticized Kaspersky anti-virus company. Are the U.S. companies doing any better to set an example?
What close relationships do I refer to?
Which government contracts?
These are all valid questions, and the answers are imperative to understand why matters should be settled in black and white, to understand why the tech companies political lobbying is wrong, why indeed the money big companies and businesses pour into Net Neutrality is a pittance if compared to what small business could lobby so they keep Net Neutrality. It is worth reminding that Net Neutrality benefits small business only. In order to find the right answers, read in the article below more about the funding of tech companies by the U.S. government during its inception.
Google’s true origin partly lies in CIA and NSA research grants for mass surveillance
https://qz.com/1145669/googles-true-origin-partly-lies-in-cia-and-nsa-research-grants-for-mass-surveillance/
"
They funded these computer scientists through an unclassified, highly compartmentalized program that was managed for the CIA and the NSA by large military and intelligence contractors. It was called the Massive Digital Data Systems (MDDS) project.
The CIA and NSA funded an unclassified, compartmentalized program designed from its inception to spur the development of something that looks almost exactly like Google. Brin’s breakthrough research on page ranking by tracking user queries and linking them to the many searches conducted — essentially identifying “birds of a feather” — was largely the aim of the intelligence community’s MDDS program. And Google succeeded beyond their wildest dreams.
Today, the NSF provides nearly 90% of all federal funding for university-based computer-science research.
"
Part 2
In other words, the NSA and CIA have succeeded in its efforts to track digital fingerprints of people on the Internet, and sort them out in different groups, the thing they call “birds of a feather” with the creation of Google. Google has made possible for information be organized to the smallest detail, so that any meaningless search query or any Internet related activity carried out from inside the many services offered by Google at a later date can be retrieved and put together in order to ‘show’ whatever that is the intelligence community wishes to know or learn from you. The private information of people worldwide can now most definitely be linked together and ranked in order of importance, and groups of people can be labeled according to intelligence communities’ whims, and their movements traced altogether.
Two important chains of email correspondence published by Al Jazeera in 2014 have pointed to a close relationship between the NSA and Google. In the first email from Eric Schmidt, back then executive chairman of Google, to the former NSA director Keith Alexander, it is discussed a set of meetings, scheduled classified briefings and sessions between the two, its co-founder Sergei Brin, and other executives awkwardly referred to as Google ‘individuals’. Apple is also mentioned. One year before former NSA contractor Edward Snowden leaked documents detailing the agency’s online spying efforts. It is also detailed what we might call a cozy relationship between the NSA, the DOD, and the DHS with the CEOs of a few key companies — Intel, AMD, HP, Dell and Microsoft. Is there any left out?
“
Google’s participation in refinement, engineering and deployment of the solutions will be essential.
”
In the second email Sergey Brin is referred to as a key member of the Defense Industrial Base, whatever this is I don’t know yet. Alexander is discussing the Enduring Security Framework (ESF) meetings, whereas he refers vaguely to its accomplishments, targets and progress against threats in the cyberspace. This ESF meeting was a coordination between the government and the industry to take actions on important, apparently classified, security issues that he wrote and I point it out “couldn’t be solved by individual actors alone”. Whatever this means I don’t know yet. Alexander refers to the effort to secure the BIOS of enterprise platforms — installing backdoors perhaps, to address a threat in that area. At some point, equipped with the knowledge that the NSA had BIOS exploits at its disposal https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2015/03/bios_hacking.html reading these two emails is pretty sad.
Emails Show Google Cooperated With The NSA For Years
https://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/05/06/nsa-google_n_5273437.html
Part 3
Google’s secret NSA alliance: The terrifying deals between Silicon Valley and the security state
https://www.salon.com/2014/11/16/googles_secret_nsa_alliance_the_terrifying_deals_between_silicon_valley_and_the_security_state/
The following three paragraphs are paraphrased from the Salon article above.
The NSA helps tech corporations find weaknesses in their products, and also pays them not to fix it. Those weak spots give the agency an opportunity for spying or attacking other nations who have hacked and exploited U.S. intelligence agencies, the military, and its critical infrastructure. Microsoft, for instance, shares zero day vulnerabilities in its products with the NSA before releasing a public alert or a software patch, according to the company and U.S. officials. Cisco, one of the world’s top network equipment makers, leaves backdoors in its routers so they can be monitored by U.S. agencies, according to a cyber security professional. And McAfee, the Internet security company, provides the NSA, the CIA, and the FBI with network traffic flows, analysis of malware, and information about hacking trends.
The U.S. companies that promise to disclose holes in their products only to the spy agencies are paid for their silence, according to experts and officials statements. Furthermore, the NSA and private security companies have a symbiotic relationship, whereas the government scares the CEOs and they run for help to experts such as Hacking Team, and those companies, in turn, share what they learn during their investigations with the government, whichever government they report to. Under Google’s terms of service, the company advises its users that it may share their “personal information” with outside organizations, including government agencies, in order to “detect, prevent, or otherwise address fraud, security or technical issues” and to “protect against harm to the rights, property or safety of Google.”
I’m not sure why Google’s terms of service state ‘outside organizations’.
Quid Pro Quo
In the first quarter of 2010, the NSA’s general counsel began drafting a “cooperative research and development agreement,” originally devised under a 1980 law to speed up the commercial development of new technologies that are of mutual interest to companies and the government. The agreement’s purpose is to build something . The participating company isn’t paid, but it can rely on the government to front the research and development costs, and it can use government personnel and facilities for the research. Each side gets to keep the products of the collaboration private until they choose to disclose them. In the end, the company has the exclusive patent rights to build whatever was designed, and the government can use any information that was generated during the collaboration.
Part 4
Eric Schmidt, the Chairman of Alphabet founded Groundwork, a company that existed solely to get Hillary Clinton elected.
What justifies Amazon’s support towards Net Neutrality?
The Defense Department Deal
Most recently Amazon stroke an annual $53 billion dollar deal with the government to become the Defense Department’s single source of chairs, paper, desks, water bottles, and other commercial off-the-shelf products (COTS).
House to vote on giving Amazon $53 billion deal to become main Pentagon supplier
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2017/11/11/amzn-n11.html
Has Amazon donated to senators and congressmen who stand in favor of Net Neutrality this much? Just know that Google is watching and compiling and running algos over piles and piles of your data.
I still don't want to write about Microsoft, and unfortunately Steemit is not good for sharing images.