Australia's internet speed is still catching up with the rest of the world---bloody slow still

I've already signed a petition to the FCC to allow technical advances to benefit all users. Legislators were up in arms because Obamacare was supposed to penalize small business -- that didn't happen. But this will impact small businesses that use the internet giving the corporations an edge they don't really need. Bad business all around.

Too true.

While I was really happy when Steven Colbert energized so many people to message the FCC demanding a level internet that it broke the site, I think we'd better educate ourselves about this issue and clarify what we are asking. There already is a de facto two-tier internet (and it will increase). Online businesses are already shelling out money to speed up their websites by paying content servers like Amazon to serve parts of your website -- like the images, which can really slow it down. (But any individual can pay not-terribly-high amounts to do this, too.) I don't know what arrangements those content serving companies have with the big telcoms. This bears examining.

I know one thing: We'd better get after providers like Comcast and Verizon to speed up our internet connection. U.S. has about the slowest internet in the civilized world, and we pay more for that lousy connection speed.

It's a shame that Usenet seems to mostly have been abandoned for Google Groups. That was a place where people really protected their right to communicate. The internet really is still a frontier. Sometime I hope you'd write about what you know from the early days, since you were involved before it went commercial.

This country is scaring me lately...