RCN

RCN is messing with internet access and our right to net neutrality

[This post is for Greg Scott, who caught me in the middle of a rant about RCN over at Twitter.]

For about 4 months now I have noticed the change in service : I will get to YouTube but the pages load as slow as molasses. Other times, if I'm doing a search in Google, the page will take forever to load.

Today though, it's pretty obvious what's happening : I can't get into Google from my home connection. No Google. No Gmail. No YouTube. So I pinged people on Twitter and asked if anybody was having problems getting into Google.

Erica G replied from Boston :

I'm on RCN in Boston and having trouble connecting to Yahoo and tinyurl this evening. # [...] And actually, thinking of it, for the past several weeks I haven't been able to load YouTube videos properly, either. #

Melanie Notkin, who is also in NYC, reported the same issue. Maria Niles is on Comcast California, but she has had similar choppy access to YouTube in the past several weeks, making her wonder if she's living in China.

Why is this so important to blog and not dismiss as a possible "blip" or outage? Well, if we take into consideration all the services Google provides, the search company may indeed be the largest and most trafficked network of websites in the world. YouTube alone would make Google the largest video broadcaster at least in the United States.

Are you going to tell me RCN just happened to degrade service to the biggest web network and web services provider in the United States? As Seinfeld would say ... I. Don't. Think. So.

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Words to live by

Anger is a tricky thing. It can motivate people, but it can also repel. I wrote last week, for example, that antiwar protests are more effective when protesters are serious but not angry. That's because people who are not angry at the same things you are will be uncomfortable with your anger. If you want to persuade people to see your point of view, it helps to do it in a not-angry way.

Blogging, on the other hand, is not about persuasion as much as it is about peeling away layers of socially conditioned bullshit to get at bare-bones truth. A good blogger is an honest blogger. I'd say to any blogger that if you're angry, dig into yourself to find the source of your anger and blog it. Don't worry about what the neighbors will think.

— Barbara O'Brien
The Mahablog | Speaking of Anger