Jack Elfrink Dot Com

WARNING: If you know who Mystery Organization X is, please don’t post to the comment section. Like Glenda the Good Witch looking out after Dorthy, if you just TELL someone the answer, it wont do them any good. They have to learn for themselves.

So I heard someone ranting about ‘net neutrality’ recently. I would have thought the issue had died back in ‘06 but apparently there are still people who believe that if we dont do something RIGHT NOW then those evil telecoms companies will start to censor what we access on the internet. Porn on the net is under attack and if you care at all about sexual freedoms you have to support net neutrality.

But does the right to view the sexual content we wish really hang in the balance? Or are ‘freedom’ and ‘censorship’ and ‘greedy telecom companies’ just buzzwords to get people to support net neutrality on an emotional level without examining the facts? Well, whenever you wanna get to the truth of an issue, all ya gotta do is follow the money.

Let me take you back to the trilling days of the late ’90s. The dot come boom was in full swing. Experiential growth. At the pace the internet was growing, there was going to have to be a huge global network of fiber optics to carry all the data. Huge budgets were spent in putting in fiber optic networks everywhere.

But all good things must come to an end. The dot come bubble burst and all the expected data that was going to go through those lines never came to be. Add to that the fact that breakthroughs in technology that permitted a larger volume of data per each fiber optic line and you wound up with a large chunk of these lines going abandoned and unused. So called ‘dark fiber’.

Then secretly, quietly, in the dead of the night, undercover, Mystery Organization X comes along. The failed dot-com business that still owned all the line were approached by Mystery Organization X and offered a ridiculous sum of money for thse lines. As the fiber optic lines were not carrying any data they were not generating any income. And they still needed to be maintained and that was an expense. Owning these lines was business suicide. The failed dot-com companies were happy to get rid of the drain on their finances. But industry experts were left scratching their head on why Mystery Organization X would even want the fiber optic lines.

Fast froward a few years. Along comes internet phone. Voice over IP. Skype. This really changed things. Before then, if you wanted something from the internet, a webpage for example, you would have to wait for it to load. When viewing a website a second or two isnt noticeable, but for real time communication its critical. You hear silence from the other end so you start talking. As soon as you start, the voice on the other end comes on so you stop to let them speak. A two second delay causes huge social/psychological problems for human speech. Our brains are simply not wired for that delay in the conversation. So internet phone has to be instantaneous.

How to get instant communication? Satellite cant do it. In order for a satellite to be geostationary it has to be a HUGE distance away from the earth. Enough to cause a response time delay. ‘Wi fi’ and microwave point to point beaming is faster but there is only so far a distance that it can be used before the curvature of the earth would get in between the two points and block the signal.

You want instant voice communication over long distances there is only 2 ways to do it. Fiber optics or the old wire-switches that the phone companies figured out how to work back last century.

So in spring of 2006, about the same time net phone really started to grow, along comes this propaganda piece. “Those telecoms? They are EVIL! They want to take your freedoms away from you. They want to censor the internet. Why if those greedy telecoms had their way, they would put a ‘throttle’ on content. If you tried looking at something those evil telecoms didn’t want you looking at, they could charge you a different rate depending on what your looking at. Those telecoms must be stopped!”

Now on the face of it this doesn’t make much sense. Cable television companies charge one rate for basic cable and a higher rate for premium channels. That’s not censorship. Long distance companies charge one rate for local calls and a higher rate for international calls. That’s not censorship. Cell phones have one rate for in network calls and a higher rate for roaming charges. That’s not censorship. So its doubtful that it would be censorship if ISPs charge a basic rate for someone who only used the net to surf the web and get their email, and a higher rate for online gamers who require faster connections, or music/movie downloads who require more volume, or net phone users who cant have a delay.

But the propaganda report worked. Soon everyone and their mother was screaming about ‘freedom’ and ‘rights’ and how the evil telecoms who were using those twisted-wire switch boxes were greedy and needed to be stopped. Leaving the fiber optic lines, naturally, as the only other alternative.

It should be no surprise that the company that put out this propaganda piece with all the ‘freedom’ and ‘censorship’ buzzwords was none other than good ol Mystery Organization X. If only they could get the telecoms out of the way, they would control the future of the internet.

So who is Mystery Organization X?

There are 2 reasons I cant tell you. First, if I told you then I would be no better than Mystery Organization X themselves. They want people to blindly believe their rhetoric without checking the facts. It would be hypocritical of me to just tell you what I believe and expect you to follow along without checking the facts. Second, as I noted at the very top of this post, your not going to learn anything if I just tell you. Google it for yourself and they you will KNOW. (I will give you one hint. Its not a government agency.)

I gotta warn you however, this is real conspiracy theory stuff. Saying that Net Neutrality is all a carefully crafted plan to control the internet ranks pertly high up the list of ‘they are all out to get us’ paranoia. If you do decide to ‘follow the money’ and do some research on your own, you will totally shit bricks when you find out the organization behind it all. …. Or you can join the legions who are in favor of net neutrality and become part of the ‘brave fight to save the internet’, crush the telecoms, and pat yourself on the back that you were a hero.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 24th, 2009 at 3:49 am and is filed under not what you think, oppression, urban legend. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.