I titled this, “Network Neutrality or Network Brutality”. It was written via the form at Save The Internet (check out that site if you haven’t already).

Network Neutrality or Network Brutality

The current state of the Internet in the U.S. is abysmal and it will get much, much worse if we do not guarantee the neutrality of the network. As so much speech exists in the form of bits and bytes it is essential that we guarantee freedom from discrimination on the network it traverses.

Big ISPs do not like the idea of network neutrality precisely because they plan to reserve the majority of their pipes for their own channels of communication. Their vision of the Internet has them as both the carriers of information as well as its source. They want to divide everyone’s connection into two unequal parts: An incredibly fast connection reserved for their own purposes and a slow connection for everyone else.

I ask you, if we allow ISPs to have their own exclusive dedicated connections into everyone’s homes how can any business or individual compete with that kind of access? The answer is that they won’t and they can’t. All it would take for an ISP to crush a business is to start offering the same services over their extremely fast, exclusive connections. Every business that exists on the Internet today will either have to pay the ISP extra for access to their upper-tier channel or will suffer with slow speed into people’s homes.

But it is the citizens who will suffer the most. They will have high-speed access to content chosen for them by their ISP and slow, unreliable access to everything else. Even worse, the voices of our own citizens will be relegated to the lowest class of service. ISPs have absolutely no intention of allowing home users to compete with their own services and will remove perfectly legitimate speech that becomes too popular—just as they do today with unspecified bandwidth caps and unjustified disconnections of service.

We must stop the ISPs before they enshrine these abusive systems into the networks. Before it is extremely expensive to replace them. Before businesses are destroyed. Before citizen voices are choked into irrelevance. NOW is the time to protect America from this threat.

It would be extremely unwise and naive to allow the market to be afflicted by this destructive force before anything is done about it. The FCC must embrace Network Neutrality and enforce it as quickly as possible before the networks are all built and any damage is done. The longer it takes, the more we’ll end up paying.

I’ve been arguing with a certain individual about health care and as a result I’ve looked up lots of numbers. Since this information is likely to be useful for anyone talking about health care I’ve decided to share it—some might call it being a good Samaritan.

How much do we pay for health insurance?

Employers:

9.95% of salaries: In the U.S. employers currently pay on average 8.5% of their payroll on private health insurance (goes up every year). They also pay 1.45% on Medicare taxes for a total of 9.95% of their payroll.

Employees:

Varies: Family health care premiums for employees are currently averaging about $3000 annually (taken from here) regardless of how much a person makes (no idea how good that coverage is). Therefore; the more money you make the less of a percentage it is of your income. Also, the less money you make the more of your money you’re devoting to health insurance premiums. This does not include co-pays for doctor’s visits, hospital care, drugs, etc.

Totals:

$2.16 Trillion: That’s how much the U.S. spent on private health care in 2006. Or, about 16% of the U.S. GDP.
~25%: That is how much of every dollar spent on health care in the U.S. goes to corporate profits, executive salaries, advertising, marketing, and the cost of paperwork (related to billing). In other words, that’s the overhead of private health care. Otherwise known as “inefficiencies”.

How much would we pay in a single-payer system?

The following assumes that HR 676 is what we go with for a single-payer system

Employers:

4.75%: 3.3% on top of the 1.45% they’re already paying for Medicare via payroll taxes (i.e. not taxed on income).

Employees:

1.45%: What you already pay for Medicare. HR 676 does not call for increased income taxes on individuals unless you’re in the top 5% of income earners (more below).

The Rich:

6.45%: The top 5% of income earners will have to pay a “health tax” on top of their existing 1.45% to Medicare. How much money do you have to earn to break into the top 5%? According to the IRS, about $137,000 (AGI)/year (AGI stands for Adjusted Gross Income which is IRS BS for about $330,000/year in reality—this is an injustice in itself, I’ll put more info in the comments).

Totals:

1.85 Trillion: That is a conservative estimate of how much it would cost yearly to give all Americans health coverage with zero co-pays and no premiums (i.e. free health care). It will probably cost considerably less (the reduced drug prices and paperwork costs alone could cut this figure in half).
3%: The overhead associated with a single-payer system. You can’t get away from all the paperwork, just most of it. This is actually the overhead associated with Medicare right now (believe it or not).

Other scary statistics:

• On average, if you’re under 65 and already spending more than $2000 on health care, you’re spending 41.3% of your income on it (2003 figure from the nchc.org link above).
• Half of all bankruptcy filings in 2006 were the partly result of medical expenses. 68% of them had health insurance.
• 30% of Americans say someone in their family delayed getting treatment (in 2006) due to the high cost of health care.
• Every 30 seconds in the United States someone files for bankruptcy in the aftermath of a serious health problem.

• 46 million Americans have no health insurance whatsoever.

Evans Data Corporation (EDC) just released the results of their yearly survey of software developers. The results are astounding:

The market research firm said that about 65 percent of developers targeted Windows client operating systems in 2006, down from 74 percent the year before, and likely to fall another couple of points this year.

…but it gets better:

“Some of Windows’s marketshare loss appears to be Linux’s gain. Client-side versions of the open source OS were targeted by 11.8 percent of developers in 2006, up from 3.3 percent the year before, the report suggests.”

3.3% to 11.8% in a single year?!? My goodness! If the developers surveyed represent the market accurately (+/- who knows what) then that is about 1.1 million developers jumping on the Linux bandwagon (assuming the current estimate of worldwide developers is correct).

Looks like now is a great time to be an open source geek =)

Developers! Developers! Developers! Developers! Developers! Developers!