The BBC notes that Big names support net neutrality

A group of the world’s largest internet companies has written a letter of support to the US Federal Communications Commission (FCC).

The letter is the latest in an ongoing debate about “network neutrality” – or how data is distributed on the web.
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The letter, signed by the chief executives of Google, Ebay, Skype, Facebook, Amazon and Sony Electronics among others, says that maintaining data neutrality helps businesses to compete on the basis of content alone.
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Other signatories included community websites Digg, Flickr, LinkedIn and Craigslist.

The telcos want to set up tiers so they can charge some people more than others, i.e. introduce a class system to the ‘Net, because some people don’t like to have their important content treated the same way as Friday Cat Blogging.

The real problem is that telcos have been pulling in subscribers with promises of unlimited bandwidth, and discovered they are going to need to spend money on improvements to the infrastructure to provide it, rather than just milking the existing system for profits, which is what they had in mind.

If they don’t make the improvements, they are going to be forced to start limiting the access of their subscribers, and the subscribers may leave. It’s called competition, and there isn’t a lot of it around, but they hate what there is.

Over at Corrente Hipparchia has a must read on the Dartmouth Atlas Project. If you have any interest in the current debate on health care and insurance it is important to understand what this document really is, because everyone and their Aunt Martha is citing it as a basis for controlling costs in what is coming out of Congress.

This is a study of the amount of money spent on people during the last six-months of their lives. Everyone studied is dead. All off their health care resulted in death. This is being used to judge the efficiency of various health care systems, when all of the systems failed the subjects of the study.

All you can factually derive from this study is the cost of failure in various locations. It doesn’t tell you how many people receiving the same level of treatment didn’t die, because it is limited to those who did. What they are doing is basing reforms and reimbursements on the relative cost of failure.