Net Neutrality

Large telecom companies and their lobbyists are working hard to make bigger profits by censoring the Internet for us. Don't pay enough money, and your site could take forever to open, if at all.

Congress recently defeated an amendment that would have made provisions to ensure what is called 'Net Neutrality'. This topic is now in front of the Senate with S.2917, and you know how hard-working those lobbyists are. There are a number of large companies and grassroot organizations spreading the word and fighting for our Internet freedom. Savetheinternet.com is one of those organizations and their FAQ page explains Net Neutrality beautifully.

(excerpt) "They want to tax content providers to guarantee speedy delivery of their data. They want to discriminate in favor of their own search engines, Internet phone services, and streaming video — while slowing down or blocking their competitors."

They also have a wonderful page on how this specifically impacts you.

(excerpt) "Bloggers - Costs will skyrocket to post and share video and audio clips—silencing citizen journalists and putting more power in the hands of a few corporate-owned media outlets.
Ipod listeners—A company like Comcast could slow access to iTunes, steering you to a higher-priced music service that it owned."

I urge you to read it and then blast some email to your senators to make sure they support S.2917. I don't know about you, but I know much of what we see/hear/read in mainstream media is channeled and censored for us, and I believe that's why so many of us, especially in the blogosphere, congregate on the Internet. We could lose that free press and sharing of information to large corporate interests as well. We will lose this battle with apathy.


Allan adds: Be aware that the Telecoms are waging a disinformation campaign against Net Neutrality - they have clever "populist" cartoons and ads that prey on our natural distrust of the government - "get the gubbermint off the internet etc."
Here is one site: Hands off the Internet
Here are their sponsors.

What they are really saying is: "Get the government regs off the Internet so that we can get our filthy hands on it."

Do you think that your phone company would let you blog for free if they could charge you for it?
They'll charge Google for the access and Google willpass the charges on to you and individual blogs will die- only the sponsored corporate/party shill 'blogs' will remain- and they aren't even blogs, really.

The House already passed the COPE act.
Now it's up to the Senate to stop it- great news, huh?

Get busy.