While surfing the net today, I stumbled upon This Spartan Life and they have an interesting blog called “Cant Buy Me Web“. The theme of their blog video post is Network Neutrality.
I don’t know about you but it’s a term that I’ve never heard of before. Here is a blurb from This Spartan Life’s site about it:
Net neutrality is the concept that all publishers of web content, from personal blogs to giant e-commerce sites, are treated equally by ISPs and are equally accessible to users. This cornerstone of internet democracy has never been written into law and recent attempts at doing so have been blocked by powerful lobbies in Washington. This leaves us all vulnerable to the discretion of the telecoms as to what sites deserve a special fast lane. The level playing field of neutral gateways is what fostered the innovations we now value so much as the public’s internet.
Basically in a nutshell DSL and Cable companies want to create a tiered Internet, where if a site pays more money then people who are using their connection will be able to see it. So for us poor bloggers out there, it means that if we don’t pay the money, our stuff may never be seen.
Here is a quote from Ed Whiteacre, CEO of AT&T taken from the article “Hijacking the Internet: How Big Cable and Phone Companies’ Plans for Broadband Threaten Democracy”
The telephone industry has been somewhat more candid than cable about its plans for the Internet. Senior phone executives have publicly discussed their plans to begin imposing a new scheme for the delivery of Internet content, especially from major Internet content companies. As Ed Whitacre, CEO of AT&T, told Business Week in November, “Why should they be allowed to use my pipes? The Internet can’t be free in that sense, because we and the cable companies have made an investment and for a Google or Yahoo! or Vonage or anybody to expect to use these pipes [for] free is nuts!”
I love the internet and love the freedom it represents. It’s an outlet for thousands and to censor websites because they can’t pay for it just seems wrong. Perhaps it’s my “GenX” attitude and I’m being incredibly naive. The internet is a form of media and for the majority media is censored in some way. I want to do a bit more reading about it before I come to any hard fast conclusions, but here are a few links that are a great place to start. I’m not sure what we can do about it but I suddenly get the feeling that 1984 is going to happen around the end of 2007.
4 Comments
Some people arguing for net neutrality are blowing this issue way out of proportion. No one is going to kill off bloggers or block people from going to their sites. If one internet provider tried to do that they’d be out of business in a nano-second.
Tiered service is a way to make things like VOIP and High-Def video on demand so reliable that millions of American’s could replace their cable TV and phone service with it. If net neutrality is mandated (and that is what the net neutrality side is talking about, having government regulations mandate this) then High-Def video and VOIP will eventually start clogging the internet for everyone.
Actually, it has just been revealed that Google has dropped one million bucks into Moveon.org’s lap to demogogue this whole NN issue. And the “facts” they are using can be proved as false. I wonder who’s truly getting googled here?
DigitalMaven: Can you please send me a link to some of the news items that talk about Google giving moveon.org a million dollars? I’ve tried a few searches and have not come across anything.
JS: You have a good point. I have not read enough on both sides of the issue to have a definite opinion yet so I’ll keep this in mind when I catch up on some reading tonight.
I understand your point of view and I agree that if one internet provider tried to kill off sites then there would be hell to pay. However, if both the cable company and the phone companies who offer broad band services decided to do it, where would we go?