| User | Learah | | Topic | Net Neutrality | | Message | Imagine if you woke up one morning and there was no more EliteSkills unless you paid extra money to your telecom provider for that bounty?
A motion has been forwarded to the US administration to dispose of the ol’ Superhighway and make the internet a dual carriageway of information, high- and low-speed. ISPs could demand a premium from websites such as Google, MSN and Opera, just to ensure the connection speed to those pages stays strong and unhindered; the fast lane. Those sites who do not pay will find their servers lagging at a disastrous snail’s pace, bouncing from brick wall to wall to wall as the user on the other end seethes with rage, the simple act of clicking a link now an hapless chore devoid of pleasure; the slow lane.
Practically every telecoms provider in the USA has banded together in support of this motion, of course they would. It means more money, more control, more power. It is a basic proliferation of the stark human right to choice and freedom.
Imagine the uproar if the post office demanded we use premium, registered services to have our mail delivered, otherwise they’d ensure it took a month to reach a mile? There would be outrage, entire colonies of consumers would revolt and crush the concept before it had the chance to fly. However, this is very, very real and it is happening RIGHT NOW. The rest of the world is depending on the American people to realise the gross misappropriation of the communication companies’ power, it is your government and your voice that has the chance to stop this atrocity in its tracks.
The idea of boycott is one that holds viable effect; lost revenue is the only way to hit the corporations where it hurts. But how does a small minority spread the message across 250 million people?
Go onto the streets, canvass, call, write to your district paper, your senator, local councillor, sign petitions, circulate emails, link to www.savetheinternet.com, tell the old folks, tell the young kids, tell the students, workers, the cashiers in the supermarkets...make sure that this injustice is not swept beneath the rug. Contact your ISP and warn that if they continue to veto this movement, they will lose your custom. Encourage everyone you know to do the same. BAND TOGETHER.
The Internet has been possibly the most important development in modern technology since the arrival of cars, telephones and TV. It’s a neutral forum with room for every soul on this planet to look and find the space they need to be. And now we are expected to pay more or be penalised for that small pleasure.
The first target would be profitable Internet companies such as eBay, MySpace and Yahoo, which, despite offering their services to users for free, AT&T CEO Ed Whitacre has deemed freeloaders.
"What (Internet companies) would like to do is use my pipes free, but I ain’t going to let them do that" he said.
The CEO of AT&T doesn’t own those pipes; you do. You pay for them, you dictate how they should be used. If enough lone voices of dissent unify, the resulting roar will bellow freedom for all those in favour of Net Neutrality.
And to drive their point home, these companies recrited the age old method of propaganda: www.dontregulate.org. Using the suffix of ’.org’ to look like an ordinary people’s protest site, it has been designed to look amateur and radical in its message of anti-Net Neutrality. However, this website is linked to www.handsofftheinternet.com, a site sponsored by the communications ogliarchy to justify their desires to claim control of the latent poetential of the Web. A listing page shows all the huge corporations sharing the same aim; how to control what you do and where you go on the web.
And it is not only America; I am Irish and have never been to the USA. This movement still affects me though, money is not my concern here but rather the flagrant abuse and disrespect to my right of choice. Anyone in the world trying to connect to sites from American servers that do not pay the behemoth corporations may find their searches lagging at a speed worse than dial-up, may discover their emails no longer deliver, could realise that servers are blocked by endless re-routing and unnecessary hops.
Websites created by small ventures (or even singular, like Eliteskills’ Jimmy Ruska) as a way to build communities, start businesses, even just share some photos of the grandchildren, could fall and fade away miserably into a gaping maw of hyperspace unless they cough up extortionate fees to already immensely wealthy organisations. Blogs, fan-forums and online stores could be a thing of the past. Developing concepts such as Skype may be doomed; why would Verizon want a free phone service to succeed when it could easily be crushed like a moth in its iron gauntlet?
Who knows, Microsoft could pay so that only Internet Explorer functioned on the mainlines; how would freeware like Firefox compete with the richest man in the world? Everything we know and love about the internet, its neutrality, diversity, its role play boards and lame fanzines, everything could be wiped out and we may well be left with yet another clean, sanitised, meaningless pay-per-view service.
Is that what you want?
In the materialistic world of money and no morals, it seemed we had one thing that was truly the product of Just People. The World Wide Web and its boundless, unlimited reaches. Now that may no longer be so. Join hands, modems and indomitable spirit and give your all to this fight for your rights. For once, it’s not Them versus Us.
Now... it’s Us vs Them.
We can win...but only if you help. |
|| Replies ||
| User | Learah | 2006-05-24 | | | Subject | untitled | | Message | That’s the thing that really gets me...
Wherever people go, whatever they do, there is always an "authority" watching from the wings, waiting to pounce and silence/punish/charge those who simply want to stretch the limitations of freedom and imagination.
Forget the police state, a global militia is more the phrase for this world we live in... |
| User | Blue Monk | 2006-05-23 | | | Subject | untitled | | Message | Maybe not in this exact same thread, but witness how the government of China appears to be using the internet against it’s own people who it might suspect would use it in a fashon undesirable to the "people’s government". Be careful what you search for, big brother is watching. |
| User | Learah | 2006-05-22 | | | Subject | untitled | | Message | Yes, there has been worry that something like this would happen because someone always comes along to kick down the castles and sand into our eyes. Now it is happening and the only way to prevent it is by doing something.
We deal with ISPs pretty straightforwardly GhostKnight: our government here in Ireland and over in the UK would not DARE to introduce such measures for the same reason they wouldn’t present a ruling body like George Bush and his admin, presumably because our voters are much more outspoken and less happy to be dictated to. There is nothing cyclic about this in any way; right now you click a link and you get there, you send an email and it arrives, at no extra thought or bother to you, the consumer. But all of that, those basic motions of internet use are set to change in the next few months unless the people move on this and assert their fundamental consumers’ rights.
Freya: Exactly. The quality of internet as we know it know would be a thing of the past.
In many countries abroad the internet is gradually doing what those more privilged bore witness to in the last ten years: it is becoming commonly widespread and uniting nations. If such a bill as the COPE (Communications Opportunity, Promotion and Enhancement bill) is passed it will cripple developing internet in small countries as fees raise to compete with the demands of the US market. I don’t want to bitch but America seems to regard itself as a World inside a world; there is a great deal more boyond its shore and yet the sad fallacy of all is that every action of this kind affects not just America but all other nations too.
Something MUST be done to preserve the neutrality of the internet remains in the most stable and trusted hands of all; YOURS. |
| User | ghostknight | 2006-05-22 | | | Subject | untitled | | Message | but honestly, this has been the attempt of the internet since the beginning. the spur that drives the constant creation of low-cost ISP’s is the simple allowance of them by the higher-ups. it’s a cyclic thing, the high-cost providers are ’challenged’ by these newcomers who claim to provide equal or better service at lower costs, and such is true... until the number of members to the service equals or outnumbers that service’s ability to sustain. it’s an inherent property of ISP’s, and when a certain level is reached, prices go up, in order to simply sustain what the provider has founded. no company who starts off with a lower ISP cost will ever stay that way- they all raise in price, or go out of business. here in america, anyway. i’d be interested in hearing how companies outside of the US deal with ISP’s. |
| User | Fantastic Freya | 2006-05-21 | | | Subject | untitled | | Message | Thanks for posting this, Learah. It’s of major concern to those of us outside the US, where of course most of the major internet sites are based. Of concern for many years now has been the possibility that the internet would become just another generic propaganda machine, a cyber McDonalds of a kind -- with corporation being the driving force behind access to the internet, that is exactly what this proposition would lead to. Although there would still be an illusion of free speech and access for all, it would be free speech only for those with the means to pay for it. |
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