Help! the Internet is Dying

In a little over ten years, the Internet has taken the world by storm and changed our way of life. We access the Internet from our homes, offices and schools, we use it for our work, entertainment or research, the Internet allows us to connect with people from all over the world and to get all the information we want at our fingertips; anyone with a broadband or even a good dial up connection can add new content to the Internet; in a way, the Internet belongs to all of us, or at least, this is what one would think, given the fact that most of us take network neutrality for granted. But what is network neutrality and, more importantly, is it really about to end?

Wikipedia defines network neutrality as "a principle that is applied to residential broadband networks, and potentially to all networks. A neutral broadband network is one that is free of restrictions on the kinds of equipment that may be attached, on the modes of communication allowed, which does not restrict content, sites or platforms, and where communication is not unreasonably degraded by other communication streams". In other words, network neutrality means that acess to websites and the adding of content to the Internet is not being hindered by any means or anyone.

As phone and cable companies are lobbying the American Congress to introduce new network neutrality regulations, there is fear among Internet users that the Internet as we know it is about to end, giving ownership of the Internet not to the consumers, as it was designed in the first place, but to telephone companies and the big corporations who can afford to pay them in order to get published on the Internet.

Advocates of network neutrality claim that the telecommunications companies have entered a deal that means that the Internet will, by 2012, function the same way as cable television packages, meaning that we will only be able to access a small number of websites by paying a standard fee, and we will have to pay extra in order to access a wider selection of websites, with an even higher subscription fee for the elite who can afford to access the whole of the Internet. This means the end of thousands of small websites and blogs, giving control of the Internet to commercial companies and, with the introduction of higher fees for access to the less powerful websites, the ability to express ourselves on non-commercial platforms such as MySpace, Blogger and even Associated Content and with it our freedom of speech will be eventually stolen away from under our fingertips.

Network neutrality regulation supporters may argue that controlling Internet content could benefit end users of the Internet, making it easier to prevent unlawful content to be published and spread through the Internet; in fact some countries already block specific online content to be accessed through their networks. For example in Great Britain, it is not possible to access websites showing sexually explicit images of children; in the U.S., some public networks (such as schools and librairies) are required by law to block content related to the exploitation of children as well as obscene and pornographic materials, but once that countries have the ability to apply the desired filters, whether this is appropriate or not, there is no reason to hand control of the Internet over to commercial companies.

Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google Inc. and a supporter of net neutrality, wrote a letter expressing">http://www.google.com/help/netneutrality_letter.html">letter expressing his concerns about the current threat to net neutrality in which he urges Internet users to take action to protect Internet freedom; Save The Internet and Open Internet Coalition are among those fighting to preserve the openness of the Internet.

Once more, pretty much as this already happened in the past with the press and the radio, the large corporations have discovered a new way to increase their profits at the risk of destroying the Internet as we know it, introducing a discriminatory pricing system on the Internet, which is guaranteed to a one-way communication system instead of the great communication tool the Internet was meant to become. Do we want to switch on the Internet to be bombarded with advertisements and shopping websites or do we want to keep the Internet as this exciting interactive communications system, where people can have fun, learn and exchange ideas independently of their purchasing power? Don't let the big players take away our freedom; you can sign the Save The Internet petition to Congress for Internet freedom here:

http://action.freepress.net/campaign/savethenet