SAVE THE INTERNET

The freedom of the internet is under attack! Our friend Leslie Hall has made this video illustrating just what’s going on.

Video: We Are the Web

The problem with this issue is that not many people give a shit about it right now because it’s too techie and too boring a debate to feel strongly about. But nobody gives a shit about anything anymore, have you noticed? Everyone is too busy with their Myspace, YouTube, BitTorrents and porn. Which is weird because those popular websites owe something to the freedoms at stake right now in the US Congress…

One of the neatest things about the internet is it enables anyone with a computer to broadcast information to the world – be they huge corporations or a start-up company in a garage; everyone can have a website and have it accessed on the world wide web in exactly in same way. This is the principle of network neutrality – where all websites are treated equally on a level playing field.

Nevertheless, the online democracy created by network neutrality is currently being threatened by the political clout of big business. Freedom is under fire.

Telecommunications titans have spent hundreds of billions of dollars building new high-bandwidth tubes for high-speed internet. And they want to see some of that money back. The telcos want to control the network by offering differently-tiered broadband services where preferred (paid-for) websites download better than others.

So people are getting mad. They’re crying that privileged access subverts network neutrality, the 1st amendment of the internet. They want the government to enact laws that would regulate the big evil telcos and make sure they treat all traffic equally. If the government doesn’t step in, they fear that big business will buy up the internet and the Joe Bloggers of the world wide web will lose out.

DOM TUNON