It was just about one year ago that I first became aware of efforts by the nation's largest telecommunications companies to capitalize on a 2005 Federal Communications Commission decision which would have allowed these same telco giants, many which own the physical internet backbone and also provide internet service to millions of customers, to gut the most basic foundation of a free and open internet; network neutrality. I first wrote about this topic on the now defunct group blog I had started last summer because I understood then, as I do now, that the concepts and principles of net neutrality really matter to what I and millions of others do every single day.
This is not a sexy topic, but it's an important one.
Net Neutrality is a founding premise of the world wide web which means no discrimination. It means that your ISP cannot slow down or speed up any web content based on source, ownership or destination, and it basically means that when you visit my site, it gets to your computer the same way as any other site online. As an independent blogger/writer, I count on net neutrality to guarantee that I play on the same level playing field as anyone else.
However, telecom companies see dollar signs and lost revenue. They see the internet as an unexploited opportunity to charge content providers a premium for high speed delivery on their networks, which would drastically change the landscape of the internet, and would give those who could afford to pay the premium an unfair advantage. The beauty of the internet, I think, is that it truly operates as a free market, meaning that consumers decide which ecommerce sites, blogs, search engines, or any other category of website survive or fail. And it's all based on creating good content, and it's fair to everyone.
The telecom companies almost won this battle, but according to savetheinternet.com [1]:
In 2006, Congress took up a major overhaul of the Telecommunications Act called the "Communications Opportunity, Promotion and Enhancement Act of 2006," or COPE Act. Despite more than $175 million spent on lobbying, campaign contributions, deceptive advertising and fake grassroots groups, the phone and cable companies failed to pass their legislation.
Why did it fail? Because more than a million concerned citizens wrote and called Congress opposing any bill that didn't protect Net Neutrality.
So why are we talking about this again now?
During a performance last week at the Lollapalooza Music Festival [2] which was webcast by AT&T, a content monitor censored Anti-George Bush lyrics sung by Pearl Jam's Eddie Vedder during an audience participation sing-a-long. The story of the apparent politically motivated censorship quickly gained legs, appearing first in the blogosphere [3]and then picked up by the mainstream media [4], which quickly caused AT&T to issue a statement of apology to its customers and to the band, but the ill-conceived use of the mute button by the company AT&T contracted to produce the webcast (Davie Brown Entertainment) became fuel for the fire to address the very real problems of an assault on net neutrality, media consolidation and ownership, freedom of speech and a plethora of other civil liberties and personal liberty and privacy issues which have been under assault since the Bush Cabal came to Washington.
I am an independent website operator, writer, and concerned netizen who depends on net neutrality to function in this medium. Anyone who keeps a blog or website or who runs an ecommerce site or who is just concerned about freedom of speech and free access to any content they choose needs to care about net neutrality. You are encouraged to visit savetheinternet.com [5] and get involved. Your YouTube Tuesday video is the unedited Pearl Jam performance that started this… and, girls kissing! Hey, this is still geishaland after all! What would YouTube Tuesday be without pretty girls kissing?