RB 10/3

The Internet, as Poster observes, is decentralized. The empowering ability to send and receive unprecedented amounts of information all over the world is shared equally by all Internet users (except those in totalitarian regimes). But that doesn’t mean the Internet will stay that way.

Internet access is endangered by the same kind of corporate monopolization that has come to characterize print and broadcast media. Internet Service Providers (ISPs), such as Bright House and Verizon, are capable of blocking or restricting access to this postmodernity blog or any other Web site, and groups like Save the Internet fear ISPs will soon begin doing exactly that. ISPs are making bank as it is, but if they were to charge Web sites “tolls,” then they could keep upping their Wall Street street-cred.

ISPs are nothing more than the road (wire) connecting the Internet to the Internet user. Today they charge only the users for access; however, guys like Ed Whitacre, SBC Telecommunications CEO, and William Smith, BellSouth Chief Tech Officer, would like to charge Web sites for what they would designate as an express lane, directing sites that don’t pay into the slow lane.[1] In fact, there’s nothing to stop them from completely prohibiting passage to certain sites.

Nothing stopping them yet. Save the Internet wants the federal government to create a law enforcing Net Neutrality. Six bills – three House and three Senate – have been introduced in 2006 alone. Two passed but neither is comprehensive. No passage of a comprehensive bill is in sight, although ISP tolls are.

Net Neutrality activist Dr. Robert McChesney said, “The decisions that we’re going [to] be making . . . are probably going to set our entire communication system, and, really, our entire society, on a course that it won’t be able to change for generations.” Moyers on America will be doing a special about Net Neutrality on PBS, 9pm Wednesday October 18, 2006.