Keep Communication Open: Net Neutrality
Posted by dlende on April 5, 2008
Sometimes it’s about the medium, not just the neuroanth message. Damian Kulash has an editorial today, Beware the New New Thing, on net neutrality and how companies are trying to sell us something “good” (for those who can afford it) that replaces something better that we already have, an open Internet. There’s just one problem, we might have that–but not legally.
Here’s one good excerpt: “For some parallel examples: there are only two guitar companies who make most of the guitars sold in America, but they don’t control what we play on those guitars. Whether we use a Mac or a PC doesn’t govern what we can make with our computers. The telephone company doesn’t get to decide what we discuss over our phone lines. It would be absurd to let the handful of companies who connect us to the Internet determine what we can do online. Congress needs to establish basic ground rules for an open Internet, just as common carriage laws did for the phone system.”
To support net neutrality, you can go to the website Save the Internet.
dlende said
Here’s a link to a basic overview of the debate on net neutrality from MediaShift–a good place to look for more information on the topic: http://www.pbs.org/mediashift/2008/04/digging_deeperyour_guide_to_ne.html