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Change is coming. In fact, if you look over the past 15 years it's already here: the Internet. What it is now, with blogs and social networks, software-as-a-service and 'net-enabled applications, bears scant resemblance to what it was like in 1995. Think about how much it has changed just since you got on the net. No question: the Internet is evolving faster and faster. Do we know what it will look like in 15 years? Ten years? A year from now?
No. The Internet is changing too fast too fast.
Why Net Neutrality is important
The phrase "Net Neutrality" itself is unfortunate because, alliteration aside, it doesn't really have punch, but it's very important. Liza Sabater describes it as "digital civil rights." It's a clear concept when you talk about governmental control of the Internet. China, with the collaboration of its state-run ISPs and American search engine companies, has already demonstrated that control and censorship of the Internet is already possible.
Alistair Croll points out that ISPs have increasing capability to control what users can access:
There are a lot of bad things on the Internet: spam, child porn, malware, phishing and so on. Until recently, it’s been up to people to protect themselves, using security software or web site blocking. Lately, however, governments and legislators have been calling for service providers to limit where users can go, both to stop criminal activity and to protect naïve surfers from straying onto malicious sites. Recent advances in DNS may soon let carriers comply with such regulations.
In June, three major carriers agreed to purge child pornography hosted on servers their customers operate in their data centers. Having signed New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo’s Internet code of conduct, every major U.S. ISP has also agreed to eliminate access to certain newsgroups. It’s not just in the U.S., either: Australia’s hotly debated Plan for Cyber Safety blocks content that isn’t child-friendly. Subscribers can opt out, but they’ll still be blocked from content the government deems illegal.
What about in cases of control and censorship of Internet content by corporations for non-government-manded reasons?
Claire, of the Hawaii LRB Library, gives a thumbnail:
Network neutrality is generally the concept of ensuring "unfettered access to the Internet" by regulating owners of Internet networks. CRS notes that the two most common discriminatory actions against net neutrality are "the network providers’ ability to control access to and the pricing of broadband facilities, and the incentive to favor network-owned content, thereby placing unaffiliated content providers at a competitive disadvantage."
It's this latter part -- "incentive to favor network-owned content, thereby placing unaffiliated content providers at a competitive disadvantage" -- that explains the concern of every website owner who does not control a piece of the Internet backbone.
Alice Marshall puts it in the context of the tech economy:
I am very concerned that the whole Web 2.0 crowd and the entire tech community are way too complacent about net neutrality. It is true that articles about net neutrality are regularly featured on Slashdot's front page and tech publications have done some great reporting on this, but I think too many people take the point-to-point architecture of the Web for granted and don't realize the entire basis of their business model could be destroyed.
Just what would be left if in fact corporations were left to create the content we see every day? They may edit and put their own spin on items in order to create a more favorable view for certain topics. When *we* create the Internet, we are able to put our own opinion on things, yes but people are also allowed to create their own opinions after reading multiple ideas from multiple people.
This isn't just about being able to hear political statements by Pearl Jam.
In a post about how "Verizon Wireless plans to tack on an extra 3-cent charge for every SMS message sent by Web information services to any of its mobile subscribers," Erick Shonfeld points out that Net Neutrality is not just about politics' effect on business, but also business' effect on politics:
The other way this could backfire for Verizon is that it could raise some serious Net neutrality issues. If it does not apply this charge evenly across the board, or starts carving out exceptions to do biz dev deals (and Verizon made some indications to Silicon Valley startups it was moving in this direction prior to the rate hike announcement), then it will be giving preferential treatment to one source of information over the other.
What if
