:. Keep the Internet Free

"What? The Net's not free (unless I can find a hot spot). I have to drop my $20 every month for access. And my parent's are paying more than that for dial-up. The Net's never been free (except for those freeridin' days of college) - what are you talking about?"

Well, I'm talking about a little thing called net neutrality. Jeffery Chester explains what's at stake in his article Save the Internet:

Will the internet in the United States become, in the words of AT&T (SBC) CEO, their company's private "pipes"? Or will it remain, as the Supreme Court cited in 1997, "the most participatory form of mass speech yet developed"? These two very different perspectives reflect what's at stake in the growing fight now in Congress over the internet's future.

The basic question: Should Internet service providers be allowed to charge extra for preferential treatment of web pages? (i.e. ABC.com loads way faster than Craig's List because ABC pays SBC/Yahoo DSL [or whoever] more money to carry it's website faster) Congress is just beginning to debate this as they start the process of overhauling telecommunicaation regulations for the first time since 1996.

Alyssa Milano (yes, that Alyssa Milano) paints a picture of what it might be like without net nuetrality:

Imagine, wanting to donate money to a charity and not being able to open the nonprofit's web page because of the charity's inability to afford the dominant internet provider's fees required to make the page efficient? Imagine the millions of life-saving dollars these charities will lose if lobbyists get their way? What if your child is sick, and you can't gain access to a support group's page because the support group can't afford the fees? Or even scarier, imagine not gaining speedy access to a politician's views because the specific provider is against his or her ideology?

In an L. A. Times article, Jim Puzzanghera explains the motivation for internet service providers to push for an end to net neutrality:

As more people use the Internet for data-heavy applications like video and music, the copper wires and fiber-optic lines that whisk information from computer to computer can get crowded. Big ... companies led by AT&T Inc. want to charge extra to guarantee fast and reliable delivery.

Simply put, the internet will change completely for us if congress passes the proposed telecom bill. This would be a bad thing. We didn't let telephone companies charge a premium and provide more reliable service to those who paid as that technology spread across the country and we shouldn't let ISPs do it with the internet.

In an article for the New Yorker, James Surowiecki describes what it might have been like if we'd allowed telephone companies to act in the way ISPs are pushing for today:

In the first decades of the twentieth century, as a national telephone network spread across the United States, A.T. & T. adopted a policy of “tiered access” for businesses. Companies that paid an extra fee got better service: their customers’ calls went through immediately, were rarely disconnected, and sounded crystal-clear. Those who didn’t pony up had a harder time making calls out, and people calling them sometimes got an “all circuits busy” response. Over time, customers gravitated toward the higher-tier companies and away from the ones that were more difficult to reach. In effect, A.T. & T.’s policy turned it into a corporate kingmaker.

If you’ve never heard about this bit of business history, there’s a good reason: it never happened. Instead, A.T. & T. had to abide by a “common carriage” rule: it provided the same quality of service to all, and could not favor one customer over another.

Take just a moment and go to Save The Internet and sign the petition to speak out against this abuse of the internet.