Monday, 1 February 2010
Mark Kirk - Count Down to Un-election - Day 2 - Net Neutrality
I grew up in the time when 'hack the planet' was the defacto state of being on the internet, which at that time consisted of DARPAnet or BBS's. If you were half decent at programming, chances were you could access just about anything on the inet that existed 30+ years ago. The internet has come a long way, integrating itself into our business and personal lives in ways we barely imagined, let alone thought possible back then.
Who would have thought that people 30 years later would be using twitter to let the world know about the religious fascism that exists in Iran during the election protests. Who would have thought that 20 to 30 percent of one's business sales could be generated by online sales or entire business models built on the backbone of the internet like World of Warcraft, the massive online multiplayer game. Who would have thought that people would be finding their soul mates online or exchanging mission critical business information across state lines in an open source endeavor. Who would have imagined 300 Petabytes of information on any topic you can think of available at the click of a mouse.
All of these things exist within the confines of the Cyberspace we've come to expect everyday and know as the 'Internet'. These things grew to their current state because the internet is an open and pretty much unregulated framework of equipment, code and users. No one person is the king of the internet, nor are there policemen to give you a ticket for driving to fast or a legislature to dictate borish laws governing use or abilities. In other words, the internet is a place that if left untethered to a set of legal constraints or protocols, will continue to evolve, perhaps into its own intelligent entity.
In this state of development to the victors go the spoils, victors at this point being those creative individuals that develop the fastest, easiest, best looking, zowwie wowwie websites out there. Sites that keep us coming back for more... and spending our hard earned cash with them because their product or service is unrivaled.
There are however some companies and government concerns that want to change the petri dish that is the internet and turn it into a moldy bacteria ridden mess. Those companies like Comcast, AT&T, U.S. Congress, Sprint, Amazon, Ebay just to name a few want to push the little guy to the fringes of internet existence. The idea being is to eliminate any competition from up and comers. To corner their little market and keep it all to themselves. By pushing our CONgress critters to make laws that govern what we can see, or creating levels of service that in essence do the same thing or slow our connects such that our access to alternative sites is hampered they will effectively lock us into the domains of the big internet players.
This is were Net Neutrality comes in.
Network neutrality (also net neutrality, Internet neutrality) is a principle proposed for user access networks participating in the Internet that advocates no restrictions on content, sites, or platforms, on the kinds of equipment that may be attached, and on the modes of communication allowed, as well as communication that is not unreasonably degraded by other traffic.
The principle states that if a given user pays for a certain level of Internet access, and another user pays for a given level of access, that the two users should be able to connect to each other at the subscribed level of access.
Though the term did not enter popular use until several years later, since the early 2000s advocates of net neutrality and associated rules have raised concerns about the ability of broadband providers to use their last mile infrastructure to block Internet applications and content (e.g. websites, services, protocols), particularly those of competitors. In the US particularly, but elsewhere as well, the possibility of regulations designed to mandate the neutrality of the Internet has been subject to fierce debate.
Neutrality proponents claim that telecom companies seek to impose a tiered service model in order to control the pipeline and thereby remove competition, create artificial scarcity, and oblige subscribers to buy their otherwise uncompetitive services. Many believe net neutrality to be primarily important as a preservation of current freedoms.
In a nutshell, net neutrality says that governments shall not regulate the internet in any way, it keeps the playing field level for all involved, from the big Ebay's and Google's to the little ma and pa shop hocking hooter bisquits.
Mark Kirk voted NO to preserve Net Neutrality. He doesn't want ma and pa to be able to compete against the big guy. He doesn't want you to visit my site so you can read about his murderous, pimping and drug smuggling ways. He wants to fill the coffers of AT&T and Comcast with gold and in turn they will pump millions and millions into his campaign war chest.
The fight is still on, the FCC is currently drafting rules and regulations that would change the internet from the open and free wilderness to a tier big game player only cityscape. This is happening because CONgress and Mark Kirk in particular voted NO to preserve the internet as open and full of freedoms.
You can help in this fight in two ways. The first is to support groups like Save the Internet, which actively solicit our CONgress critters to do the right thing where internet freedoms are concerned. The second is to vote just like Kirk did, a resounding NO to his being a Senator.
Catch all 15 articles in the Un-elect Mark Kirk Series at Mark Kirk - Count Down to Un-election - Day 15
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