Hijacking the Internet

This is potentially an important issue that merits a few minutes of your time. Apparently telecommunications companies are considering ending their practice of "network neutrality." In plain English, that means that individual telecom and cable companies would charge Internet companies a premium fee to have their content delivered quickly to users. If Google doesn't pay AT&T, suddenly it would take a half-hour to do a Google search on one of AT&T's high-speed lines.

This is hijacking, pure and simple. The telecom companies have seen tech companies get rich and are now whining that they want a piece of the action. They already own the telephone lines (which they monopolized for decades) and the high-speed fat pipe, but they want more. Their deciding what websites will be delivered quickly and what won't will crush innovation and small-scale sites and turn the Internet into a pay-for-play operation not unlike Congress has done with Washington lobbyists.

It's actually pretty amazing that the Internet became the way it is: decentralized, unencumbered, where everybody with some html code gets a fair shake to put their product on the Web and see if everybody likes it. Now that it has evolved to this state, the telecom companies want to put the genie back in the bottle. That's absurd, and overwhelming majorities of the public will not want that to happen.

There are a bunch of action items at this Free Press site. Let's save the Internet, and give it an opportunity to reinvent itself over and over without interference.

P.S. I would be remiss if I didn't say that this is a free speech issue, where major corporate conglomerates want to expand their profit margins by charging for speech. That's not how it's supposed to be done in this country.