Hopefully you’ve seen the term Net Neutrality in the headlines in the last couple of weeks. The US House rejected a bill that would ensure Net Neutrality as we know it. If the Senate follows suit the internet will be changed forever.

Right now the entire internet communicates data on a simply principle, first come first served. The internet nodes and routers and switches process every request in the order it came. This sounds like a very practical solution but I should point out that a lot of foresight and passionate socialogically minded engineers had to determine and build in these protocols which have proven to be so successful in terms of usage and adoption of the internet. Now anyone, anywhere can get information with the same priority of anyone else.

The problem is that the large American Telcos who provide much of the fiber used by the internet think that since it goes thru their pipes (pipes funded heavily by government land deals and bubble-fueled investor spending such as the giant scam that was WorldCom. So these telcos now want to charge an extra fee for data going thru their pipes to the websites owners. This means Google, Amazon, Wikipedia, Dogster, your personal photo site, your email service, your sons baseball wesbite, whatever will have to pay a tax to the bandwidth providers to get priority service or your users will have wait for ppublic-class service.

The excellent SaveTheInternet site has over 800,000 petition signers and great facts and information.

What really disgusts me besides the fact the Telco’s didn’t really pay for the pipes they claim they they worked so hard to build, is that these are the same companies that handed over stunning amounts of private domestic phone calls without even putting up a fight. So not only does the US Govt. owe them a huge favor, it’s int he governement’s best interest to consolidate the internet. A populist internet is in a populaces’ best interest, but not a centralized government who would much prefer to only have to deal with a handful of agent who control all of it. Today these companies illegally hadnover phone data, tomorrow it will be internet data. I’m no pervert and I have nothing to hide, but we’ve seen in this century ala McCarthyism and worse that witch hunts drag everyone through the mud.

The internet works fine as it is now. It’s only the greed of the large Telcos that implies there is any problem. This is a good old fashioned insider land grab, one that has the blessing of the government and one that will be a rape of the populace that it has been made for.

Jealous much someone else made better use of technology than anything they could come up with