sign a petition, write a letter, take a figurative poke in the eye at Mike McCurry
Okay, I had a bunch of stuff I was going to blog about, but I read Wil Wheaton’s post and decided this was more important.
It’s been described beautifully elsewhere (such as here) so I won’t make a lame stab at it here; suffice to say that the good old telecommunications giants of America are once more sniffing around for the opportunity to sabotage the Internet, by putting themselves in a position to charge for the right to have your site available to their customers. Those who cannot or will not pay could face being sabotaged, muscled aside, or blocked altogether at the whim of these telecom giants, companies like AT&T, Verizon, and Comcast. The days of an internet subscriber being able to visit any site of his or her choice, for his or her own reasons, would be gone forever. Little sites (like mine) could be choked out of existence.
Putting power into the hands of corporations is always a dangerous proposition. In this case, the power these telecom corporations seek could transform them into rulers of the Internet, dishing out life or death to sites which don’t toe the line. It’s not an exciting proposition.
People are trying to do something about it, and the Save the Internet campaign is really trying to spread the word. If we push on congress hard enough, we could get language inserted into the proposed telecom bill that all the media companies are fretting over at the moment which would enforcably maintain Network Neutrality, which is what we want.
This is also one of those types of activism which transcends other politics; it’s equally important for left, right, radical, conservative, commie, hippie, yuppie, fascist … anyone. We can go back to hating each other later; for now, we can be a team.
There’s a lot you can do, including the following:
- write to your congressperson
- sign the petition at moveon.org
- put the banner up on your blog (like I’ve done)
Let’s show these bastards who really runs America for a change, shall we? The individual.
Technorati Tags: network neutrality, Save the Internet