Swinging Back the Other Way
Of all companies, Google is now campaigning to preserve net neutrality.
Wasn't this the same Google that acquiesed in creating a search engine to work through Chinese censorship? But then backed away? Its corporate values are a little ambivalent, but perhaps this is a move in the right direction.
Let's not forget, however, that Google is a web company. This is a problem with the Internet - the actual infrastructure which carries the World Wide Web:
Today the Internet is an information highway where anybody – no matter how large or small, how traditional or unconventional – has equal access. But the phone and cable monopolies, who control almost all Internet access, want the power to choose who gets access to high-speed lanes and whose content gets seen first and fastest. They want to build a two-tiered system and block the on-ramps for those who can't pay.
Creativity, innovation and a free and open marketplace are all at stake in this fight.
More prescient is a remark by Tim Berners-Lee:
The neutral communications medium is essential to our society. It is the basis of a fair competitive market economy. It is the basis of democracy, by which a community should decide what to do. It is the basis of science, by which humankind should decide what is true. Let us protect the neutrality of the net.
If the American public can't block this bill - and let's face it, none of the rest of us have a look in - then we could all end up in a blocked-off net, just like China.
