Wednesday, May 31, 2006
The End Of Internet Freedom
Unless you have not heard, Verizon, AT&T, Bell South and other telecommunications giants are lobbying Congress to establish a legal basis for charging website owners for traffic with the help of two-tier Internet.
If telecommunication lobby succeeds it would mean the end of online freedom and higher prices for online goods and services for all of us.
So what do telecommunication companies want? Quite naturally, greedy corporations want more profit and they are keen to find a way to stuff their pockets even tighter.
Hold on there, telecom companies already charging us - the consumers - for broadband and cable access, right? But now they want to charge content providers too based on the amount of traffic their sites generate. Nonsense! Although telcos argue that they want to curb proliferation of online video and other types of data-hungry streaming that allegedly taxes their networks they think imposing traffic fees on content providers would be a fair solution.
But content providers already pay traffic charges to their hosting providers! So what telcos want is to charge content providers twice! Not only that, the whole premise of two-tier Internet puts high-dollar companies ahead of cash-strapped runner-ups effectively killing start ups and low-key businesses. With two tier you've got to cash-out to cable providers if you want to ride 'high-bandwidth' channel and make sure that your pages are served fast and clear, whereas if you are a cash-strapped nobody like most of us you would be stuck to an auxiliary channel choked with spam, porn and god knows what else.
But most troubling of all is that the introduction of two-tier Internet creates a unique opportunity for censorship and interferes with the free speech right so much treasured by online community. Indeed what a clever move! The bill does not prohibit free speech not it interferes with the free speech directly. Sure, you can say all you want and blog all you want about anything you want. But we just won't serve your pages!.. Unless you pay a hefty price... and even then we may choose not to serve them.
The two-tier Internet bill must be stopped. Activist groups already pressure US senate to abandon the bill. And even an opposing Net Neutrality bill was proposed by democratic senators. Net Neutrality bill requires all online content to be served without discrimination, which is a nice idea in theory, yet it is vigorously opposed by equipment manufacturers and ISPs due to fears of potential liability (arising presumably from bugs, outages and custom content filters).
While Net Neutrality bill sounds like overkill, two-tier Internet bill is ought to be stopped too. If it passes freedom of speech would be seriously hampered, startups and small businesses will take a hit and we will pay higher prices for online advertising as well as goods and services delivered or sold over Internet. Do we really want that? I think not.
source:http://techsearch.cmp.com/blog/archives/2006/05/the_end_of_inte.html?loc=software_and_web_development
