HELIOLITH

Care of KPFK’s Digital Village, come an interview with Robert W. McChesney, President of Free Press. They’ve posted a good informational essay from the San-Jose Mercury News here: Free Press : Saving Internet Equality. From that piece:

The choice facing lawmakers is stark: keep the Internet as a decentralized network that no single company controls and where all users and all Web sites are treated equally; or hand control over it to an oligopoly of cable and telephone companies.

You can visit Save the Internet.com to read more and take action if you have a minute. It’s not looking good, and it’s hard to imagine an internet world where full-speed access is limited to websites that pay for it. The U.S. Congress is going to vote on this soon, and it appears they’re leaning toward caving in to telecom lobbyists.

What we need instead is a powerful re-invigoration of net neutrality, something along the lines of the Snowe-Dorgan Internet Freedom Preservation Bill. If we allow congress to give telecom companies the green light, they will throttle the majority of non-paying websites to a marginalized back-country where fewer users will have the patience to venture.

You tube has an excellent super-dense and simplified video that explains the issue.

Digital Village Audio Archive/Podcast