The Ruling that Endangers the Internet as we Know It

[unhappycamper]

http://www.juancole.com/2014/01/ruling-endangers-internet.html

The Ruling that Endangers the Internet as we Know It
By Juan Cole | Jan. 15, 2014

A Washington D.C. federal panel has struck down the Federal Communication Commission position on net neutrality, threatening the corporatization of the internet.

The reason readers of Informed Comment can reach it as quickly and conveniently as they can reach a multi-billion dollar corporate web site is the principle of internet neutrality, built into the system by Tim Berners-Lee and other architects of the World Wide Web, which went live in 1991.

Large private corporations that have been allowed to build out the pipes through which internet traffic flows have long wanted to introduce a different system, of net metering. In essence, if a corporation paid the internet provider a million dollars a year, readers could get to that site immediately. But for a site like Informed Comment without those sorts of bucks, service would be deliberately slowed and readers would have to wait a minute or two for the site to load. Studies have showed that most people won’t wait that way. So the entire independent cybersphere would be made invisible and more or less swept away.

A similar thing happened to radio, which was a grassroots medium at the beginning and then was corporatized with government help.