A danger to the Internet as we know it and as sites like TomDispatch survive and even flourish on it -- a federal panel struck down the FCC position on Internet neutrality. If confirmed, it could ensure that, as in so many other places in our world, its money that speaks loudest. Juan Cole offers a cogent look at this nightmarish decision and what it means. Tom 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. While Tuesday’s ruling is not the final word, since the FCC will have an opportunity to try to reformulate its position, and the ruling can be appealed, I have a bad feeling about this. juancole/2014/01/ruling-endangers-internet.html
Posted on: Wed, 15 Jan 2014 17:04:49 +0000
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