When I first moved to my place, I setup my TV to receive channels the old-fashioned way: I hooked up an antenna that pickups up the 100% free TV signals from the air. I planned on getting basic cable eventually, but orders for new service take time, and I wanted my baby girl to be able to enjoy a couple of hours of educational TV each day, when she felt like partaking.
Imagine my surprise when I found that my powerful TV antenna couldn't get any signal from any station. I was completely blacked-out, and I didn't understand why.
When I eventually got cable, I asked the cable guy why I wasn't able to get signal the old school way. He told me that it was because my place is located near a small airport.
Nonsense!
Shenanigans!
My thinking was that my local cable provider was up to no good, but I really didn't have the time to pursue the matter.
Everybody Should Be Up In Arms In Defense of Net Neutrality!Now the cable TV and telephone companies are conspiring to bring the free Internet to an end. Seriously, that's exactly what they are doing.
The U.S. government has done a great job of keeping the Internet free and democratic up to this point. Kudos to Uncle Sam for that. It's called Net Neutrality, which basically means that all website are created equal (yes, repeat that again in your head: sound familiar?) Net Neutrality is what allows independent bloggers to post their content to the world at very low cost or no cost. It's truly a beautiful thing: putting your stories, thoughts, ideas, videos, etc. into cyberspace for all the world to see, and, if you're a
Blogger who accesses the 'Net from e.g. a library, then you can do it all without spending a penny.
You see, the cable TV / telco lobby is pushing to end Net Neutrality, and they're using spin (<cough>lies</cough>) to trick the public into believing that ending Net Neutrality is a good thing. "Hands off the Internet," is their battle cry. Sounds like a sixties-era, grassroots movement, but in fact it's the telco / cable folks trying their best to get the government out of the way, so that they can reap massive profits with their proposed "tiered" pricing system.
You see, the Internet Service Providers (ISP's) make money by charging you and me for accessing the Internet. OK, we're cool with that, right? If you want a fast connection to the 'Net, then you'll have to pay more: no problem, as long as I have some choice. OK, now what the telco / cable folks don't like is that they are only making money by charging
us to access our favorites websites. What the access providers want to do is charge
the websites for sending
us the content we desire. In other words, they want to be able to charge both the receivers
and the senders of Internet content.
In real world terms, it means that those great, homemade
video clips that you like to watch may become a thing of the past, because video files eat up a lot of bandwidth. The proposed tiered pricing scheme would mean that ordinary folks who want to share their movies online probably wouldn't be able to, because the cost of doing so would be prohibitive (I doubt sites like YouTube.com could continue to offer their service for free if Net Neutrality was no more.) Only big corporations would be able to afford the fees, so you if you like the inane, mind-numbing clips featured on shows like America's Funniest Home Videos, then you don't have to worry.
I make my living online, and it is my strong belief that installing
Net Neutrality safeguards will keep innovation and entrepreneurship alive on the Internet.
For more, check out
WeAreTheWeb.org.
To contact the folks who represent you on Capitol Hill,
click here.
PS: Internet heavyweights
Microsoft,
Google and
eBay support the Net Neutrality movement.
, and you don't even need to enter a coupon code to get the discount. Just add the dot-US names you want to your shopping cart then checkout and the discount will be applied automatically. Furthermore, if you have some .US names that need renewing, you can renew at the $5.99 price as well. Good stuff!
