There’s no mistaking where the New York Times stands on the network neutrality issue. The paper’s editorial writers have already come out in favor of regulations to prevent broadband providers from creating a two-tiered web.
Now, Adam Cohen has this “Editorial Observer” piece today entitled “Why the Democratic Ethic of the World Wide Web May Be About to End.” Cohen warns that the vision advanced by the Internet’s widely credited “creator” Sir Tim Berners-Lee is threatened by big broadband providers.
This democratic Web did not just happen. Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the British computer scientist who invented the Web in 1989, envisioned a platform on which everyone in the world could communicate on an equal basis. But his vision is being threatened by telecommunications and cable companies, and other Internet service providers, that want to impose a new system of fees that could create a hierarchy of Web sites. Major corporate sites would be able to pay the new fees, while little-guy sites could be shut out.
Cohen also points out a difficult concept inherent in this debate; namely that broadband providers advocate keeping the Internet free of regulation, which to some sounds like an argument for maintaining the Internet in its existing form, an altogether appealing idea.
In actuality, however, it’s the broadband providers who want to change the rules of the game.
The companies fighting net neutrality have been waging a misleading campaign, with the slogan “hands off the Internet,” that tries to look like a grass-roots effort to protect the Internet in its current form. What they actually favor is stopping the government from protecting the Internet, so they can get their own hands on it.Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at 8:49 AM | Print | Comments (0)
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