Net Neutrality

According to the American Civil Liberties Union (ALCU)

"the Department of Justice issued a filing with the Federal Communications Commission opposing net neutrality and opening the door for discriminatory, two-tiered pricing systems. The DoJ filing supports telecoms in their efforts to roll back the clock on net neutrality, and would permit telecoms to censor or block users from desired content based on their ability to pay."
(September 6, 2007)

According to the ACLU net neutrality:

"ensures that you, not a corporate monopoly, choose how you access and use the Internet. It protects your ability to access and send any lawful information on the Internet. It prevents Internet Service Providers, such as cable and telephone companies, from preferring certain content, applications, or services over others. Net Neutrality means individual freedom, not corporate control, on the Internet."

And according to a Washington Post article:

"William L. Smith, chief technology officer for Atlanta-based BellSouth Corp., told reporters and analysts that an Internet service provider such as his firm should be able, for example, to charge Yahoo Inc. for the opportunity to have its search site load faster than that of Google Inc."

This means that these few large companies could charge either groups such as google and yahoo more for faster service or they could charge customers more for faster and better connections...or they could charge BOTH!

This would kill much of what the internet has come to embody. For example, for a blogger, like myself, I might have to pay a fee each month for my website to load as quickly as a large news website (such as cnn.com). And that large company could easily afford a fee per month for quick loading versus small time bloggers and start up companies who do not have large amounts of capital available.

The net MUST BE neutral!!!