Wildcatboy
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| Re: Berners-Lee, Inventor of World Wide Web, on Net Neutrality
What a lot of people don't understand is that the lack of net neutrality isn't just about big companies. Most people think who cares about which company makes more money and which doesn't. It won't affect us because we're not one of those big shots and what they do won't affect us.
The truth is that not having net neutrality could have a profound effect on our freedom of speech and our freedom of choice and that is what we should focus on. To me, nothing is more important. This is how lack of net neutrality can affect us all:
Imagine you have a web site that you trust and you get most of your news from. Company X finds their niche to be a lucrative one and company X happens to control the bandwidth on major routers and switches. The next day you try to go to your favourite web site as usual, and you find that the site loads slowly. The problem continues for weeks and gets worse every day. Then you happen to see Company X is providing the same kind of information at a blazing fast speed. You leave your favourite web site and use them instead. Your favourite site eventually shuts down and then Site X feeds you whatever garbage they feel like, because no one is competing with them anymore.
Multiply this scenario by thousands and then you realize that in a few years The Internet is not going to be what you know today. Right now, major portals are competing on a level ground and by providing valuable content to give them the upper hand. But with the lack of Net Neutrality, they no longer have to play fair. They can shut the bandwidth on competitors and then they no longer have to offer much value. You won't have a choice but to read what they give you to read. It's not going to happen tomorrow. It's not going to happen next year. But it will happen. There's just too much money in it for them to ignore the opportunity. Not enforcing Net Neutrality means guaranteeing monopoly.
This is just an attempt to make The Internet as useless as major TV Networks and Newspapers. They'll give you the news they want you to know and hold on to what they think you can't handle or shouldn't know. They'll tell you who your next president should be and because that's the only voice you hear day in and day out, you will eventually believe it. They have been doing it forever with Newspapers and TV and now they want to do it with the Internet because the Internet has become the single most dangerous threat to their agenda.
The government doesn't mind it either. In fact they welcome it. Because They can control a handful of big companies and make them do the things they want from time to time, but they can't control Billions of people around the world. Not to mention that big companies will gladly bribe your representatives in Congress as they have been, but the average Joe living in some remote area doesn't have much to offer.
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You can catch the Devil, but you can't hold him long. |
