Net Neutrality

Next Wednesday, Sept. 10, if your favorite website seems to load slowly, take a closer look: You might be experiencing the Battle for the Net’s “Internet Slowdown,” a global day of grassroots action. Protesters won’t actually slow the Internet down, but will place on their websites animated “Loading” graphics (which organizers call “the proverbial ‘spinning wheel of death’”) to symbolize what the Internet might soon look like. As that wheel spins, the rules about how the internet works are being redrawn. Large Internet service providers, or ISPs, like Comcast, Time Warner, AT&T and Verizon are trying to change the rules that govern your online life.

The fight over these rules is being waged now. These corporate ISPs want to create a two-tiered Internet, where some websites or content providers pay to get preferred access to the public. Large content providers like Netflix, the online streaming movie giant, would pay extra to ensure that their content traveled on the fast lane. But let’s say a startup tried to compete with Netflix. If it couldn’t afford to pay the large ISPs their fees for the fast lane, their service would suffer, and people wouldn’t subscribe.< br />
[...]

Corporate censorship is also a concern. Let’s say you advocate for union rights, in support of striking workers. A large Internet service provider could block your website, denying the public access to critical information. This is not hypothetical. In Canada in 2005, workers at the corporate ISP Telus went on strike. One of the strikers developed a website, Voices for Change, which supported the strike. Telus denied its Internet customers access to the website until the corporate censorship became national news. But if large ISPs get their way, this type of censorship could become routine.

  Democracy Now!