Thanks!

The newspaper of record for the Internet community has come out in force to support Net Neutrality. In an editorial today, the San Jose Mercury News stated that if Congress doesn’t adopt Net Neutrality rules, the results “would be disastrous for Internet users, for Internet companies and for innovation itself.” Here’s more:

The choice facing lawmakers is stark: keep the Internet as a decentralized network that no single company controls and where all users and all Web sites are treated equally; or hand control over it to an oligopoly of cable and telephone companies.

The Mercury News reiterates our point that Net Neutrality legislation isn’t new “major government regulation of the Internet.” This is the AT&T lie being echoed by industry front groups in Washington. According to the Mercury News:

Network neutrality isn’t new. Its basic tenets — that all users can access all legal content on the Internet and that all content providers are treated the same on the network — have been in effect since the birth of the Internet through regulations governing the old telephone network. But a series of court decisions and a vote of the Federal Communications Commission last year have voided those rules. And that has opened the door for phone and cable companies, which control Internet access, to change the rules of the game.

The Mercury News outlines the threat posed by the largest phone and cable companies that seek to strip Net Neutrality from the books so they can put their “Hands ON the Internet” and squeeze it for profit:

. . . if cable and telephone companies become traffic cops and toll collectors, they will be in a position to decide which shows go on the fast lane and which get stuck in a lane too slow to be watched. That would turn Internet video into an online version of the cable system, where an intermediary controls the delivery of all content. The explosion in creativity would be snuffed out and the innovative start-ups and business models would never see the light of day. Future technologies and industries could suffer the same innovation-crushing fate.

The only thing that stands in their way is Congress and a vocal citizenry. The Mercury News sums it up:

few lawmakers seem to understand that by not enacting network neutrality legislation, they’d be subverting the basic principles that have made the Internet into such a powerful force for economic growth. Perhaps, it’s because they’ve been worn down by armies of lobbyists from the telephone and cable industries.

It’s time for online users everywhere — those who search on Google, download songs from Apple, buy books from Amazon, run businesses on eBay, make phone calls on Skype or simply read e-mail and surf the Web — to let them know the Internet is too valuable to be sold off to special interests.

Read the entire editorial and take action.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 17th, 2006 at 7:21 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.