Shad

There’s an important bill going before congress this week. It would allow internet service providers (ISP’s) to choose which traffic gets priority. Providers would be allowed to, for instance, make it so that Skype doesn’t work as well (unless Skype pays them lots of money). However, the ISP’s internal phone product would work perfectly.

Currently, the internet is a free market of ideas. This legislation undermines that in a major way. It is only there to protect the ISP’s. It seems that they believe it’s not fair for Google to make all of the money when they’re the ones providing service. As a solution to their money woes, they’re throwing money at Congress to make it legal for them to get “protection money” out of service providers (like Google, Yahoo!, Skype, Ebay, etc.) You can almost hear them say “I’m taking my ball and going home unless you let me be quarterback” It’s blackmail.

“Buy why?” you ask, “How can they think this is good?”. The providers claim that they want to give companies like Skype and Yahoo the ability to get priority service so that their services will work better. But think about it… do you really want AT&T making deals that affect how well your favorite service works? And where is there room in this new world for entrepreneurs? In order to compete, companies would need to make deals with individual ISPs.

Please help spread the word, the internet is not broken so please stop trying to fix it.

Here’s what you can do:

• MoveOn petition - every person who signs will get future actions they can take to keep the heat on Congress: link
• Call Congress today: link
• Original MoveOn email describing the issue: link
• How gutting Net Neutrality affects regular people (Ipod users, Google users), and proof that telecom companies abuse their power: link
• Coalition website: link
• A key committee is voting this week. Click here to see if your Representative is on this committee: link
• Find out where your Member stands: link

Good articles on coalition kick-off:

“Gun Owners, Librarians Unite Against Bells,” Telephony Online, April 24, 2006
link

“New Group Aims to ‘Save the Internet’” Cnet News, April 24, 2006
link

“Average Joe And Saving The Internet,” Webpronews.com, April 24, 2006
link