Sunny Man’s Blog

June 9th 2006

(0) United States - Net Dictators

Internet, Life, News, Politics, Technology

So, as American law decides not to back net neutrality, what will become of this wonderful technology? It seems that as the United States takes out one dictator, it becomes one. When ICANN refused to give control of the internet to a European body, I felt it marked doom for the internet. Will the internet become the next capitalist state?

Besides the fee we pay as users to access the internet from our Internet Service Providers, the net is essentially free. Do you think we should have to pay extra to, for example, visit a website hosted in a different country? I don’t think so. Do you think that we should be really restricted to what services we can use because of our location or the amount we pay for our connection? I don’t. The United States seem to think it can mould the world to suit it. First it drags us along to its wars, uses us to commit human rights crimes and now it’s moving towards a tiered internet where we’re not all equal and we don’t all have the same choices available to us. Granted, there are services at the moment that aren’t accessible to all (such as when Channel 4 released the ‘IT Crowd’ online to UK residents only) but this sort of thing will rise. I think that an independant body should be formed - independant of any country, any political view that includes people experienced in the IT industry from countries around the world. This would ensure that this body isn’t corrupted and/or influenced by governments and political views. We cannot let the United States rule us. They are one country - they do not have the right to restrict our access to the internet, nor their own citizens and especially, they do not have the right to change the structure of the internet and turn it into a capitalist state. The internet should remain like Switzerland during WWII - neutral.

What’s your view on this news and this matter?

Here are some opinions of some people on a forum:

It may well be a utopian dream as the internet may have already gone to far to bring it back… The internet and what it means and is capable of is still a very new thing in it’s infancy, whilst in this stage it is showing that it is an increasing threat to a great many of the traditional establishments they will seek to control it, the listings of sites visited, blocking or limiting to access by various nations to differing degrees all show that there is some effort to tame this wild beast with varying degrees of success.

Everyone including the W3C are trying to impose their vision of what the web should be on the public, some with what they think are the average user’s best interests at heart but some users are still content with a nice 56k dial up connection whilst others are addicts who have to have the best and pay for it. There is already a wide gap between those willing to pay for the fastest internet connections and the casual user and it would come as no surprise if this gap continues to grow.

It is impossible for something such as the internet to continue growing without there being some break up, at present this may not be apparent but the bigger it grows the more facets there will be and the more likelihood of break ups, whether it is a two tier system such as the one proposed or something completely different that hasn’t been foreseen.

What should happen and what will happen are likely to be two very different things.

The world already has two Internets, one that can be accessed from within China and one that can be accessed from everywhere else. I know which Internet I want to be connected to.

Now this may be a slightly extreme example, however creating a two-tier Internet is not as different as it may seem. A few weeks ago it emerged that publishers have to pay bookstores to market their books, to create more sales. Applying this principle to the Internet would mean that sites have to pay to get onto ‘premium’ bandwidth, effectively pushing up the price for the end user. Now a large site from a multi-national may be able to pay these fees, however I’m pretty sure the average open source project won’t. A two-tier Internet will push users towards certain chosen sites at the expense of the smaller, independent and possibly better sites.

The current Internet creates innovation, which should be encouraged. A tiered Internet would only benefit large companies endlessly rolling out material to the same tried and tested formula. The question is what do we want out of our Internet?

Check out:

• BBC News Article