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Dark Web or Net Neutrality. Do Something About It?
5/24/2006
By Terry Calhoun
I was going to write this week about seeming parallels between the spread of monocultures of food plants by big agriculture and what’s happened in the past ten years with Learning Management Systems (LMS), but a couple of timely news items captured my attention. Instead I am going to urge you to do something to help preserve Net Neutrality and fend off the Dark Web.
If you don’t want to read any further, then the gist of my opinion this week is that right now is a fairly critical time for higher education institutions with regard to the next ten years of the Internet. It would be very helpful if you view this and the accompanying information about how to communicate with your federal legislators. Take a moment to do so. That way, you can be doing something about an important issue.
If you want to learn a little more about the debate, along the same lines that I have been learning, then read on!
In order to make more money, the large telecoms (Some of the same folks who are tracking our calls for the NSA.) want to change the World Wide Web’s founding principle: Net Neutrality. To me it’s kind of like they’re trying to make a limited, and therefore more expensive, resource out of an unlimited resource.
I’ve been following the debate on Net Neutrality and learning a bit more each week. At first I thought it was a simpler matter of companies like AOL wishing to charge e-mail senders a fee to ensure that their e-mails don’t “accidentally” get caught up in AOL’s spam filters. (Even that instantly sounded a bit Mafia-like to me.) But as I read more, I learned that it is a larger issue.
I find myself, almost reflexively, on the side of those who write things like:
Congress is pushing a law that would abandon the Internet's First Amendment – a principle called Network Neutrality that prevents companies like AT&T, Verizon and Comcast from deciding which Web sites work best for you – based on what site pays them the most. If the public d'esn't speak up now, our elected officials will cave to a multimillion dollar lobbying campaign.
Of course, World Wide Web founder Tim Berners-Lee has a large influence on my opinion. Last week, speaking to that larger issue of U.S. telecom companies wanting to create a two-tier Internet system (read article here), Berners-Lee said, “What’s very important from my point of view is that there is one Web.” He said that if the U.S. allowed the companies to move forward with their plans, the World Wide Web would enter “a dark period.”
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