Shyzer.com

If there’s one thing in politics that’s actually worth following these days, it’s the whole Net Neutrality Act and how the major ISP’s are lobbying most of the Republican’s to defeat it. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to realize that Net Neutrality is good when so many large websites and actual Internet players come out in support of it. Google, Yahoo, E-Bay, Myspace, Craigslist, Amazon and countless other major websites that are dependant on their users to keep them in buisness have all come out in favor of Net Neutrality. And why shouldn’t they?

For those of you who don’t quite understand what’s at stake here, it boils down to this. Let’s say I’m a huge fan of Swedish fishing shows or African cooking articles. Without the Internet, I’m stuck with only cable TV and my local print media and I doubt either of them would have much material on Swedish fishing or African cooking. But thanks to the Internet, I can watch Oleg’s homemade podcast on Swedish fishing and read Kimbabwesaquanda’s blog on African cooking. Hooray for hobbies!

But if Net Neutrality is defeated, my ISP suddenly has a say. Verizon, Time Warner, Adelphia, Comcast, or whoever else might provide you with Internet might decide that they don’t make enough money from Oleg’s or Kimbabwesaquanda’s websites and as such, restrict the amount of bandwidth they’ll allow to flow to those sites. Now all of a sudden when I try to go to their websites, they load painfully slow or in some cases, not at all. In essence, the Internet would cease to be a forum where any and every user, regardless of money, could sell or offer their services. Instead, with no Net Neutrality, ISP’s could auction off the Internet to the highest bidder.

And don’t be fooled into thinking only small blogs would be effected by this. Time Warner owns CNN. Well, what’s to stop them from blocking all their users from going to msnbc.com and foxnews.com so that now all their users are forced to use their news service? How about this: TW also owns Sports Illustrated, so what’s to stop them from blocking ESPN.com? Or what if TW, who owns AOL and thus AIM, blocked customers from using MSN or Yahoo Messenger, forcing people to use AIM. And the examples don’t stop with just TW. Verizon could block any cell phone competitor’s website. Comcast could block VH1 or MTV’s websites and force me to go to E! Entertainment’s. The list of possibilities is endless thanks to the number of assets these giant corporations own. I simply picked on TW because not only are they the biggest, but this past April, their AOL asset blocked all emails that mentioned www.dearaol.com – an advocacy campaign opposing the company’s pay-to-send e-mail scheme.

Most supporters of Net Neutrality claim that if my ISP starting throttling websites, then I should switch to an ISP who doesn’t. That’s fine and dandy in theory, but in reality, how many ISP’s can I pick from? In 99% of the country, there is only one or two ISP to choose from and if I don’t like either of them, tough luck. In fact, website throttling is already happening in Canada, where the situation is actually much worse than here in the states. Most major Canadian ISP’s pinch off bittorrent traffic so that their users can’t download anything and one such ISP, Telus, blocked customers from visiting a Web site sympathetic to the Telecommunications Workers Union during a labor dispute. China isn’t the only country with banned websites people; it’s slowly but surely coming to our shores. Sites like Save The Internet are trying to spread the word, but I find that not enough people realize what’s actually at stake here for the longterm development of the Internet.

To put it to you another way, if the current bill in Congress passes and your ISP decides that I don’t pay enough money to them (which I can assure you I won’t), then they will throttle your bandwidth to Shyzer so that you can’t access it from your home. And I don’t know about y’all, but a world without Shyzer simply isn’t a world I want to live in.

Oh, and comments are on for this post. I wish I could have it automatically let y’all know whether they are on or not without having to click the comments button, but until I figure out how, this is how I’ll let y’all know.