Net Neutrality : The internet at stake?
Can internet be controlled ?
Is the explosion of democratic speech a threat to established power ? Can institutions re-lock the power of internet ?
Are big telecom companies trying to take control of how we use the internet?
Is the internet going to become a private toll road owned by big telcos?
If a double standard is established for some big companies who pay the telecom operators for a privileged access to their users, we are in trouble. That would mean slow access to websites that they don’t want us to see and high speed to the mainstream media.
It seems that’s what’s going to happen if nobody reacts. Check out this video.
However, the internet is not just about access. We can access the internet with any device anywhere nowadays.
Internet is the “internetworking of networks”. It cannot be controlled because its very nature is decentralized. Every content can be accessed through many different routes and can be replicated almost infinitely. Just think of how sites like youtube find it hard to manage what is uploaded by users. Some countries manage to restrict access to content. For how long?
60% of internet content is produced by users. That’s huge.
For me, the reality of the threat is elsewhere : the true commodity of the internet is content, and it is produced by us. The true currency of the internet is traffic, and that’s where we need sites like Google, Youtube and Digg. What if these sites where to be controlled by governments?
Yes, the risk is to see the internet turn into a huge on demand TV, where nobody searches anymore for information, but where we wait patiently for our daily dose of “webtertainment”.
