Save Our Internet

A bill currently winding its way through the labyrinth of Congress seeks to end the Internet as we know it. The COPE Act (the Communications Opportunity, Promotion and Enhancement Act of 2006 - HR 5252) is a major update of the country's telecommunications laws. While parts of the bill should benefit consumers, we (everyone who uses the Internet) should do all we can between now and the passage of the final bill to make sure that it contains provisions to protect net neutrality.

Common Cause defines "net neutrality" as "the principle that you should be able to access whatever web content or services you choose, without any interference from your Internet service provider." It's what makes the Internet the open, democratic medium it is today. It means that I can write what I want in this blog and, if you wish to read what I've written, you can without restriction. It means that you can access The Blue Voice as readily as you can access eBay, Yahoo!, or any other site.

The big telecoms, the phone and cable companies, are lobbying hard to keep net neutrality provisions out of the COPE Act. Not content with making money by the barrel, they want it by the dump truck. They want to take over the Internet and put up virtual tollbooths that restrict how fast, if at all, sites load. Pay their protection fee or their users may not be able access your website. Two companies, Verizon and Comcast, have already announced plans for a two-tiered Internet - a "fast lane" for some websites and service (for a fee, of course) and a "slow lane" for everyone else.

The telecoms have established an "Astroturf" organization and are running misleading advertisements that may have appeared on some of your favorite websites. The ads say, "Don't Regulate The Internet! See The Truth About Net Neutrality. Don't let the Government Regulate the Internet. Make up your own mind. It's about the future of the Internet!" The ads take you to Hands Off the Internet. It appears to be a grassroots organization that seeks to set the record straight about net neutrality and oppose government regulation of the Internet. Don't be confused. Before you start buying into their arguments, scroll down to the bottom of their homepage and check out their members. Looks like quite a few big telecoms to me.

Bizarrely, those ads were running on some of the biggest pro-Internet democracy blogs and websites until Buzzflash began causing such a ruckus about it. Some dropped the ads, some still run them. Even more bizarrely, The Nation refused to quit running the wildly misleading ads, but did post an entry in their Act Now blog urging readers "Don't Click on This Ad." Hmmm.

Your first course of action should be to go to Save the Internet.com and sign their petition. They'll also send your comments to your elected representatives. This week their Big Lie of the Week page cuts through the smokescreen of Hands Off the Internet's deceptive video. There are many, many other places to go for information on this issue. Here's a few for you to check out: Net Freedom Now has one of those dandy fill-in-the-blanks forms you can use to tell the telecom CEOs to drop dead. Common Cause has scads of information. MoveOn has a dandy fill-in-the-blank form for reiterating the net neutrality message to your representative.

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