Independent News and Politics

Over the last few years, there’s been a lot of talk about net nuetrality, and in the last few days some of this nebulous debate has become a priority for a few people in Congress.

The thing is, the internet already operates more or less on the principles of traffic nuetrality.  While a few ISPs have been caught throttling traffic and giving some feeds a minor priority over another, the courts have been mixed in their response and nothing particularly egregious has come up to merit harsh retaliation.

That’s not good enough for the ISPs.  Many people from magazine publishers to video producers would like to see the internet turned into a more controlled medium.  Instead of an open peer-to-peer network, they’re dreaming of a one-way mass communication machine that operates like the owners of the infrastructure want it to.  Think radio or TV, where choices are tightly controlled.

Think about all the lost opportunity for the rest of us who don’t happen to own a municipally-granted monopoly on cable lines.

McCain is behind the new push to protect ISPs from accusations of bias, and unsurprisingly he’s one of the biggest recipients of money from the very companies who would benefit from being able to control and fine-tune your internet experience as they see fit.

Defeating this obviously corrupt proposal from the member of a minority party won’t be too difficult.  Despite it, the FTC is digging in on an attempt to regulate online marketing, but their regulations and guidelines don’t demonstrate that they’ve really pondered the full chilling effects on the industry.  As non-American websites are unaffected, we’re moving into a time when American sites are cluttered with disclaimers while ones originating elsewhere will look ‘more legit’ because they don’t come with warning labels.

Indypundit.com doesn’t advertise (yet) so I don’t have to worry about any restrictions on my electronic speech (yet…)