Read all about it here:

and here:

Net Losses by James Surowiecki

Check out what the music group R.E.M. has to say:

Net Neutrality levels the internet playing field, insuring that small blogs and independent sites open just as easily as the sites of large media corporations. It allows every voice to be heard by thousands, even millions of people. This freedom is currently under threat because the nation’s largest phone and cable companies have pressured Congress to give them more control over which Web sites work for users based on which corporation pays them the most! If Congress caves, consumer choice will be limited, the free flow of information will be choked off, and the free and open Internet will become a private toll road managed by these large companies.

My memory could be playing tricks on me, but if I’m not mistaken this is an old battle that comes from the early days of the Internet. Seems to me that sometime in the early 1980s MCI was promoting the X.25 protocol along with a “Mail service”. IBM and AT&T also endorsed X.25 and had all sorts of negative things to say about the lack of structure and reliability of TCP/IP. Can’t find a reference today, but the articles are still somewhat vivid in my mind. Vint Cerf however, who just happened to help develop the TCP/IP protocol, was head of the Digital Information Services at MCI and decided to connect MCI’s Mail service to it, thus establishing the direct foundation for today’s Internet. MCI was actively working with the National Science Foundation by the late 1980s to help public organizations run TCP/IP communications over a “high speed” (for the day) network. Meanwhile AT&T and IBM were stewing in their juices, apparently mad as hell that the public was not required to purchase their expensive network hardware and proprietary services in order to communicate over the network. IBM was determined to develop other protocols but finally was forced to admit TCP/IP as the default by the mid 1990s. Now, behold AT&T and the other carriers saying they should be allowed to buy out the public interest and own the network. No surprise, really, but if they are successful then will we really have returned to 1984?

This reminds me of when General Motors, Mack Truck, oil and tire companies (known as National City Lines and led by E. Roy Fitzgerald) managed to buy out all the public transportation providers in Los Angeles in the 1940s. Soon no public transportation was left — the wealthy shareholders had bought a lock on the market. One the competition was gone, and federal anti-trust charges were avoided, Los Angeles residents were increasingly forced to rely on cars, trucks, oil and tires. Some say this group of companies made their money back in the first ten years after they purchased and disassembled the public system.