Everyone is posting about this, but I need to do so as well. There’s an excellent piece in the Washington Post from Lawerence Lessig about the importance of net neutrality.
I’ve worked at Red Hat for a long time, so I still remember when a new Red Hat release was an Internet Event. Routers would melt, the entire Internet would be slow because we just made a release. I’m told for a while we were the largest bandwith user on the east coast.
But imagine a world where that wouldn’t have been posible. That a small upstart company would have to pay whatever the cable companies required in order to have access to their networks. Not your networks. Not the networks you depend on to delivery whatever people can dream up. There’s been an explosion of technology over the last 10 years or so which is the direct result of anyone being able to participate on equal ground.
Back to my example. What if Comcast had a relationship with Microsoft? What if Microsoft said “you know, we don’t like these guys, so why don’t we pay Comcast to cut them off or make them slow?” It might sound like I’m just using a scare tactic but if I were Microsoft and Comcast it’s a deal I would make. As companies they will leverage everything they have, and this kind of raw deal is the lever. If you stand for freedom and innovation there’s no way you can allow this to go forward.
