REM:

R.E.M has joined a growing coalition of artists and musicians who have signed the Artists and Musicians for Internet Freedom petition. The petition is being circulated in response to a large telecommunications bill Congress will soon vote on, one part of which would gut Net Neutrality, the long held principle that all online speech is equally accessible to Internet users, regardless of its source. In practice, 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 (Click here to read an article by Robert Reich in American Prospect for background). 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.

Please take a minute to watch this enlightening video which clearly explains the Net Neutrality issue.

Kristian Knutsen:

read with great interest the biggest issue burning up the internets today, a USA Today article about the National Security Agency (NSA) collecting a database of phone records with the assistance of AT&T, Verizon and Bell South. “For the customers of these companies,” USA Today reports, “it means that the government has detailed records of calls they made — across town or across the country — to family members, co-workers, business contacts and others.”

Having been an AT&T Wisconsin customer since it was named SBC, I take this news seriously and immediately thought of two questions I’d like my phone company to answer. Were records of my calls made via AT&T included in data provided to the NSA? If so, did this violate the company’s privacy obligations as a service provider?

More on AT&T.

Tim Berners Lee (Father of the web):

Net Neutrality is an international issue. In some countries it is addressed better than others. (In France, for example, I understand that the layers are separated, and my colleague in Paris attributes getting 24Mb/s net, a phone with free international dialing and digital TV for 30euros/month to the resulting competition.) In the US, there have been threats to the concept, and a wide discussion about what to do. That is why, though I have written and spoken on this many times, I blog about it now.

Twenty-seven years ago, the inventors of the Internet[1] designed an architecture[2] which was simple and general. Any computer could send a packet to any other computer. The network did not look inside packets. It is the cleanness of that design, and the strict independence of the layers, which allowed the Internet to grow and be useful. It allowed the hardware and transmission technology supporting the Internet to evolve through a thousandfold increase in speed, yet still run the same applications. It allowed new Internet applications to be introduced and to evolve independently.