Dawnsinger

There is a specter hanging over Web 2.0 - the presence, or the decay, of net neutrality.  Proponents of laws guaranteeing net neutrality fear that the current free-speech, affordable access to the entire internet will be lost as the big communications companies that own the bandwidth pipelines begin to filter out business rivals' sites, crack down on non-politically-correct sites, and create premium access pricing creating a digital divide.  The self-sustaining engine of the internet, which has so changed our world, is a juicy target for multinational corporations.  Imagine an internet in which your service provider, owned by the same company that owns Yahoo, refuses to allow you to search on Google. 

The question came up at the recent Media Giraffe conference, as I sat on a panel with two wonderful moms - Cooper Monroe and Emily McKhann - who launched an enormously successful  grass-roots internet relief effort for Hurricane Katrina victims.  We've got a little menage-a-mutual-admiration thing going .  The subject of the panel was the way the internet was used - both by NOLA.com users and loving strangers - to bring rescue, relief, reuiniting and rebuilding to the storm-hammered area.

The question was raised during this session (and you can watch the entire thing here if you'd like): What would happen to grass-roots efforts like those of  Cooper and Emily in a world without net neutrality?  Frankly I didn't want to think about that scenario, and stuttered through a  feeble answer.  But the fact is that in a world without net-neutrality, the ability of citizens to connect with other citizens in an unfettered manner on the web would be destroyed.  Remember when "online" meant that you were a dialup member of America Online, the proprietary uber-electronic bulletin board?  It seemed like a whole world then, but in fact, you could only communicate with other AOL members, inside the walls of AOL.  And for a long while, AOL held out against the internet, trying to keep its customers hostage inside its own sphere of content partners, chatrooms and bulletin boards.  It was a great service, don't get me wrong, and I was a charter member.  But the users outgrew it.  Net neutrality is about making sure we don't get locked into a closed environment again . . . into an AOL/Yahoo-only world. 

The "We are the Web" site has a hilarious video trying to sell this point with humor.  Dawnsinger says "two thumbs up"! 

Go ahead, watch it now! (about a minute of download)