I'm starting to be pretty worried about the government destroying what is terms "net neutrality," that is, the Internet performs about equally for everybody. Disregarding the speed of the web hosting services and servers themselves, traffic from microsoft.com gets to you no faster or slower than traffic from bobsskeetshootingblog.com.

But a couple of bills are floating around Congress that would allow the telcos, AT&T and so forth, to discriminate traffic: your traffic runs slow, but the more money you pay, the higher priority your traffic becomes. What's astonishing is that the media doesn't seem to understand that this is really what it all boils down to -- I've read a lot of articles that swallow the telco rhetoric ("this will allow streaming video to reach the end users faster!!") hook, line, and sinker.

What it really amounts to is telcos getting richer and small- and mid-sized sites finding it that much more difficult to compete with the big corporations. Equality on the Internet is what made it as big and as popular as it is today.

I'm not usually a doom-and-gloom kind of guy, but this one has me worried. I'm interested in talking more about this here and getting some other perspectives. I'm also interested in urging you to contact your representatives and let our support for net neutrality be heard. It really seems like that's the only way to preserve it. Fortunately, there are a number of sites out there, sites from varying political stances, that make this easy for you.

This is probably the best one I've found:

http://www.savetheinternet.com/

Click on the map on the right to see where your representative stands. The orange box in the upper right takes you to a form where you can write a quick letter, which will get forwarded to whoever your representatives/senators are.

Some other links on the subject:

http://yro.slashdot.org/yro/06/04/27/2350258.shtml
http://www.techtree.com/techtree/jsp/article.jsp?article_id=72868&cat_id=643
http://news.com.com/Net+Neutrality+missing+from+telecom+bill/2100-1028_3-6067153.html
http://www.infotoday.com/newsbreaks/nb060501-1.shtm