David Isenberg sucked the Dr. Seuss houka quite hard to produce this poem on freedom to connect: It's a bit of beautiful doggerel from the man who gave us The Stupid Network. His latest cause is network neutrality, or the necessity of not allowing the folks who run the pipes to control what passes across them. It's all bits. We don't let the phone company tell us what conversations we may have on our wired and cellular phones. The battle is underway to, as Isenberg puts it,
The Bells want to split the Net in two,
Keep one part the same and give it to you.
A sliver of bandwidth that stays the same,
Even as Moore's Law continues to change the game,
Until "our Internet" is a rutted dirt road,
And their piece is a turnpike with heavy, heavy tolls.
The nycwireless community group has an excellent state on network neutrality's principles that I cited in passing in a recent New York Times article. You can read it all here, but the summary is that we should have the right to access any legal content using any software using any legal device buying content, access, or software from any provider.
Just an FYI.
Free Press is organizing its 220,000 activists in a letter writing campaign to pressure the CEOs of the most rapacious telephone and cable companies to keep their hands off our Internet. They're also sending letters to Congress to to ensure that they put enforceable network neutrality principles into our telecommunications laws and regulations.
More at www.freepress.net/deadend.