SoonerBlue

Sen. John McCain, the guy who said his wife has to help him send an email, is now going to write legislation regarding the Internet.

Yes, the guy who regularly stuffs his pockets with telecom lobbyist bucks, is introducing a bill that would "prohibit the FCC from governing communications and allowing net neutrality." Under his bill the FCC "shall not propose, promulgate, or issue any regulations regarding the Internet or IP-enabled services."

He wants to allow the telecoms to become the gatekeepers of our Internet content.

Well, pcworld.com ain't too happy about it: "[M]cCain's bill, the Internet Freedom Act, seeks to do the opposite of what its name implies by ensuring that broadband and wireless providers can discriminate and throttle certain traffic while giving preferential treatment to other traffic. Basically, those in power or those who pay more will have better access. Apparently we have different definitions of ‘freedom'. [...]"

Some of this geek stuff makes my head hurt, but I had to do some research so I could better understand. First of all, what is net neutrality?

From what I can understand, net neutrality gives all servers, ISPs and transmission lines the right to send and receive information equally. It levels the playing field -- like a small online bookstore can still receive as many visitors as the more popular Amazon or Barnes&Noble.

Net neutrality stops individual ISPs, search engines and big online services like Yahoo, AOL or Google from restricting or filtering our access to rival companies. Like, AOL can't prevent one of its subscribers from getting email from Hotmail accounts.

So, basically, net neutrality would prevent the bigger commercial websites from completely dominating the marketplace. Which is why those agin it are the cable television companies, major ISPs and large commercial websites.

I know that most people hate the government's (FCC) nose in anything...but I think I'd rather have them holding Internet companies accountable, than have giant global media conglomerates running roughshod over us.

The same global corporations who pay no taxes due to loopholes and off shore offices...who hand over American jobs to third world countries...then stash all their windfall profits in the Cayman Islands and Switzerland.....

Is it wise to give these giant global corps more power to dictate America's future?

How has that worked out so far for us?