How much do we value a free internet?

When a city builds a road, once the digging is over and dust settles, everyone can travel on it — locals, business people, visitors, wanderers, even those up to no good

The Internet is a gigantic system of roads leading to billions of destinations. One of the most striking things about it is that most of those destinations were not built by governmental agencies or private businesses. The founders of Google and eBay were kids operating out of their dorm rooms. You see, they knew the language. Anyone who knows operating systems and code language can create his or her own website. Anyone can start an Internet mammoth the size of Facebook or Moveon.org. Young nobodies did.

Judging from all the new sites that pop up hourly, many people know the language. If you have something to say or a product to advertise, you can start your own website or blog. Or you can decide to put your expertise at the service of others and create a site people can use (Google and Craigslist started like this). The amount of free stuff boggles the mind. People are dying to share. It’s as if we had inside ourselves a tremendous urge to connect, communicate, give. Wikipedia, which many of us use routinely, is entirely written by regular folks who pop by and decide that an article should be written, or an existing one improved (I’ve done so myself). There is no remuneration and no glory: just a profound desire to share.

“Open source” software, like the blog publishing platform Wordpress or the web browser Firefox, make their source code, the technology that allows the running of their programs, available to the public, which “enables anyone to copy, modify and redistribute the source code without paying royalties or fees.” This means that there are literally thousands of people who, out of curiosity, intellectual challenge, or the simple desire to make things better for others, spend great amounts of time and energy improving products that are not theirs and for which they get no tangible rewards. It’s the nature of the virtual community. Curiosity, creativity, and generosity are traits that do not require excessive stimulation in humans. We are creatures who like to grow as individuals and communities.

Enter the gatekeeper. The only real entities that stand between us — the Internet users — and the goodies that lie on the other side of the screen are the folks that connect our little personal computers to the vast system of roadways that is the Internet. We all use service providers, through dial-up, DSL, broadband wireless, cable modem, and so on. The largest providers of access in the United States, AT&T, Verizon, Comcast and Time Warner Cable, connect us by charging us small fees that are often bundled up with our phone or cable fees.

These companies, though, could get a lot more out of their gatekeeping than the fees we pay them for their services. With hundreds of millions of people virtually connected at any given moment, the ability to control traffic translates into huge potential revenues. At this time, these large corporations are working out ways to increase their profits. In our profit-based society, this is not unnatural: it would however alter the very nature of the Internet. Here are some of the potential dangers of increased content control on the part of corporations: they could charge for access to content that is not produced by themselves; they could slow down access to content that is not produced by themselves; in a worst-case-scenario, they could even block some content.

Instead of the free Internet we have now, we would have one that is basically up for sale. This means that a large company (say Google) would be able to pay to speed access to its website, while a mom-and-pop competitor (a small local website), unable to afford the fees, would have to hope that customers would wait for its pages to load (remember the slow dial-up days, and how many times you moved on to another page due to impatience?).

This is a time for us to consider how much we value a free Internet, and to weigh the advantages of government regulations that enforce net neutrality.

By Giovanna Pompele (http://www.livingcitymagazine.com/)