Senator John McCain is coming up with a bill called the Internet Freedom Act. It is something that I vehemently oppose. This is one bill that could affect us right away. The Internet should not be the playground of the corporations, it should be the network of knowledge!

The Internet Freedom Act is actually a block measure intended for the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) who are trying to formulate net neutrality guidelines. What is net neutrality? What it means is that there would be regulations in Internet Service Providers to allow, slow down or outright ban sites for their customers. In simple terms, it means that you can surf to any site that you like if you pay your Internet bills and your ISPs cannot slow down your service.

E.g. Lets say Verizon suddenly hates Slashing Tongue and have become our bitter rivals (so untrue, would never happen). Based on that grudge, they can ban our site outright and Verizon customers would not be able to come to our site. Another thing they could do is to slow down access to our site, so even though you have a 100 Mbs broadband, you would be only surfing 10kbs when visiting our site but would be able to surf up to 100Mbs on other “Verizon-friendly” sites.. With net neutrality, Verizon would be forced to allow her customers to visit our site at 100Mbs. It is as simple as that!

Think about this. What would happen if a mega company like Google, or Microsoft buys over ISPs, and ban all from visiting non Yahoo or make the Internet inaccessible to Linux users? What if AOL Time Warner bans all news but CNN online? Would it be so free market then?

The free market is the free market. If the FCC is going to socialize all the ISPs under state control and make it assets of the state, then we would have a problem. That is not making the market free. Just in the same manner, it is also not part of the free market if the ISPs can slow down our Internet connection for visiting sites that they do not like. That is simple too much!

This is yet another thing that should be a no brainer but politics can screw anything up. Anybody that has Internet at home or in the office can understand what this bill is about. Can you imagine how frustrating it would surfing for knowledge when many sites are banned?. What if political agendas take over ISPs and we can only get liberal/conservative views online? What do you think the outcome of that would be? We already have that in television stations like FOX and MSNBC.

Lastly, I would say that my respect for Senator McCain is still there. Even though he has come up in negative light in the last two articles, I still think he would have been a better President than Senator Hillary Clinton should she have won the nomination. I think is stance on the Rape bill was outright disgraceful, and he is very wrong on this bill, but I think that his heart is at the right place.

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