In today’s Net Neutrality news, World Wide Web inventor Tim Berners-Lee evangelizes about how the Internet should be treated. Meanwhile, the Christian Coalition has called for its prayer partners to focus their collective energy on the Senate Commerce Committee vote.
The Christian Coalition has found unlikely allies in the Net Neutrality debate, signing up with left-wing political organization MoveOn.org, established just after the Bill Clinton’s snafu/tryst with Monica Lewinsky. The group advised the country “move on” to more pressing issues.
The Coalition has moved on to a more pressing issue by sending out notice to its members urging them to call senators sitting on the committee as they consider the Snowe/Dorgan net Neutrality Bill set for a vote next week. The email also urged its members to be praying at 1:00 PM on Friday about Tuesday’s vote.
From the email:
If this bill does not pass, consumers will have to pay an additional fee to have a website. The cable and telephone companies will be dividing the Internet into a “fast track” and a “slow track”. Our grassroots, who cannot afford the additional fees, will have to be on the slow track, which will mean that many of our websites will be passed by because the general public will not have the patience to go on the “slow track”.
Senators in the Commerce Committee include John McCain, Trent Lott, George Allen, Kay Bailey Hutchinson, and Gordon Smith.
The spiritual group finds good company with intellectuals as Tim Berners-Lee blogged about his hopes that Net Neutrality will receive protections from the legislature.
“When I invented the Web, I didn’t have to ask anyone’s permission. Now, hundreds of millions of people are using it freely. I am worried that that is going end in the USA,” wrote Berners-Lee. He then offered up a definition of Net Neutrality, which supporters have been struggling to produce for critics who struggle with abstraction.
If I pay to connect to the Net with a certain quality of service, and you pay to connect with that or greater quality of service, then we can communicate at that level.
Berners-Lee said it was up to ISPs to offer the interoperability to allow that functionality and dismissed assertions that Net Neutrality proponents wanted the Internet “for free.”
“There have been suggestions that we don’t need legislation because we haven’t had it. These are nonsense, because in fact we have had net neutrality in the past — it is only recently that real explicit threats have occurred,” he said.
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