Res Ipsa Loquitur (phrase)- Latin, Legalese: "The Thing Speaks For Itself." . . . DREAM JOURNAL

As a former Network Engineer and a current law student, this strikes me as one of the single most important issues our society might be facing:

Currently, we enjoy the right to surf to where we want, and dialogue about whatever we want. To do so, we need only pay our monthly connection fee. That could be changing soon, at the behest of corporations like Cisco and Verizon.

Congress, ever-attentive to the wishes of big business, wants to make it so telecom companies can set up a tiered charging system and *discriminate against browsing based on content*. You'd be facing a toll-booth situation, basically: accessing a commercial site might be included in your flat browsing rate, but a non-commercial site --Mindsay springs to mind-- would cost more to access. There is even a possibility of charging you *per post*. On the bright side, Verizon, AOL, and Cisco can finally make some real money off this whole Internet thing. Open, truly-democratic communication is a small price to pay for that, surely? I mean, take a look at the TV and radio stations: they're a fair, inclusive forum for candid dialogue, right?  They give each and every citizen a viable means of sharing their views, don't they?

...Ahem...

In any case, this issue should be making everyone who values free speech *very* nervous.

Congress and the corporations do not want any "net neutrality" language in their bills. They don't want the Internet to be a "common carrier" like the old railways, open to all, and they're currently taking the legal steps to make their vision America's reality.

So let's do the American thing, and fight the heck back. This time it really *is* for freedom and democracy.

*Check out http://www.democraticmedia.org/issues/netneutrality.html for more information... while you still can without paying an additional "content access" charge.