Can someone, in a nutshell, wrap up the net neutrality issue?

[ourbluenation]

I would appreciate the cliff notes on this....thx in advance

[BurtWorm]

1. Joe Barton is sponsoring a law called the COPE act

to make it easier for ISPs (like AoL, Verizon and AT&T in particular) to control their customers' access to content, making sites that pay the ISP more accessible than sites that don't. Net neutrality is the principle that all sites should be equally accessible to anyone on the Internet.

Ed Markey is introducing a bill to make Network Neutrality the law, to preserve what has been until now the distinguishing characteristic of the internet as a medium, which is that sites that are created with little money have just as much chance to be viewed (in principle) as sites backed with lots of money, i.e., Joe Blow's blog enters the arena on equal footing with Time Warner.

Does that make sense?

[ourbluenation]

3. perfect sense...thx.

[flamin lib]

4. That's about as concise as I've seen. Good job! nt

[november3rd]

2. In a nutshell ...

We're scammed again.

[LiberalPartisan]

5. Got that right

The government created and built the internet.
The government hands over the internet to corporations.
Corporations benefit from government sponsored R&D (corp. welfare)
Corporations are run by republicans.
Republicans hate welfare.


Cognitive dissonance anyone?

[regnaD kciN]

6. In another nutshell...

...take away Net Neutrality, and it may well be "bye-bye, DU" (as well as DailyKos, MyDD, TalkingPointsMemo, and other progressive sites and blogs).

How would you like it if, in addition to controlling the rest of media, the powers that be were able to only allow content they liked to circulate on the Internet?

I was reading Markos's and Jerome's Crashing The Gate, and noticed how much of their hope for reinvigorating the Democratic Party and progressivism as a whole comes from the "netroots." Take that away, as the new bill is quite capable of doing, and where are we? Isolated and marginalized, unable to even reach each other, permanently.

:scared:

http://www.savetheinternet.com