{"id":4,"date":"2008-01-28T21:58:36","date_gmt":"2008-01-29T04:58:36","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/?p=4"},"modified":"2008-01-28T23:35:27","modified_gmt":"2008-01-29T06:35:27","slug":"net-neutrality","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/?p=4","title":{"rendered":"Net Neutrality"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>This\u00a0<em>Net Neutrality<\/em>\u00a0thing is a big deal. It&#8217;s a lovely term and sounds all fuzzy and warm, but what it&#8217;s about is controlling the Internet.<\/p>\n<p>Right now, the Internet is pretty open and free. That&#8217;s how it was designed. An agency more-or-less in charge of the Internet is the\u00a0<em>Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers<\/em>, ICANN. But, like the name says, they only regulate Internet names and numbers: domains and IP addresses, that sort of thing. Net Neutrality is about more.<\/p>\n<p>Big corporations, especially big media, Web giants like Yahoo and Google, and communications companies, are moving to set up a different type of Internet. They want to use the power of Government to set up a service that they can control and regulate. They fear the very nature of the Internet: its freedom. Well, specifically, the\u00a0<em>free<\/em>\u00a0part of freedom.As the speed of Internet access increases (<em>bandwidth<\/em>), the ability for regular folks to download free books, songs, and videos increases. According to\u00a0<em>New York Times\u00a0<\/em>columnist David Pogue, it&#8217;s becoming more acceptable \u2014 especially for younger folks \u2014to steal copyrighted material on-line. The next generation may not even harbor a moral concept of intellectual property rights.<\/p>\n<p>For a writer like myself, someone who has no respect for my work and steals my stuff by downloading a &#8220;free&#8221; e-book is a nuisance. (And I had such a person come forth in my former on-line forums.) But imagine the impact to a big company like Time-Warner. They control a lot of the Internet&#8217;s fat pipes. Will they allow file sharing to run along unabated on the Internet while they stand to lose\u00a0<em>billions<\/em>\u00a0of dollars?<\/p>\n<p><em>That<\/em>, my friends, is what Net Neutrality is all about.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Relevant Links Dept.<\/strong>\u00a0Here are the links for\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/www.icann.org\/\" target=\"news\">ICANN<\/a>,\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/pogue.blogs.nytimes.com\/2007\/12\/20\/the-generational-divide-in-copyright-morality\/\" target=\"news\">David Pogue&#8217;s column on file sharing<\/a>, and a cool link to\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/www.handsoff.org\/blog\/\" target=\"news\">Hands Off the Internet<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p><strong>This Very Dept.<\/strong>\u00a0I&#8217;m working on a way for you to add comments to my stories. It&#8217;s going to take some doing, as I&#8217;m going to have to modify existing software to get just what I want. So be patient!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>This\u00a0Net Neutrality\u00a0thing is a big deal. It&#8217;s a lovely term and sounds all fuzzy and warm, but what it&#8217;s about is controlling the Internet. Right now, the Internet is pretty open and free. That&#8217;s how it was designed. An agency more-or-less in charge of the Internet is the\u00a0Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, ICANN. [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-main"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}