the young person's guide to net neutrality

a public service brought to you by henry rollins of the independent film channel's the henry rollins show:

freedom is under attack — under attack by hysterical and well-funded christian psychotics. intellectually undernourished leaders who lie and manipulate information. overfed baby huey coward bitch motherfuckers like karl rove and their suck-up weakling apologists like sean hannity. to question authority is to be somehow unpatriotic, un-american and in league with terrorists worldwide? fuck you! with even election results becoming more and more questionable, the constitution a thing to be manipulated, ignored and frivolously amended, even democracy itself seems to be on the run. so where's the one place you can go and tell your version of the truth, rail against liars, fakes and propagandists with your own unique propaganda, sign your name to it and let the whole world know how you feel? that's right. the internet. perhaps responsible for the most substantial shifts in culture in the last several decades. there's so much freedom and potential on the worldwide web that one is barely able to get one's head around it. who in their right mind would dare to regulate or charge websites to be on the internet? who would dare to rain on a parade so fantastic that many of us would not know what to do without our high-speed connection and our lives on the internet? actually, some very powerful forces. telco companies want to make you pay for your site to be carried on the internet. if you can't afford to pay, guess what? that's right, you're cyber-history, pal! the bush administration wants major internet and phone companies to keep track of where their customers surf, all in the name of the "war on terror", don't you know. how much do you wanna bet they want the internet regulated, contained and thrown into a cell at guantanamo bay? for a country that talks so much about freedom being on the march, seems to me that some people want anything but! if they come for your freedom, you must not only resist, you must strike back with a vengeance that will stun them. on this front, if your anger and outrage are not at the forefront, then you're already dead! dead to me, anyway. fuck these cowards! these traitors! these ENEMIES of democracy! thanks for watching the show this season. never relent.

note: in an otherwise solid introduction to the developing struggle over net neutrality, henry mistakely mischaracterizes the telcos' plan as wanting to burden the end user with excess access fees.

what the telcos really want is to get their fees directly from the access providers, who in response would create segregated tiers of access, rewarding the affluent with state-of-the-art high speed high bandwidth content while relegating the rest of the population to the equivalent of the internet ghetto.

today msnbc.com competes for your attention on the same playing field as glad-you-asked.blogspot.com, but the telcos want to apply the corporate television model to the internet, which rewards institutional media outlets with disproportionate impact, benefits and profits relative to their resource-starved public-access brethen.