According to a Washington Post article, there is apparently a bill in Congress that seeks to limit the ability of the FCC to stop ISPs from blocking or slowing access to certain websites.
Read that again. I had to. A number of firms such as Microsoft, IAC, Google, Yahoo and e-Bay (again, all according to the WP article) weighed in against the bill, as the bill would essentially make it very difficult to prevent an ISP from telling the individual what sites they can and cannot visit.
I’m totally in agreement that this bill (and its limitation of the FCC’s power to intervene), which would enable censorship by my local ISP (Comcast would love nothing more than to control more of my life than they already do) is a bad thing. Side note: apologies as I’m sure that sentence breaks several grammatical rules!
The internet is about freedom and accessability of information. That’s what makes it so great. If you take that away you start to get bias – the bias of whoever is deciding what gets through and what sites get blocked. We’ve already got plenty of that in the mass media (and I’m totally not one of those huge anti-mainstream media people), we don’t need any more. Keep the internet free and uncensored!