Nobody knew who Greyson Chance was a few weeks ago. But when a video of Chance singing a Lady Gaga song at a school talent show began circulating on the Internet, it became an instant sensation, with more than 25 million people getting to hear a voice that otherwise might never have traveled beyond Chance's hometown of Edmond, Okla.
That's the power and the beauty of the open Internet - anyone with a connection can freely share their talents and thoughts with the world, thanks to Net Neutrality, the principle that protects our freedom to express ourselves online.
Today, a handful of young "stars" who have made their careers on the Internet released this video -- in collaboration with SavetheInternet.com and the Harry Potter Alliance -- urging the Federal Communications Commission - and you - to take action to protect Net Neutrality and preserve the open Internet.
Watch the video:
With YouTube subscribers and Twitter followers numbering from the thousands to the millions, these Internet celebrities use the Internet to showcase their music, their comedy, their books, their blogs and vlogs, their projects for social justice, and even their TV show on the Discovery Channel.
The video includes John and Hank Green of the vlogbrothers; actor and blogger Wil Wheaton; Maureen Johnson, New York Times bestselling author for young adults and "Mashable's Most Interesting Twitter User to Follow" (@maureenjohnson); Shawn Ahmed from the UnculturedProject, one of the most viewed and most subscribed to YouTube channels on global poverty; vloggers and musicians Kristina Horner (italktosnakes) and Luke Conard (lukeconard); and Adam Savage from Mythbusters.
While the Internet allows people to create and share their work with the world without anyone's permission, phone and cable companies like Comcast and AT&T want to control the Internet - deciding which content loads fast, and which doesn't load at all. They could effectively silence artists and media makers everywhere, and you, too.
The group in the video joins nearly 1.8 million people who have told the FCC to safeguard Net Neutrality. Will you add your voice? The FCC has the power to protect the Internet and our free expression online, and to ensure that we all get to keep using the Internet the way we want to.
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Why else would you be concerned about a situation in which consumers have been able to rectify every attempt to disrupt end-to-end service? Every case in which there has been a problem related to net neutrality, consumers were not only able to reach a satisfactory solution with service providers, but in the most famous incident comcast and bittorrent came a solution 4 months before the FCC was able to respond by admonishing comcast for the behavior they had already ceased.
Ownership over the infrastructure has not translated into ability to control content distribution and the limited competition that exists today has been sufficient to reign in undesirable practices. Instead of focusing on the FCC, which has traditionally censored content and delayed the introduction of new technology, if you want the government to do something why don't you ask them to free up more wireless spectrum?
But what do we do about people and sites hogging bandwidth? How do you limit what is uploaded and downloaded? How do you make sure, for the lack of a better term, that there is enough to go around for everyone?
We already see some form of the net being taking over. All you need to do is google something and then try to wade through the sites that are selling something just to get to what you need. In that sense the net is already being taken over.
Cable companies should have already been able to connect anyone that wants to via a cable line. But it is no longer feasable for them to do that because of the cost of upgrading and setting up the system to deal with the amount of data flowing. The same thing goes for dsl.
So the real question is how do we maintain a balance so that providers can afford to provide and users are free to use the net to its fullest potential?
It's as simple as that. Instead of saying "oh, well, we only have so much capacity, so we have to start rationing it" we should say "we have only so much capacity, so let's increase that." That's what has been done in other countries, and we can do that here. And these companies already are making huge profits, so they can afford to do it, and they should do it from pure free market reasons because they would improve their market positions. Any time they say "we can't do it, we don't have enough money" is total bullshit.
Well, duh, given how they're *doing* it! WTF do they need two technicians to string fiber into a home, a wall-mounted modem that's bigger than my building's fusebox, and a "special" router that comes with 10/100 Ethernet jacks(!) and WEP(!!!) encryption? I completely shut off the wireless features of that router and use it as a bridging point to my AirPort Extreme....
That's why we need Net Neutrality regulations - Because Captialism Failed. What we have instead is an electronic oligarchy with those handful of fatcat corporations dragging their heels and preferring to legislate and litigate, rather than innovate. Remember how Big Telco fought and killed the notion of "Free Municipal WiFi" in most towns and cities? And don't tell me you think they'll let *Google* proceed with their Gigabit Internet rollout without trying the same tactics....
What right does the government have to insist that companies upgrade to fiber optic so that everyone can get high speed?
Once the market is open enough with people connected then we all know we'll see more bandwidth hogged by television and other services that haven't been dreamed of yet.
Lets face it, there is no easy answer to this problem. The sides are cleanly divided and there is no easy solution. It may just take something like googles gigabit thing to nudge things along.