Net for all

We must stay the course on Net Neutrality. The following news brief is the latest.

Then there is “net neutrality,” the idea that internet access providers be required to treat all bits on their network equally. Google and most of the internet industry favours this, at least for now, lest they be extorted into paying extra money to internet service providers (i.e. phone and cable companies) to assure unimpeded access to their services. Net neutrality isn’t going anywhere for the moment in DC (guess who’s against is?) but the issue is by no means dead.

In fact, a group of private individuals organised recently by members of a long-running and influential email list called IP is setting itself up as a the Network Neutrality Squad. The goal is monitor “anticompetitive, discriminatory, or other restrictive actions by internet service providers…” There are already plenty of examples of behaviour that could fall into these categories, including a recent move by Verizon to re-route any miss-typed internet addresses to its own search page.