Howard Rheingold and Tim Berners Lee on net neutrality

July 15th, 2006

I came across a verbatum post that TBL made on net neutrality on Howard Rheingold’s blog

Here is a quote I thought to be very powerful

Control of information is hugely powerful. In the US, the threat is that companies control what I can access for commercial reasons. (In China, control is by the government for political reasons.) There is a very strong short-term incentive for a company to grab control of TV distribution over the Internet even though it is against the long-term interests of the industry.
Yes, regulation to keep the Internet open is regulation. And mostly, the Internet thrives on lack of regulation. But some basic values have to be preserved. For example, the market system depends on the rule that you can’t photocopy money. Democracy depends on freedom of speech. Freedom of connection, with any application, to any party, is the fundamental social basis of the Internet, and, now, the society based on it.

But its not just the US which is now facing these problems as we posted a few days ago in telephone age thinking in an internet age

There is no doubt the dinosaurs of big business are waking up to the fact that their world has changed

Initially published on DIG and Via Howard Rheingold

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