The End of the Internet As We Know It

As we progressives are well aware, THEY own the media which, in large part, includes access points to the Internet.

“They” being folks like Rupert Murdoch (Fox, NewsCorp), the Asper clan (once CanWest), the Peladeaus (Quebecor, Sun Media) and so on.

These stories, however, paint a very real portrait of things to come.

It’s bad enough that bloggers are posed to be considered the world’s biggest threat to economic and democratic stability since the Lenin years (aka ‘blogging terrorists’).

Now, we’re going to be shunted into the halls of oblivion, never to be seen or heard from as long as the douches at Microsoft and other corporations have their way.

Here are some sample stories to digest:

• http://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2010/09/jack-booted-thugs-and-copyright-enforcement
• http://www.zdnet.com/blog/howell/another-reason-for-acta-caution-us-rightsholders-as-government-pawns/389
• http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/12/world/europe/12raids.html?_r=4&pagewanted=all

This map shows us just how few companies and organizations hold their fingers on the ‘delete’ button, threatening any act of dissent.

Folks, we have to get very serious about what the Internet means to us.

Battles like Net Neutrality and access are just the tip of the iceberg and are actually meaningless and miss the point.

The real point is that we have to get ready to start building our own public internet or THEY will take it away from us.

If only we could get George Soros to start investing in real infrastructure.  That would be COOL!