"This is serious":
Tim Berners-Lee blogs on net neutrality here and here
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.
Let's see whether the United States is capable as acting according to its important values, or whether it is, as so many people are saying, run by the misguided short-term interested of large corporations.
I hope that Congress can protect net neutrality, so I can continue to innovate in the internet space. I want to see the explosion of innovations happening out there on the Web, so diverse and so exciting, continue unabated.
An authoritative opinion, I'd say.
In his column this week, Bob Cringely gets a little over my head in analyzing how a tiered system would affect internet network traffic, but the bottom line is that he says it won't work out the way the ISPs think.
