Berners-Lee wants Net neutrality
p2p news / p2pnet: The World Wide Web will no longer be an “open information space” if broadband providers abandon Net neutrality, says WWW inventor Sir Tim Berners-Lee.
In an interview with Canada’s Toronto Star, he says he’s, ” ‘very concerned’ about talk from major North America phone and cable giants about their desire to collect so-called Web tolls from content suppliers and e-commerce companies that want assured access to broadband subscribers,” going on:
“It stops being the Net if a supplier of downloaded video pays to connect to a particular set of consumers who are connected to a particular cable company. It would no longer be an open information space.
“The whole point of the Web is when you arrive it’s more or less the same for everybody. That integrity is really essential. … I’m very concerned.”
Supporters of Net neutrality includeGoogle, Microsoft and Amazon who argue, “broadband providers are gatekeepers of the Internet that shouldn’t be permitted to favour one content provider or application over another,” says the Toronto Star.” They collectively resist the idea of a tiered Internet – where how much one pays determines the level of access to an online consumer – arguing it would stymie online innovation.”
Arguing against them are the likes of AT&T and Comcast who, “say they need to be compensated for expensive upgrades to their networks, which are being overwhelmed with bandwidth-hungry services and applications, such as online video ,”says the story.
Berners-Lee also foresaw a “horror scenario” with computers so cheap, “they’re given away as promotional items, complete with their own operating system, browser and built-in Internet service – all biased towards specific products and businesses”.
Meanwhile, “A generation of innovators – like Tim Berners-Lee with the World Wide Web, Yair Goldfinger with instant messaging, David Filo and Jerry Yang with Yahoo, Jeff Bezos with Amazon, and Larry Page and Sergey Brin with Google – were able to offer new applications and services around the world … without paying exorbitant carrier rents to ensure that their services were seen online,” the Toronto Star has fficial Google ‘neutrality evangelist’ Vint Cerf declaring.
“We all have benefited enormously from their inventions.”
‘Do No Evil’ Google is reportedly developing its own in-house internet, with all that implies, and also plans to be able to access literally everything on users’ computers by, in effect, becoming their virtual hard-drives. It also openly aids China with its Net censorship actions.
Yahoo is implicated in the arrest of two Chinese cyber-dissidents, who were later jailed.
By stark contrast, Berners-Lee, “never patented or collected a penny from his invention, preferring instead to freely distribute the software that eventually spawned a vast network of millions of websites connected by hypertext links,” says the Toronto Star, adding:
“In doing so, he laid a foundation that changed the economy and made billionaires out of those who followed.
Also See:
Toronto Star – Battle for the Web, March 28, 2006
in-house internet – Google wants its very own Net,February 3, 2006
access literally everything – Google as your PC, March 7, 2006
