Al Franken, the junior senator from Minnesota, wants you to help him save Net Neutrality. Given that Google may or may not be actively plotting to destroy Net Neutrality, it may be worth your time to sign the petition.
What will signing the petition do? Presumably very little. It’s more of a show of support for the idea of Net Neutrality. We’ll see if I start getting e-mails from Sen. Franken’s office.
You know what would really be worth the time? Writing a letter to your congressman. That is, sitting down with a pen and a piece of paper and making a coherent argument in favor (or against—do what you want, I see) of Net Neutrality. Your congressman, who’s more tuned into your concerns than your senator, who has an entire state’s worth of people to pay attention to, would see the actual letter sitting on his desk and be like, “Whoa, what do we have here?”
Whereas if you send an e-mail it’ll beep-boop on his BlackBerry, he’ll see “Save Net Neutrality” in the subject line, and merely mark as read.
Same thing with signing a petition. It’s a nice show of support, but don’t expect any real action because of it.
Meanwhile, it seems the FCC is becoming increasingly frustrated dealing with the various ISPs, trying to get them to play along with Net Neutrality.
I have zero faith that, in just a few years’ time, we will be looking at a multi-tiered Internet.
News Corp. will hand over giant sacks of money to your ISP, ensuring that you can load The Sun’s Web site faster than you can load The Guardian’s. Or that NBC Universal will cut a deal with your ISP to re-direct all your search traffic through its servers. “Looking for friends? Watch old clips on Friends right now on Hulu Plus.”
And that’s when we should all quit the Internet because, really, what’s the point?