Monday, May 01, 2006

Save The Internet (Part II)

250,000 people have signed the petition in a week, but we still need more people to join the fight to keep the internet free. Please sign the petition.

The vote is next week, so please don't just stop at signing the petition yourself. Encourage your family, friends and co-workers to go to the link above and sign. This petition will be delivered to Congress, and everyone who signs will be kept informed of the next steps that are taken to keep the pressure on Congress before next week's House vote.

Snopes.com, which monitors various causes that circulate on the Internet, explained:

"Simply put, network neutrality means that no web site's traffic has precedence over any other's...Whether a user searches for recipes using Google, reads an article on snopes.com, or looks at a friend's MySpace profile, all of that data is treated equally and delivered from the originating web site to the user's web browser with the same priority. In recent months, however, some of the telephone and cable companies that control the telecommunications networks over which Internet data flows have floated the idea of creating the electronic equivalent of a paid carpool lane."

If companies like AT&T have their way, Web sites ranging from Google to eBay to MoveOn either pay protection money to get into the "fast lane" or risk opening slowly on your computer. We can't let the Internet — this incredible medium which has been such a revolutionary force for democratic participation, economic innovation, and free speech — become captive to large corporations.

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