Digiwonder?

Last Thursday, while millions of Americans did their daily web thang– surfing, streaming, gaming, dating, shopping, their representatives on the Hill were voting on the "Communications Opportunity, Promotion, and Enhancement" Act– a wonky name for something the tech community calls "Network (or just Net) Neutrality".

In my own words, Net Neutrality means Internet Users– students, moms, dads, business people, grandparents, activists– can get any information they like off the Web or go to any site they wish, without having to pay extra to access "premium content."

For companies like Amazon, Google, and Ebay, for individual tech rock stars who are pushing e-innovation further, for activists who've found the web to be a powerful organizing tool and for others, Thursday didn't go so well.

C|Net reported on Friday:

The U.S. House of Representatives definitively rejected the concept of Net neutrality on Thursday, dealing a bitter blow to Internet companies like Amazon.com, eBay and Google that had engaged in a last-minute lobbying campaign to support it.

By a 269-152 vote that fell largely along party lines, the House Republican leadership mustered enough votes to reject a Democrat-backed amendment that would have enshrined stiff Net neutrality regulations into federal law and prevented broadband providers from treating some Internet sites differently from others.

Of the 421 House members who participated in the vote that took place around 6:30 p.m. PT, the vast majority of Net neutrality supporters were Democrats. Republicans represented most of the opposition.

So what does this vote mean? What is it reflecting and what will its legacy be? Two bloggers write:

TDavid: …all internet traffic does not have to be treated as equal. Get ready for internet fast lanes.

Scott Carp:

Other than love, those who pay more almost always get something better (or at the very least something that can be perceived as better).

It’s deeply naive to expect that the web would turn out to be any different.

Naive. Yeah, maybe. But in my opinion, worries that many folks have over this vote are valid– after the Sinclair/Kerry/Swiftboat episode in the last election, Enron's implosion, and other headlines that lead us regular folk to distrust big business, is it any wonder we want to keep the Net free from its tentacles?

While the Ebays, Googles, and Amazons of the world banded together on this issue out of concern for their own business models, I think many of us are mourning what's starting to look like loss of access to a modern frontier land.

Paying to access my favorite vlog or to sell some old junk or voice my fringe opinion on something. Feels kinda like strip malls being propped up on old family farmland.

Maybe singer/songwriter James McMurtry sums this up the best in his ballad No More Buffalo:

no more buffalo
blue skies or open road
no more rodeo no more noise
take this Cadillac
park it out in back
mama's calling
put away the toys

–Suz