Today scores of big companies are taking symbolic action to defend the essential principles of an open Internet, and I support them. That’s why, on your first visit here today, you’ll see the “spinning ball of death” up on the right. For more information about the Internet Slowdown, head here.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m concerned about the internet having neutral pipes. But the importance of physical neutrality pales in comparison to the importance of social neutrality. Until all the big internet companies stop putting up walled gardens, until they stop leaving cookies and tracking and advertising me across the entire internet realm, until the currency of the internet realm stops being what can be mined from my interactions across the net, I don’t have much sympathy for their physical neutrality whinging and whining.
John, did you see this article? Worth a read:
http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/08/advertising-is-the-internets-original-sin/376041/?single_page=true
“I have come to believe that advertising is the original sin of the web. The fallen state of our Internet is a direct, if unintentional, consequence of choosing advertising as the default model to support online content and services.”
In particular, see this section:
“Third, the advertising model tends to centralize the web.”
You’ve talked a lot about a free and open Internet, an Internet with apps that allow deep linking and all the original, open ideals of the Internet. I share those ideals. But it’s time we realized that an ad-supported Internet flies in the face of those ideals. An ad-support Internet centralizes, when what we were supposed to be building two decades ago was a loose, decentralized system with open protocols.
So again, physical net neutrality is great. But until the Internet itself weans itself from the ad-supported model, and goes back to the ideals of decentralization, the neutrality of the pipes is but a minor concern, a footnote.