The Internet has been dubbed by many as the new "Wild West" with rampant freedom of speech to include more than just speech but virtually everything that can be sent over a wire. Today people are freely sharing music, movies, conspiracy documents, blogs, news, pornography, and yes even hate speech. This has many very upset and frustrated, and it has also spurred a debate over censorship.
While I agree the Internet needs to be organized better and browsers need to be more conducive to censorship at the "Point of use" I very much oppose global or national censorship. There are currently several principals that govern the Internet one of the most important is "Net Neutrality" see: video:
The Internet network has been under attack, and www.moveon.org has been calling attention to several areas that need our attention and concern. The ones listed at Moveon.org include Congress and AT&T working together to regulate a fee for speed. This law will slow down our networks at home, dramatically increase the networks of big corporations and make AT&T Billions in profit.
The Internet attack has begun some time ago, and currently there are even more aggressive direct criticisms of P2P sites or sites where users are permitted to share personal information from computer to computer. The reason our country wants P2P sites closed down is because they allege it poses a national security violation due to government computers having it installed by employees who unknowingly share confidential files.
The biggest loss this year was the "Internet Broadcast Act" that has forced many small home based Internet radio stations to pay excessive fees or shut down. There has been a campaign to inform the 20 Plus million listeners of theses Internet radio stations to come out and help fight the injustice by posting the following banner on independent websites. For anyone curios you can go to the logo's advertised website and read about the unfair new laws.
The news today, or the news that prompted me to write this blog, came from www.infowars.com where Google was accused of steering traffic away from blog boards and small media sites that did not conform to the representations of the mainstream media. This process is called "Link Relevance." The way I understand it to work is that the more sites that post your website links, the more the Google search engine ups your "Link Relevance" and the more relevant the higher and more often your website appears on Google searches. Infowars has criticized Google as steering the majority of Internet traffic away from bloggers and minority news sources and exaggerated the "Link Relevance" of the main stream media. The purpose of this is to discriminate against public views while exaggerating corporate media opinions.
While I find these new technological ways of altering the Internet very Un_American, and unfair, I also believe that there will be a major negative ramification from any continued attempts to censor the Internet in favor of big corporations. I urge everyone who reads this to go to moveon.org and sign the petition to preserve free speech on the Internet and preserve "Net Neutrality."
The link is: http://civic.moveon.org/save_the_internet/
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