Net Neutrality : Lawyers should rally to support

Lawrence Lessig posts that to get a clue on the Net Neutrality debate, just watch the sides lining up on each side.

The pro-NN contingent is filled with the people who actually built the Net — from Vint Cerf to Google to eBay — and those who profit from the competition enabled by the Net — e.g., Microsoft. The anti-NN contingent is filled with the entities that either never got the Net, or fought like hell to control it — telecom, and cable companies.

Also per Lessig, Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web, now has video to emphasize how important net neutrality is. As Lee says,

When I invented the Web, I didn’t have to ask anyone’s permission. Now, hundreds of millions of people are using it freely. I am worried that that is going end in the USA.

Net neutrality, as I understand it, means keeping the net neutral so as to prevent better Internet access being given to the transfer of the data of service providers (such as websites) who have agreements with companies selling broadband access than is available for service providers who don’t have such agreements.

Lawyers, now empowered with blogs allowing them to publish in ways never before possible, should be rallying to the support of net neutrality. Without it, such lawyers free and open access to content distribution (free speech) could be jeopardized.

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