Day and Night Digital | Irish Independent

It’s easy to forget that the internet is an unregulated place, available for anyone to use provided they have the access. Anyone can access a website: be it for a blog, a news site, commerce, music, silly youtube videos, opinion and niche communities. It’s the only truly open communications medium we have available to us but not for much longer if US Senator John McCain gets his way.

Last week, Senator McCain introduced a bill to place the power back in the hands of corporations so they could decide who can access what website and at what speed. And that is why the preserving “net neutrality” is particularly pertinent at the moment.

In a classic case of ironic titling, McCain called it the Internet Freedom Act 2009. It sounds innocuous enough but the freedom here is not for the people, it’s to allow internet service providers and telecommunication companies to prioritise their own content over their competitors by slowing or blocking access to other web content, therefore removing the level-playing field that gives your neighbour’s blog the same priority as RTE.ie for example.

Despite admitting to being computer illiterate, McCain has taken up the shield for the telecom industry. It should be no surprise though as a recent report from the Sunlight Foundation lists him as the single largest congressional recipient of campaign contributions from that industry. Imagine, if McCain had his way, that information perhaps wouldn’t be so freely available on the web.

While it’s unlikely that the bill will be passed, it’s important to recognise that this openness or ‘net(work) neutrality’ should remain. The problem is the term is quite vague and not at all self-explanatory.

As ever it was The Daily Show’s Jon Stewart who did the best job of explaining what was going on to the American public. Stewart consistently combines entertainment with razor-sharp satire that’s genuinely informative.

In the insightful clip from the Comedy Central show Stewart explains MCCain’s proposed anti-net neutrality bill as “sort of like creating a carpool lane on the internet but instead of high-occupancy vehicles, only rich a**holes will be able to drive it”. Watch the clip here: