Send A Sympathy Card Over The Death Of The Internet To Your Senator

from the condolences dept

Alexis Ohanion, founder of Reddit (and Hipmunk and Breadpig), is kicking off a neat campaign to send condolence cards to Senators, mourning the "death of the internet" in response to the effort to move forward with PIPA. In a video he put together, he questions why our elected officials, who admit they don't understand the technology, seem to have no problem at all moving forward with a bill regulating that same technology -- and shows the condolence card he's sending to his own Senators in New York. " He separately notes how odd it is that in this era of political gridlock, where almost nothing can get done in Congress, so many in Congress jump to push through bad legislation they don't understand -- written by the entertainment industry -- while ignoring the many real problems this country faces...

Because I can already hear some of the SOPA/PIPA supporters out there revving up the "but it doesn't kill the internet!" cries, let's dig into that issue. No one is saying that it kills off the entire internet, so that it goes away. What we've been saying all along is that it kills the established legal framework under which the internet has grown and thrived for decades. That's a big deal. Multiple studies have shown that the protection from secondary liability is a large part of what enabled the internet to grow the way it did, and to build the kinds of innovative new services that have shown up over the years. Taking that away doesn't mean that "the internet" goes away -- but it does mean that the key protections on which the internet were built are put at significant risk or, in some cases, wiped out. That's pretty scary if you want to see new internet services built up and to see existing ones grow. Under such conditions, sympathy cards seem perfectly reasonable.

Filed Under: alexis ohanion, death of the internet, pipa, protect ip, senators, sopa, sympathy card

Death Of The Internet Greatly Exaggerated (By Those Who Stand To Benefit)

from the check-the-biases dept

Well, here we go again. For well over a decade now, someone will come along every few months or so and claim that the internet is about to be overwhelmed by traffic and will collapse. However, these predictions never seem to come true, and when you dig deeper, you almost always find that the reports misinterpret some data. In fact, when you get down into the details, you'll almost always find that the technology guys say there's little threat of an internet collapse -- but the policy and business guys will often state otherwise. So, take with a large grain of salt the latest research report claiming that the internet will collapse by 2010. Thankfully, Broadband Reports quickly picks apart the report to note that it was funded by the likes of AT&T and Level3, and it's being supported by a group whose job is to lobby for laws that help the telcos. For them, it makes sense to promote the idea that the internet is about to be overwhelmed, so that regulatory subsidies are put in place to help these companies pay for the type of infrastructure they know they need to invest in anyway. In other words, don't worry about the internet collapsing. Worry about telcos trying to squeeze the government for more taxpayer support (as they've been doing for years) to pay for expected business expenses.

Filed Under: death of the internet, internet, net neutrality
Companies: at&t, level 3, nemertes