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The End of the Blogosphere?

The digital gatekeepers want to set up the virtual equivalent of tolls.

Blogs have gained a growing cultural and political impact in the United States and worldwide. In the United States, they've been credited with playing a key role the resignation of a U.S. Senate Majority Leader and the public repudiation of a longtime TV news anchor. Merriam-Webster's Dictionary of the English language deemed "blog" its word of the year in 2004. The Technorati website boasts that it keeps track of some 28 million blogs worldwide.

Undeniably, blogs and their collective identity known as the "blogosphere" have become an extraordinary phenomenon. And no matter what topics they may discuss or what political leanings they may espouse, they are all under grave and immediate threat.

The threat involves the issue of "net neutrality" the idea that those who manage the virtual roads for internet and digital communications don't discriminate who travels on those roads and why. But America's major cable and telecommunications companies, are heavily lobbying Congress now to change that.

Companies like AT&T, Verizon, and Comcast want to abolish net neutrality and set up the virtual equivalent of tolls on the internet. The idea would be to set up separate tiers of internet access

Posted in: News on February 28, 2006 @ 12:00 AM

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