A Day without Food Blogs, May 16 2006

Have you heard? The democracy of the internet is being threatened. I hadn't even realized that it was possible to threaten the very foundation of this place we use so freely, until I heard about what's going on in the US Congress right now.

Big service providers -or the Pipes as called in the Telecom jargon- such as AT&T, Comcast, and others, are lobbying Congress and the Senate to allow them to create two tiers internet, essentially a fast and slow one. The fast one will be used by companies who are willing to pay for the über speed, while the rest of the little guys can move at a snail's pace on the slow lane.

This is not the same as the varying types of Internet access that people have. Currently, consumers can pay at their end for different connection types at varying speed, DSL, dial-up, etc. Once they are connected to the internet, reaching a little blogs or the big Food magazine sites will be just as easy. But this new law, when passed, will change things completely. It will allow the Pipes to dole out different sites at different speed. It will even allow these Pipes to exclude sites or blogs that they don't like out of their services altogether.

This change in the very foundation of the internet will affect us all, regardless of country we are in. I ask you to please, together, as a strong community of food bloggers, to act in unison this coming Tuesday, May 16.

Even if your blog normally steers away from all political discussions, I would still urge you to get involved JUST THIS ONCE. I'm out of words to describe how important this is. If the internet is allowed to change, it will spell doom to our beloved blogs and to this very community that we've built together.

Even if you blog isn't in the US, if you think you have any US reader at all, please urge them to write their Congressperson AND Senator. And if you are not a US citizen, then please go to Savetheinternet.com and sign the petition to support Net-neutrality.

Let's all do this together. We can easily afford to lend the front page of our blog forhttp://www.blogger.com/img/gl.link.gif a day for a cause THIS important.

Let's write a blog post about this Tuesday. Let it be a day without food blogs. Instead, all visitors to our blogs will learn about this menacing threat to the internet instead.

Will you join us? Will you?


This Post was written on behalf of the democratic Internet we all know and love.

More information:
NY Time's editorial, May 02 2006

Will the Internet Stay Fast and Cheap? From Amercian Public Media, May 11, 2006, by Robert Reich