I find it very curious that Blogger has been running painfully slowly the day after the Official Google Blog has a post urging folks to lobby Congress to Support Net Neutrality.

Is this an untimely coincidence, or shades of things to come? Are the big phone and cable companies putting the squeeze on Google for speaking up on the “wrong” side of the issue?

Here is what the Blogger Status Blog says, “For many users, Blogger will have been extremely slow or down for most of the morning. We continue to work on fixes for this problem and hope to have it resolved as quickly as possible.”

Of course I’m also told by some who are more exprienced than I am that Blogger is notorious for having outages, so maybe I’m just being cynical.

But I’ve never had a big problem with them in the 6+ moths I’ve been with the service. And I’m not one to complain about a free service that has as much to offer and is as easy for a beginner to use as Blogger has been for me! As far as my (limited perhaps) experience goes, Blogger is a great platform that I’d recommend for anyone starting out. It is an exceptional low cost way to try blogging out and see if it is a good fit.

Just the same, perhaps it is now officially time to move CREEations to a more reliable and robust (and yes, more expensive) host.

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OK guys. It’s time for me to get a little preachy. If you are in the US, and most of you stopping here at this point are, you need to know there is something big happening in Congress in the next week.

It will affect everyone. Globally.

Do you support any non-profit charities? How would you like it if their information could no longer be accessed?

Congress will be voting on the issue that has been labeled “Net Neutrality”. The outcome of this vote will have lasting repercussions that affect your access to information on the internet and ultimately how everyone in the world can access information flowing from the US.

Congress may decide to keep things the way they have been for years by passing a new law. Or they may vote to give the giant phone and cable companies complete control of the internet so they can convert it to their own private network.

If Congress gives control to these corporate giants, these companies say they will choose what information their customers can and cannot access.

And it is already happening.

For example Craigslist is being blocked by Cox Interactive.

What can you do?

First – Get Informed.

You can read my previous posts on the issue here and here.

Go to the advocacy sites It’s Our Net and Save The Internet.

Read what Google says about the issue in today’s entry at the Official Google Blog.

Liz over at Successful-Blog has a whole page of links devoted to Net Neutrality. She’s been tracking this issue for a long time.

And you can read what Mark has to say at R-Web Designs. He was targeted with a comment spam attack because of his advocacy.

Then – Contact Congress.

Make your voice heard. Send an email. Make a phone call. If you don’t speak up now then you are allowing Congress to be swayed by the multi-million dollar marketing campaign that the corporate giants are using to tell their side of the story.

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The Wall Street Journal has an article up today The Web’s Worst New Idea that totally misses the mark on the issue of Net Neutrality.

They say that the current fight for Net Neutrality is a bad idea basically because making laws to preserve neutral data flow by the internet providers would open the door to lawsuits. They claim the government shouldn’t “regulate what isn’t broken.”

The one sentence that sums up their apparent complete failure to grasp the reality of this issue is this:

Given the impulse on the left to regulate anything that moves, perhaps the real surprise here is that it’s taken this long for someone to seriously suggest the Net will wither in the absence of a federal regulatory apparatus.

They seem to think those supporting Net Neutrality are only on the left side of the political spectrum. Um, read my profile. I’m sure not in the MoveOn.org crowd. Although I pretty much agree with them on this one issue.

But, hey, my own political credentials aren’t all that substantial (which is A-OK with me). Regardless, the WSJ should take a look at the Charter Members on the SaveTheInternet.com site. They’d see that the fourth one on the list is Gun Owners of America.

That’s not exactly the type of organization characterized by the WSJ as supporting this issue. Check out what their Executive Director wrote to Congress about the issue. The question is will us little guys be able to make our voices heard in the future?

The other flaw in the WSJ reasoning is that they seem to think that because every thing’s going well now, there is no problem. The issue is not what has happened to the internet, but what the providers say they intend to do with it.

Here’s what’s at stake in simple language, so that even I can understand it:

The high speed internet providers want to be able to start charging for data flowing over their network regardless of where the content originated in addition to charging for each computer that connects to their network.

As it stands right now everyone pays based on how much data flows to the internet at the connection point. That data volume is called bandwidth. The result of the current system is that Google pays a whole lot more for their internet access than I do because they are shoving way more data through their connection than I am.

The current system is fair to everyone because as a company grows, and needs more bandwidth, it is reasonable to expect them to be able to afford to pay more for their access. Suffice it to say that Google has much deeper pockets than I do.

The change the providers want to make is hard to describe because the double charging concept is so foreign to us. Basically it’s without precedent. But I’m going to try.

It would be like setting up a toll interstate highway system. As it stands now, everyone getting on that highway system would have to pay a toll to each state where you get on the highway. How much you currently pay determines whether you can get into the fast lane, or if you have to stay in the slow lane.

Now imagine a different, additional, toll structure. Say a truck was going from Florida to Wisconsin. Under the new system (what the internet providers want to do), the truck would pay his toll to Florida like he always did and get into which ever lane he paid for. But now he would also have to pay an additional toll to Wisconsin the moment he got on the highway or he wouldn’t be allowed to get off the highway there.

It might almost sound reasonable except where the analogy falls apart when you translate it to the internet. Be cause with the internet, you put your data on in one place, but it doesn’t get off in one place, but many. And under the new system you would have to pay an additional toll everyplace you wanted your data to be able to get off the highway.

It would be like the trucker having to pay a toll to every one of the 50 states the moment he got on the highway or he wouldn’t be able to get off wherever he didn’t pay. If you are a big trucking company, like say Schneider, you could probably swing the extra new fees. But what if you were an independent trucker with only one truck?

You end up only being able to work on back water routes and you no longer can make a living because you can’t compete with the big boys any longer. In the end you go out of business.

The same thing will happen to all of us little internet users if the providers have their way. We’re the ones who will be affected most, not the big guys like Google, even though they have an interest in this too. If the providers get their way, check out how it will affect you personally.

If you’re involved in a non-profit this will affect you big time. Hello! Church crowd! Are you even listening?! How much more can your budget afford to pay? Or are you willing to let the providers keep people from hearing your message?

Net Neutrality is a big deal. The WSJ totally missed what the fight is about. If you do any business on the internet and don’t want to be shut out, get active. Contact Congress now, before it’s too late.

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What Everyone Else is Doing

I’ve been reading a bit about Google Trends this morning. It is an interesting tool that charts out for you how often things have been searched for in Google. It kind of gives you a read on what everyone on the internet is interested in.

Since I consider my blog here to be mostly about practical life philosophy, I thought I’d look run “blog, life, philosophy” through and see what came out. The results actually surprised me with life having a much higher consistent search than blog and philosophy in the gutter. It is also interesting to note that blog seems to be on a steady upward trend. Of course there is no scale shown on the graph so all we get is relative comparisons.

But the most interesting part of it to me is when I clicked on the “Regions” tab of the lower graph. There we see that Peru is far more interested in blog than life. Singapore is looking for life just about as often as for a blog. And the US & Canada both appear to be desperately searching for life while hardly caring about the blog.

I have no idea what the take-away from that is.

After I poked around with Google Trends, I went looking at my propaganda sites like Drudge and Fox News and it appears that folks are all up in arms over the government data basing masses of phone records. Although by the time you read this they may have moved on.

It does make me think when I see that many of the same companies that are involved with shady goings-on regarding phone records are among the same companies that are spending millions to lobby Congress for changes to the laws that would pretty much give them control over what you can and cannot access over the internet.

If that gives you pause, check out my post that explains why Your Internet is in Danger. Then go spend some time looking at SaveTheInternet.com.

You can make a difference in the future of communication by contacting Congress.

But all this talk about trends and headlines got me thinking. Does it really matter what everyone else is doing or worried about? I suppose to some degree it does. We are all part of the same human race so there is a certain level of interconnectedness and other people will probably always influence us to some degree.

But if we try to plot our life’s course based strictly on the opinions and actions of others, we will never really be fulfilled. Leaders who have the biggest impact follow a specific vision, even when it is unpopular. For example Lincoln comes to mind as a leader who was lambasted by public opinion while he led, but whom history and hindsight has shown to be perhaps our nation’s greatest leader.

In the Bible, Paul said it this way:

But one thing I do: Forgetting what is behind and straining toward what is ahead, I press on toward the goal to win the prize for which God has called me heavenward in Christ Jesus. (Phil. 3:13-14)

Each of us has our own path to walk. Those who make the most of it, march to their own unique drummer. Don’t be so concerned about what everyone else is doing. Life is too short.

Enjoy!

What if BellSouth (or Comcast, or Verizon, or AT&T) decided to block your access to internet sites based on whether or not the owners of those sites were willing (or able) to pay each of them an access fee?

How would that change your access to information?

Do you maintain a web presence? A blog?

How much are you willing (or able) to pay so that everyone has access to your site?

Right now these companies make their money largely from subscribers like you and me tapping into their networks to access content. They don’t also charge people who provide content via other “connections” to get their contact through to you from the other side. Because the law says they can’t.

But that is in danger of changing. Soon.

If you use the internet at all you need to learn about this before it’s too late and you get locked out of content, or if you’re a blogger, you get locked out of potential readers.

Take another hypothetical: What if you live, say in Savannah like me, and you run a blog that is hosted on a computer somewhere on the West Coast. And what if neither you nor the company that owns the computers that host your blog are willing (or able) to pay your internet provider at your home for access through them.

You could find yourself in a position where you can’t even access your own web site!

If you think this doesn’t really matter to you because you don’t really use the internet all that much you are exactly wrong. Us little guys will be impacted the most if we loose Net Neutrality. The big companies like Amazon.com will simply ante up and pay the fees. The little people will be left out in the cold.

Get educated. Holler at Congress before it is too late!

Start with Randall Bowman’s great (non-technical) post Threat to the Net.

I first read about Net Neutrality on Liz Strauss’ Successful Blog post Net Neutrality is in Jepardy. Also see Do you trust Congress & AT&T to run the internet?

These posts have links to others where you can see all about this.

If we do nothing we will be the poorer for it in more ways than one.

Update: Visit SaveTheInternet.com for the complete round-up on this issue.