It is now time to draw the swords and to fight for our freedom! - These are strange time for the neutrality of the internet and its faith for the near future.
We are not talking about the next ten or twenty years, but what the internet will become the next year and the year after. Our virtual freedom and privacy is under attack by companies that want more than our money for the service we pay for. It has now become evident that those companies want to control our real lives and our habits according to their hidden agenda.
What's happening on the virtual battlefield? It is very simple: the situation is now escalating to direct actions taken from corporations and their lawyers manipulating with their influence the justice system, that for the majority, it's being used as a tool to apply draconian laws created to defend the corporate greed. Who is on the other side of the field? You and many other similar to your personality and life style that are being singled-out and brought to execution without a chance of appeal.
This is what happened in the case where Sony is targeting a young kid nick-named GeoHot for jailbreaking the software inside the Playstation 3 with the launch of a lawsuit. Now the situation is so surreal that the US justice system is siding big time with Sony not only over the case of GeoHot, but also against others who are interested in his case. At the beginning of March the news came strong on the Youtube community where a judge ordered the video channel to hand over the real identity of those who post comments over the jailbreaking video. How constitutional is that? How malicious is that from Sony the the American justice?
But there is something interesting about this, about the tactics that Sony is using to destroy this kid, his life and his family. Rather than come to terms with the fact that Playstation 3 software had many weak points and ask the kid to help them with improvements, Sony prefers to waste millions in lawyers fees and time. This violent and vicious attack against a single kid, that cannot afford top lawyers to defend himself, had sparked controversy over another tantrum that Sony threw at PayPal, requesting detailed information of the donations and donors to pay for GeoHot's legal fees. What's happening that individual's rights are being ignored and turned down in favor of greedy corporations that are acting so violent in response of their fallacies of their products? Lobbyists are gaining so much ground in politic that are now influencing more than ever representative elected by the people, paid with the tax dollars, to execute their citizens without asking "Why?".
But internet has been abused by the corporate machine for too long to the point where users gathered to answer and fight back... Enter Anonymous - a mysterious entity that is aware of what's happening on the internet that stopped watching and took matter in its on hands. We heard Anonymous before the console controversy when they obstructed visitors and users from accessing PayPal, Visa and Mastercard's website in retaliation against the halt of funds and donations towards Julian Assange in the Wikileaks case.
There is something wrong in this picture: how is it possible that few businesses are capable to influence the ruling in court of the justice system so fast? Is there a link between corporations and the people representing the law? Yes, the link has been found once again where in many cases former lobbyists for corporations become federal judges to infiltrate the legal system in favor of the companies.
War is now underway on the internet between major corporations and judges, one one side, against internet users and Anonymous, on the other. But the fight is a righteous war waged by David versus Goliath in the attempt to settle the situation once and for all, because there is also another front to this war and that is about net neutrality. Net neutrality means a lot to people and to the democratic process the web should embrace.
Politicians in Washington don't really have a clue of what is the internet and cannot take personal decisions because are out of touch with technology and its fast changing. The result is that lobbyists are filling the blanks for the politicians transcending also in regulatory branches such as the FCC (Federal Communication Commission) that is now serving as a tool to put a gag on the internet and its bandwidth cap to costumers. All this while monthly bill increases and quality of service goes down.
Who is waging another war against the web users? Companies like AT&T have now reached an almost exclusive power over telecommunications through phones, cellphones and internet. This gives the authority to create a cartel with the other communication providers and set quotas for bandwidth and costs. But AT&T is not only against net neutrality and goes further by expanding its reach into families of employees brainwashing them. The wish from companies like AT&T and Verizon is to control and limit the use of the internet by adding a limit to its use. For costumer to surpass the limit of traffic flow is pretty easy because they are low and companies wants you to pay more if you dare to go over the cap. It sounds like a scam because companies have been providing poor services to costumers from bad cellphone coverage to iPhones unable to use their network to surd the web, and that upset many costumers including Apple.
The reality is that AT&T is investing little or nothing (like other companies) to upgrade their weak network. There have been claims between 2009 and 20010 where internet providers in North American and Europe were upset at the amount of traffic Youtube was getting and pretended a share of money. Youtube declined and the ISP (Internet Service Providers) attention switched onto creating a massive plan that would cap internet for the users while skyrocketing their bills.
It is already happened with Roger's, a Canadian ISP that placed a limit on the usage of the web and already proposed alternative and more expensive options on how to be safe if the cap is passed.
Freedom of information is important because it affects all of us 360 degrees. It'not only a noble cause that must be won to keep a balance between politics and business, it's also an achievement on recognizing our rights, especially when we pay to access a service like the web or on the phone.
There is a fear among corporations that people (costumers) might get a mind of their own and start taking actions. Anonymous already did not only against powerful ISP, but also against cults such as Scientlogy.
Internet is now a battlefield that has to be controlled in order to win the war of the information and corporations are doing all they can to achieve this goal. Web users have other tools to strike their enemies and so far they have been successful with their DDOS attacks (Denial OF Service), shutting down recently Sony.com and Playstation.com bringing down the entire Playstation Network.
A great fear that companies are experiencing is how people are empowering to defend them self against tyranny for the protection and survival of democracy that is now under threat not only virtually but in real life too.
