• The Nation, Friday, February 3, 2006 10:16 AM

The Internet as we know it is coming to an end! Or so some paranoid conspiracy theorists would like us to believe. By now we know the cable and telecommunications companies that power many of our Internet connections are buying up competitors left and right; The Nation worries this  could effectively turn the Internet into a privately run and branded service. The main big brother suspects are Verizon, Comcast, Bell South and Time Warner, who are collecting data about everything we do on the Web, and could one day make that information available to marketers, large corporations, and, yes, even the government.  According to the article, telecommunications lobbyists are pressuring Congress to let them set up private networks where they would charge Web publishers like Google and Yahoo! for using their "pipes," as one AT&T executive put it.  Furthermore, charges would be accrued to consumers for services like streaming video, e-mail, instant messaging--anything that also makes use of their "pipes." I, for one, can't imagine that the government would allow anything so sordid to happen. Such anti-competitive maneuvers would absolutely cripple the Web as an industry. Not only that, but the telcos would have to buy up every avenue to the Web--including satellite--as well as buy out the major Internet companies (some of which are worth more than the telcos) that want to keep the Web free.

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