Wednesday, September 10 is Internet Slowdown Day, when this site and a whole bunch of others gave you a taste of what the World Wide Web might look like if the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) approves new rules governing how you can participate and contribute to the Internet for public discussion. These rules, commonly referred to as “net neutrality,” require Internet Service Providers (ISPs) like phone and cable companies to treat every bit that travels through their networks to be treated equally.
Need some basic understanding of what’s at stake here? Have some links:
Net Neutrality: What You Need to Know Now, at Free Press
A pair of pieces from Mashable
What I want to focus on is why this is important to writers and other content creators.
Let me start with this lovely tweet from @EdPlocher:
The Internet allows for an unmediated relationship between creators and audiences. Ending
#NetNeutrality ends that.
Let me also offer some other reasons why net neutrality matters:
Writers need web space they can control
One of the central themes Carole Jelen and I stress in Build Your Author Platform: The New Rules is now important it is for writers to have your own website, what we call “home central.” It’s the place where all your social activities point to.
If the fast-lane is implemented, how long does $100/yr web hosting for small businesses and lone creatives last? How long do the new free blogging tools like Medium and the like exist as free? , Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn and Twitter are wonderful places to visit, but I don’t want to live in any of them. Corporate sites just don’t do enough for us to communicate with readers.
Too many websites don’t pay their “content creators” already.
If the telephone and cable companies get to be first in line to demand money from websites that offer content, guess who moves further down the queue? Too many writers get ripped off already by content mills like Demand Studios, and sites that offer “exposure” instead of cash. As much as I’d like to throttle the content mills’ bandwidth, that is not how this would work in practice. If anything, the mills would pay the toll and suggest to writers they were the only game in town!
More media consolidation
The central premise of fast lanes and a non-neutral net is easy to understand: Big corporations can pay to play, not so much you and I. What might be easily missed: there isn’t enough competition in the media industry now! In the future, good ideas and good web design won’t be enough for smaller publishers to compete on the web.
Harder for self-publishers/indie authors
More than a few people think self-publishing is the future for writers. Net neutrality is really key for that argument to hold. My guess: Amazon gets even bigger, and writers (eventually) lose!
What to do?
- Let the FCC know what you think! I hope you signed the petition that displayed here first.
- Review the links above and below.
- Support organizations like Free Press, Fight for the Future, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and the like.
Michael McCallister: Notes from the Metaverse 