At any rate, while it may not be a First Amendment issue, it is a net neutrality issue . As Pearl Jam said, “What happened to us this weekend was a wake up call, and it’s about something much bigger than the censorship of a rock band.” AT&T loves to call net neutrality a "solution without a problem." This is because they, along with others like them, are the problem. They control access, so without net neutrality, they have the ability to control content as well.

If you aren’t a little concerned about Big Brother, you should be. From wiretaps to Web surfing activities to 24 hour surveillance , Big Brother wants to know about you. However, unlike 1984 , he doesn’t want you to know he’s looking. And these giant telecoms are some of the guiltiest parties of easily complying with these Big Brother tactics. Anti-trust laws forced them to split up once, and they don’t want that to happen again.

Simply put, we must consider net neutrality the central issue going forward regarding the way we receive information via the web. (Net censorship would be a close second.) It’s too important, and most people know almost nothing about it. Telecoms like it this way.

It will never be a switch turned on one night where you all of a sudden notice that the net operates profoundly different. No, it will be a series of small steps that are too obscure to notice. This is why we must save the Internet now.

In this scary article by Timothy Karr , he illustrates how bad AT&T has been. Certainly an article with a bias, but it also has facts to back up that bias. For instance, “AT&T's history of breaking trust with their customers includes handing over private phone records to the government, promising to deliver services to underserved communities and then skipping town, pledging never to interfere with the free flow of information online while hatching plans with the likes of Cisco, Viacom, RIAA and MPA to build and deploy technology that will spy on user traffic.” And that’s just “the new AT&T.” Think about all of them combined.

Honestly, what’s so “new” about that? That sounds old school Orwellian . I’ve said before that it concerns me how much Google, Yahoo!, etc. know about us , but at the end of the day, these “new” companies seem to come down on the right side of this issue. We need freedom on the Internet, not an environment where content is dictated strictly by corporate interests. We need freedom of expression and the freedom to exchange all different types of ideas. These rights are fundamental, and companies such as Google seem to understand this. We must fight for these rights because they are intrinsically tied to our digital future.

Ultimately, the only argument those against net neutrality have with any tinge of credence will argue that it’s for our security. We need it to be protected. Keep it in the hands of a few and give them the power to control access, and somehow we're safer as a result. When you dig a bit deeper into the reality, you’ll find that to be an extremely weak argument, however, even it can be argued. And it can be argued by a man who shaped this country for the better in the early days. To quote the wonderful Benjamin Franklin, “Any society that would give up a little liberty to gain a little security will deserve neither and lose both.”