The Future of the Internet, or the "why" in "Why Learn More?"

First off, go and watch this flash animation about the "future of the Internet", so to speak. But remember to come back and read the rest. The SWF file is about 1.7MiB in size.
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Now, what do you think about that? "Net Neutrality" is good or bad? You know, forget about net neutrality. What about the idea of major cable and telecom companies, controling the data that passes over their cables? Is it good or bad? The way it is presented in this animation, the future of Internet depends on it! According to the producers of this clip, if we give those pipe-providers control over what goes and doesn't go on their data routes, the world will become a Shangri-la of blessed connectivity!

Not so fast! The real story is not just that. You see, after the major -- I'm talking billions here -- success of companies like Google, that provide all their services over the Internet, connectivity providers (those major cable and telecom companies) started thinking along the lines that, why should Google reap all the profits? After all, it's their cables (or whatever) that carries the data and keeps the people connected. Basically, they thought that since it's them that connect the likes of Google to their source of income, they should have a piece of that pie too. But they just don't come out and say that. They say that they want to have different paths of Internet-traffic flow for different kinds of applications, but what's really going to happen is that they will be able to give priority to the traffic of anyone they want, say "CompanyEcks", who pays them top dollar for such a priority.
And the other online service providers will be forced to compete too, because suddenly, Google's website will load 10 times slower that CompanyEcks's (trust me, they will find a more subtle and more damaging way) and the people will go the "faster" or "better" service.
Then Google will be forced to pay for priority too, and that will cause the end-user prices to go up as well. In the end, you and I loose. (OK, you loose. I've already lost, because I don't have the power to protest to these kinds of my government's decision.)

So it's not the question of many smart pipes, or one dumb pipe to carry the data. The question is whether to have one indiscriminating pipe to carry whatever information you want, or many different pipes with the good ones carrying the information your ISP wants.

That's why we, the users, have to educate ourselves, so not to choose whichever pop-up window that was bigger. Choose smartly.