Blogtopia "Under Grave and Immediate Threat"

Imagine trying to cope with today's world without blogs.

On second thought, it's too painful.

Yet, it may happen sooner rather than later:

Blogs have gained a growing cultural and political impact in the United States and worldwide. In the United States, they’ve been credited with playing a key role in the resignation of a U.S. Senate Majority Leader and the public repudiation of a longtime TV news anchor. Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary of the English language deemed “blog” its word of the year in 2004. The Technorati website boasts that it keeps track of some 28 million blogs worldwide.

Undeniably, blogs and their collective identity known as the “blogosphere” have become an extraordinary phenomenon. And no matter what topics they may discuss or what political leanings they may espouse, they are all under grave and immediate threat.

The threat involves the issue of “net neutrality” the idea that those who manage the virtual roads for internet and digital communications don’t discriminate who travels on those roads and why. But America’s major cable and telecommunications companies, are heavily lobbying Congress now to change that.

Companies like AT&T, Verizon, and Comcast want to abolish net neutrality and set up the virtual equivalent of tolls on the internet. The idea would be to set up separate tiers of internet access – the digital equivalent of a ten-lane superhighway alongside a single-lane dirt road. If you want to access the superhighway, you’d have to pay AT&T or whomever extra fees through a virtual toll for that access – a source of fantastic profit potential for the would-be tollkeepers on the internet. But those who can’t afford the superhighway can still take the dirt road, right?

Here’s the problem for bloggers and other alternative and independent media producers who distribute media via the internet: Those who can’t afford that privileged access will far outnumber those who can, and the result would be, as Ben Scott from the media activist organization Free Press put it, to “banish hundreds of thousands of bloggers to the slow lane.”

What to do?

Go here for a few options -- though time is growing short, as a Senate panel will vote on the issue this afternoon.

Will our "elected representatives" do the right thing for once in their whorish lives?

Please?