Three years ago I sat in the Park School auditorium, giggling with my classmates as our Mass Media professor showed us Googlezon, the futuristic sci-fi video about how Google was going to take over the world by the year 2014.
The very next semester, iMPrint, an online college magazine founded and based at Ithaca College, did an in-depth report about Net Neutrality. (Articles that were part of this in-depth series can be found here, here, and here.)
At the time, I didn't have a clue what Net Neutrality was or why it was a big deal. I declined a personal invitation from iMPrint's then editor-in-chief to contribute to the in-depth report about Net Neutrality, seeing it as some boring political issue that would resolve itself and wasn't worth learning about.
Boy was I wrong.
Less than a year later, in February 2008, two news stories broke about Google erasing search results for people who dared to be bold. When journalist Matthew Lee exposed United Nations corruption on his one-man news website, Inner City Press, he received an e-mail from Google saying that his website would no longer be included in Google News. In China, university professor Guo Quan lost his online identity when he founded a democratic opposition party.
Net Neutrality continues to be an issue today. Congress and the FCC are currently battling it out over how best to preserve a neutral web. The Internet, meanwhile, celebrated its 40th birthday this past Thursday (October 29).
Happy Birthday, Internet. May you continue to transform our lives in new ways and enjoy unrestricted freedom in your next 40 years.
P.S. We discussed in class how the term Net Neutrality is rather misleading as to what it refers to. Apparently Arianna Huffington agrees with us.
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