two tier internet?

US Justice department today stirred up the hornet's nest by opinionating that there can be two different tariff systems for the Internet service providers, one for the normal services and another for premium services. The US Justice Department has said that internet service providers should be allowed to charge for priority traffic.

The agency said it was opposed to "network neutrality", the idea that all data on the net is treated equally. The comments put the agency at odds with companies such as Microsoft and Google, who have called for legislation to guarantee equal access to the net. The agency's stance is contrary to much of the internet community that believes in an open model for the internet.

The agency's stance is contrary to much of the internet community that believes in an open model for the internet.Last year, Sir Tim Berners-Lee the inventor of the web rallied against the idea of a two-tier internet. "What's very important from my point of view is that there is one web," he said. "Anyone that tries to chop it into two will find that their piece looks very boring."

Internet somehow has managed to survive many attempts to divide it like the way the real world has become since the time earth came to be populated with human beings. Some of us who have been tracking internet from the time it became popular--I for one have been writing about it since 1987!(that is really ancient isnt it?)--have always been excited by the fact that the Net has once again given the humanity a chance to become one nation and one world since the time of the legendry Tower of Babel which is stated to be the reason in ancient times to divide human beings up.

According to Catholic Encyclopaedia the descendants of Noah had migrated from the "east" (Armenia) first southward, along the course of the Tigris, then westward across the Tigris into "a plain in the land of Sennar". As their growing number forced them to live in localities more and more distant from their patriarchal homes, "they said: Come, let us make a city and a tower, the top whereof may reach to heaven; and let us make our name famous before we be scattered abroad into all lands." The work was soon fairly under way; "and they had brick instead of stones, and slime (asphalt) instead of mortar." But God confounded their tongue, so that they did not understand one another's speech, and thus scattered them from that place into all lands, and they ceased to build the city.

Tower Babel is real or not, internet sure is heading the same way with attempts by the service providers, the software providers, the governments and agencies like the US Justice Department wanting to make divisions within the global community in the guise of empowering some in the name of "justice", in this case making the consumer pay for using the Internet by compensating the cost of its development for the service provider.

As internet users we need to take a stand against such tendencies and allow Internet to spread more "freely" as a "free service" so that high quality knowledge is created that would be used for developing the world. The deal is very simple make internet a global common like air water, atmosphere, earth and fire