Johann Hari on keeping the Internet equally open to everyone

British columnist Johann Hari highlights a threat to the future of the Internet. "The massive corporations that provide broadband own the physical highways of the internet: the wires and cables and switches along which web pages travel before they hit your screen. They have been lobbying in the US and Europe for permission to turn this into a two-lane motorway, with different speeds according to how much you can pay. Under their proposal, if you are a big corporation ... you would pay a premium fee and travel on the fastest lane, with your page getting to users at super-speed. If you are just an unknown blogger, you pay the standard fee and you will be stuck in the piled-up broadband traffic, taking much longer to update or use. This is called a 'tiered' internet – and it has to be resisted. The greatest thing about the web is that the entry costs are so low: we all plug and play on an equal basis. Under the new model, we would no longer compete in a somewhat open market of ideas... ."

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