You may have heard that there is an effort under way to make it legal for internet service providers to charge website owners for preferred loading speed; meaning, large companies, who can afford it will have the way faster load times and downloads than small indie sites like this one… and probably yours to.

As you can imagine, this has gotten lot of people’s attention-namely bloggers, small site owners and the netroots. For musicians and indie labels this means that the majors can again enjoy an edge by being able to pay to get this preferred access.

This is just an example of businesses trying to figure out how to bring in additional revenue streams to grow even larger. The internet service providers already make money off of you, the internet user, so now they want to make money off of content providers.

This would be like a car company making a car that only drives well, if you’re going to a mall or a certain shopping center, but the car wouldn’t drive as well if you were going to grandma’s house. You, as the car buyer, don’t want that, do you?

Of course not-that’s just stupid. In their quest for higher returns, the ISPs are overlooking the ones that pay the bills… all of you out there in internet land.

Personally, I love when companies like this get greedy; it means one thing…

Innovation is on its way!

You see one of the great things about the internet is that it tends to help “The Man” realignment his perspective when the blind quest for cash makes him do stupid things. It’s amazing how an entire industry can seem to find their soul when they’re staring down the barrel of the next big thing.

Let’s take a little trip back in time shall we…

It’s the late 90s, there’s a lot of great music coming out, and the major labels are rolling in it; and why not. They’re charging a whopping $20+ for their entire catalogs. I distinctly remember this because I learned about a new internet thing in the same week that I bought my copy of Magical Mystery Tour.

I was complaining to a computer savvy friend about how I wanted to buy a bunch of albums that weekend, but the sticker shock resulted in my only buying one. He agreed and mentioned a little service called Napster that let you download music for free. Now, at the time, I commuted to school, I only had a 56k connection and my desktop didn’t have a CD burner – I really couldn’t do much with this info. People on campus, with the school provided broadband connection, did take advantage of Napster.

A few months later, Metallica and the record companies saw their profits shrinking and cried fowl. Their outrage was not met with much sympathy from the public; after all, we were the ones getting shafted.

Napster wasn’t the cause of the problem, it was the result.

When I walked into that record store a few moths earlier I had $40 in my pocket and I was looking to buy two or three CDs at around $12-15 each. I left with one, because it was $21 dollars and that didn’t leave me with enough for another $20 CD. The record companies lost out on $19 of sales, not because of piracy, but because of greed.

The birth of the MP3 lead to the discovery of electronic transfer of music via the internet.It started with piracy, but turned into capitalism when the iPod came out and iTunes (as well as other services) started selling individual songs at a fraction of the price. Record companies had to drop their prices because the masses decided that they didn’t like what was going on.

This is why Net Neutrality will ultimately win out over greed. We don’t want a slower connection to the sites that we want to go to. Broadband companies use their speed as an advertising point, why would they intentionally slow down part of their service?

If they did what they seem to be threatening to do, some ambitious nineteen year old nerd is just going to figure out a way to set things straight and make things better. They’ll get tons of venture capital and start a new, completely neutral broadband company, steal all the customers away from the non-neutral ISPs and make billions – and chances are the new service will have some other innovation that the current crop of ISPs can’t offer.

So I say if they want to kill net neutrality, bring it on. I can’t wait to get net neutral broadband Wi-Fi from cell towers anywhere in the country – god bless innovation.

“Greed is good.” – Gordon Gekko, Wall Street (1987)