Tim Karr

Once and for all, a bill to make Net Neutrality the law made its way to Congress on Friday afternoon when Reps. Edward Markey (D-Mass.) and Anna Eshoo (D-Calif.) introduced the Internet Freedom Preservation Act of 2009 (H.R. 3458).

This landmark legislation would protect Net Neutrality under the Communications Act, safeguard the future of the open Internet, and protect Internet users from discrimination by network owners that increasingly seek to control the free-flowing Web.

“The future of the Internet as we know it depends on maintaining freedom and openness online,” said Ben Scott, policy director of Free Press. “This crucial legislation will help to ensure that the public — not big phone and cable companies — controls the fate of the Internet.”

If passed, Net Neutrality would become the simple rule of the road — protecting economic prosperity, democratic participation and free speech online. It would protect the fundamental genius of the Internet — essentially an open network that lets everyone innovate without permission.

“If we don’t make Net Neutrality the law once and for all, we could see the innovation and promise of the Internet derailed forever,” Scott said.

In the first six months of 2009, the phone and cable industry spent tens of millions of dollars to hire hundreds of lobbyists to fight the public interest and become the Internet’s gatekeepers.

The Internet Freedom Preservation Act is now squarely in their crosshairs. Expect them to crank up their P.R. machine to tear down Net Neutrality and attack its many supporters. We saw this before in 2006 — when Net Neutrality was stripped out of legislation by a heavily mobilized army of lobbyists.

Now, with the introduction of the Internet Freedom Preservation Act of 2009, momentum has shifted in the public’s favor.

We have a president who is an outspoken supporter of Net Neutrality, congressional leadership willing to fight for an open Internet, and a pro-Neutrality chairman newly ensconced at the FCC.

Since the fight for Net Neutrality began, more than 1.6 million Americans have picked up the phone, signed petitions, spoken out publicly and written letters to urge their members of Congress to get behind Net Neutrality.

Now, we must push this bill over the finish line. Tell your member of Congress to side with the public — not with the corporate lobbyists — and take a final stand for an open Internet by supporting the Internet Freedom Preservation Act of 2009.

via Tim Karr @ savetheinternet.com

Twenty years ago, in a research establishment in the Swiss Alps, a British-born computer scientist dreamt up a new way for academics to share information around the globe.

Little did he realise that his invention would break out from the confines of academia and give birth to the world wide web.

Two decades on, there are over 200 million websites and over one trillion unique URLs. An astounding 1.6 billion people use the web worldwide, and here in the UK the figure stands at over 70 per cent of the population.

To celebrate this milestone, we’re looking back on how and why the web came into being, taking a look at how the web’s key technologies have changed since the early ’90s and investigating how it has affected our society and culture.

illustrate how vividly things have changed, we’ll take a snapshot of the web at four stages in its development – at five, 10, 15 and 20 years old. And to complete our commemoration of the web at 20, we’ve consulted an expert to find out just how different it could look in another five years’ time.

How it all began

The web might have come into being 20 years ago, but that wasn’t the start of the internet – far from it. To find the first faltering steps of the information superhighway we have to turn the clock back almost 40 years to the launch of the Advanced Research Projects Agency Network, or ARPANET, which is widely regarded as the evolutionary starting point of the internet we know today. So to see why the web was so revolutionary, we need to investigate how the internet looked back in the late ’70s

Some aspects of ARPANET-inspired technology are still with us. ARPANET was the world’s first packet switching network, and some of its technologies – including email, FTP (file transfer protocol) for uploading and downloading files, and Usenet, which served a similar purpose to today’s web-based newsgroups – were already in existence.

The biggest differences between these systems and their modern-day counterparts lies in the user interface more than the underlying technology. The older services were accessed using typed commands rather than via the now-ubiquitous graphical user interface.

Read more at  TechRadar UK.