Fidel said:
Are you even aware that the Net Neutrality bill was pushed into Congress by, umm, corporations?
How is being against and opposed to more government control over communications in any way, shape or form fascist? Fascists, by virtue of their love of propaganda, would advocate more (if not total) state control over communications: tv, radio, internet, newspapers, etc. I'm advocating the precise opposite and you call me a fascist.
You spent all weekend whining about censorship and yet you want to give the FCC - the grandmaster of communications' censorship - MORE power.
You're very very inconsistent and not coming across as well-informed at all, here. You've still to explain how fascism and Libertarianism are similar.
I'd LOVE to hear your answer.
It's Facist because you end up putting control of the Internet in the hands of a few corporations and start to end the free flow of information which we've enjoyed...I am speecless that I am arguing this point with you two, two more good articles on the subject:
The End of the Blogosphere?
March 1, 2006
By Mitchell Szczepanczyk
Blogs have gained a growing cultural and political impact in the United States and worldwide. In the United States, they've been credited with playing a key role the resignation of a U.S. Senate Majority Leader and the public repudiation of a longtime TV news anchor. Merriam-Webster's Dictionary of the English language deemed "blog" its word of the year in 2004. The Technorati website boasts that it keeps track of some 28 million blogs worldwide.
Undeniably, blogs and their collective identity known as the "blogosphere" have become an extraordinary phenomenon. And no matter what topics they may discuss or what political leanings they may espouse, they are all under grave and immediate threat.
The threat involves the issue of "net neutrality" the idea that those who manage the virtual roads for internet and digital communications don't discriminate who travels on those roads and why. But America's major cable and telecommunications companies are heavily lobbying Congress now to change that.
Companies like AT&T, Verizon, and Comcast want to abolish net neutrality and set up the virtual equivalent of tolls on the internet. The idea would be to set up separate tiers of internet access - the digital equivalent of a ten-lane superhighway alongside a single-lane dirt road. If you want to access the superhighway, you'd have to pay AT&T or whomever extra fees through a virtual toll for that access - a source of fantastic profit potential for the would-be tollkeepers on the internet. But those who can't afford the superhighway can still take the dirt road, right?
Here's the problem for bloggers and other alternative and independent media producers who distribute media via the internet: Those who can't afford that privileged access will far outnumber those who can, and the result would be, as Ben Scott from the media activist organization Free Press put it, to "banish hundreds of thousands of bloggers to the slow lane".
As a result, that digital dirt road will be endlessly clogged and more than likely face considerable delays to try to access media content on the internet. And that access isn't just simple webpages but also other media like television and radio which are becoming and will become digitized and thus rely on the internet as the major means of transit.
This will then lead to a Catch-22 for bloggers. Either pay the telecom companies hefty ongoing fees which you may or may not afford, or face the digital equivalent of a black hole where you can't easily or readily access independent media content. Either way, the abolition of net neutrality will dissuade a great many online media producers and consumers, thereby striking an effective death blow to the blogosphere and the variety and diversity currently on the internet. The advantage would thus go to already wealthy and entrenched media producers.
In the federal government in Washington, the main legislation concerning the media in the United States - the Telecommunications Act - is being rewritten, and the fate of net neutrality (and perhaps the future of the internet) rests in the balance. Unfortunately, Net Neutrality clauses have been struck out of the most recent draft of the Telecom Act.
Now the blogosphere may face its greatest challenge: saving itself.
Fortunately, there are recent media-related victories that can be drawn upon for inspiration. In 2003, activists across the political spectrum joined in widespread protest and outrage against the FCC as it tried to implement a series of controversial media ownership rules. That response fueled a successful emergency court order and subsequent lawsuit which rolled back the rules for the time being.
When the dust settled, some three million people responded to the FCC against its controversial rules - a response unprecedented in the FCC's history. The same or larger scale of response to Congress will be needed to preserve net neutrality. And the blogosphere, with its millions of active folks online, hold that very potential to rally widespread awareness of net neutrality and keep the internet free.
If you have a blog or independent media website, consider learning more about net neutrality, discussing it on your website, linking to some of the net neutrality campaigns already underway like Net Freedom Now by Free Press (www.freepress.net) or Protect Net Neutrality by Common Cause (www.commoncause.org), and contact your representatives in Congress to encourage them to preserve net neutrality. One group I work with, Chicago Media Action, has made available a series of net neutrality banner ads to use on your website to promote the issue, online at CMA's website (www.chicagomediaaction.org).
The blogosphere has been rewriting the internet. Whether it will continue to do so depends on whether or not it steps up to help preserve net neutrality. Mitchell Szczepanczyk (www.szcz.org) is an organizer with Chicago Media Action, a contributor to Chicago Indymedia and Third Coast Press, and the host of a weekly radio show on WHPK, the radio station of the University of Chicago
Another good one:
Corporate Congress Critters Kill Net Neutrality
Thursday April 27th 2006, 8:43 am
Corporate whores in Congress have officially inaugurated the process of turning the internet into another platform for ephemeral junk culture, an interactive version of television where there are 500 channels and nothing on. “Internet carriers, including AT&T Inc., have been strident supporters of upending the Internet’s tradition of network neutrality and have lobbied Congress to make it happen. They argue that Web sites, particularly those featuring video and audio that require significant bandwidth, should be able to pay extra so that users don’t have to wait as long for downloads,” reports the San Francisco Chronicle. “Internet carriers say they would use the money they earn to expand the Internet’s capacity.” I suppose this would operate the same way multinational oil corporations use their massive profits to search for new oil reserves or expand refining capacity. “By a 34-22 vote, members of the House Energy and Commerce Committee rejected a Democratic-backed Net neutrality amendment that also enjoyed support from Internet and software companies including Microsoft, Amazon.com and Google,” writes Declan McCullagh for CNET News.
In the early 90s, I was drawn to the internet primarily because it was a decentralized communication medium born as a “neutral network,” that is to say no one interest or body controlled the entire network or even large chunks. “When Tim Berners-Lee started to sell the idea of a ‘World Wide Web’, he did not need to seek the approval of network owners to allow the protocols that built the internet to run,” writes Lawrence Lessig, professor of law at Stanford Law School and founder of its Center for Internet and Society. “Likewise, when eBay launched its auction service, or Amazon its bookselling service, neither needed the permission of the telephone companies before those services could take off. Because the internet was ‘end-to-end’, innovators and users were free to offer new content, new applications or even new protocols for communication without any permission from the network. So long as these new applications obeyed simple internet protocols (’TCP/IP’), the internet was open to their ideas. The network did not pick and choose the applications or content it would support; it was neutral, leaving that choice to the users.”
Congress, as a craven and slavish handmaid to corporate interests and domination, is in the process of squashing internet neutrality. It’s all about control and corporate centralization, not innovation and expanding capacity. It’s about making sure the internet serves the commercial and political purposes of large corporations. It’s also about locking the alternative media out of the only effective medium it has at its disposal. If you doubt this, see if you can find a truth movement channel on one of your 500 cable television channels.
Once upon a time, television was considered part of the public commons and its signal was transmitted over airwaves owned by the people. It was stolen and hopes dashed in short order by private and corporate interests many decades ago. Even the charade of noblesse oblige—or corporate broadcasters pretending to be trustees obliged to protect what the people own, or think they own—is long gone and the Fairness Doctrine is dead as well, killed by “deregulation” (an excuse for theft by corporate leviathans) under Reagan, Bush, and Clinton.
In fact, the airwaves have become, like virtually everything else of value, a “raw commodity for financial speculation,” as David Bollier writes.
Public access television—an arrangement made between mega-corporations and the public when the medium was handed over by thieves and charlatans operating out of the whorehouse on the Potomac—is now an endangered species. Senate Bill 1349 and House Bill 3146 endeavored to eliminate local cable television franchises, long considered an “obstacle” by massive telecoms. If you don’t believe there will be a repeat of this in regard to the internet, I have a bridge to sell you.
“Broadband providers now have the same authority as cable providers to act as gatekeepers: the network owner can choose which services and equipment consumers may use,” explains John Windhausen, Jr. “Network operators can adopt conflicting and proprietary standards for the attachment of consumer equipment, can steer consumers to certain web sites over others, can block whatever Internet services or applications they like, and make their preferred applications perform better than others…. open broadband networks are vitally important to our society, our future economic growth, our high-tech manufacturing sector, and our First Amendment rights to information free of censorship or control. Even if an openness policy imposes some slight burden on network operators, these microeconomic concerns pale in comparison to the macroeconomic benefits to the society and economy at large of maintaining an open Internet.”
In the future, we may be relegated to the “slow lane” (no video or audio), or locked out entirely if a telecom disagrees with our content. Free expression of ideas, especially ideas contrary to those of the neolib global elite and transnational corporations, are now at risk more than ever.
It should be remembered that corporatism is essentially fascism, as the grand daddy of fascism, Benito Mussolini, long ago explained. Fascists not only favor and enforce censorship—ultimately they violently suppress all opposition.
In the not too distant future, as the internet becomes yet another tawdry and dumbed-down consumerist venue surrounded by lawyers and gun turrets, we may be reduced to handing out our content via DVD on street corners.
Of course, this will be defined as terrorism and we will be punished accordingly.
The End of the Blogosphere?
March 1, 2006
By Mitchell Szczepanczyk
Undeniably, blogs and their collective identity known as the "blogosphere" have become an extraordinary phenomenon. And no matter what topics they may discuss or what political leanings they may espouse, they are all under grave and immediate threat.
The threat involves the issue of "net neutrality" the idea that those who manage the virtual roads for internet and digital communications don't discriminate who travels on those roads and why. But America's major cable and telecommunications companies are heavily lobbying Congress now to change that.
Companies like AT&T, Verizon, and Comcast want to abolish net neutrality and set up the virtual equivalent of tolls on the internet. The idea would be to set up separate tiers of internet access - the digital equivalent of a ten-lane superhighway alongside a single-lane dirt road. If you want to access the superhighway, you'd have to pay AT&T or whomever extra fees through a virtual toll for that access - a source of fantastic profit potential for the would-be tollkeepers on the internet. But those who can't afford the superhighway can still take the dirt road, right?
Here's the problem for bloggers and other alternative and independent media producers who distribute media via the internet: Those who can't afford that privileged access will far outnumber those who can, and the result would be, as Ben Scott from the media activist organization Free Press put it, to "banish hundreds of thousands of bloggers to the slow lane".
As a result, that digital dirt road will be endlessly clogged and more than likely face considerable delays to try to access media content on the internet. And that access isn't just simple webpages but also other media like television and radio which are becoming and will become digitized and thus rely on the internet as the major means of transit.
This will then lead to a Catch-22 for bloggers. Either pay the telecom companies hefty ongoing fees which you may or may not afford, or face the digital equivalent of a black hole where you can't easily or readily access independent media content. Either way, the abolition of net neutrality will dissuade a great many online media producers and consumers, thereby striking an effective death blow to the blogosphere and the variety and diversity currently on the internet. The advantage would thus go to already wealthy and entrenched media producers.
In the federal government in Washington, the main legislation concerning the media in the United States - the Telecommunications Act - is being rewritten, and the fate of net neutrality (and perhaps the future of the internet) rests in the balance. Unfortunately, Net Neutrality clauses have been struck out of the most recent draft of the Telecom Act.
Now the blogosphere may face its greatest challenge: saving itself.
Fortunately, there are recent media-related victories that can be drawn upon for inspiration. In 2003, activists across the political spectrum joined in widespread protest and outrage against the FCC as it tried to implement a series of controversial media ownership rules. That response fueled a successful emergency court order and subsequent lawsuit which rolled back the rules for the time being.
When the dust settled, some three million people responded to the FCC against its controversial rules - a response unprecedented in the FCC's history. The same or larger scale of response to Congress will be needed to preserve net neutrality. And the blogosphere, with its millions of active folks online, hold that very potential to rally widespread awareness of net neutrality and keep the internet free.
If you have a blog or independent media website, consider learning more about net neutrality, discussing it on your website, linking to some of the net neutrality campaigns already underway like Net Freedom Now by Free Press (www.freepress.net) or Protect Net Neutrality by Common Cause (www.commoncause.org), and contact your representatives in Congress to encourage them to preserve net neutrality. One group I work with, Chicago Media Action, has made available a series of net neutrality banner ads to use on your website to promote the issue, online at CMA's website (www.chicagomediaaction.org).
The blogosphere has been rewriting the internet. Whether it will continue to do so depends on whether or not it steps up to help preserve net neutrality. Mitchell Szczepanczyk (www.szcz.org) is an organizer with Chicago Media Action, a contributor to Chicago Indymedia and Third Coast Press, and the host of a weekly radio show on WHPK, the radio station of the University of Chicago
Another good one:
Corporate Congress Critters Kill Net Neutrality
Thursday April 27th 2006, 8:43 am
In the early 90s, I was drawn to the internet primarily because it was a decentralized communication medium born as a “neutral network,” that is to say no one interest or body controlled the entire network or even large chunks. “When Tim Berners-Lee started to sell the idea of a ‘World Wide Web’, he did not need to seek the approval of network owners to allow the protocols that built the internet to run,” writes Lawrence Lessig, professor of law at Stanford Law School and founder of its Center for Internet and Society. “Likewise, when eBay launched its auction service, or Amazon its bookselling service, neither needed the permission of the telephone companies before those services could take off. Because the internet was ‘end-to-end’, innovators and users were free to offer new content, new applications or even new protocols for communication without any permission from the network. So long as these new applications obeyed simple internet protocols (’TCP/IP’), the internet was open to their ideas. The network did not pick and choose the applications or content it would support; it was neutral, leaving that choice to the users.”
Congress, as a craven and slavish handmaid to corporate interests and domination, is in the process of squashing internet neutrality. It’s all about control and corporate centralization, not innovation and expanding capacity. It’s about making sure the internet serves the commercial and political purposes of large corporations. It’s also about locking the alternative media out of the only effective medium it has at its disposal. If you doubt this, see if you can find a truth movement channel on one of your 500 cable television channels.
Once upon a time, television was considered part of the public commons and its signal was transmitted over airwaves owned by the people. It was stolen and hopes dashed in short order by private and corporate interests many decades ago. Even the charade of noblesse oblige—or corporate broadcasters pretending to be trustees obliged to protect what the people own, or think they own—is long gone and the Fairness Doctrine is dead as well, killed by “deregulation” (an excuse for theft by corporate leviathans) under Reagan, Bush, and Clinton.
In fact, the airwaves have become, like virtually everything else of value, a “raw commodity for financial speculation,” as David Bollier writes.
Public access television—an arrangement made between mega-corporations and the public when the medium was handed over by thieves and charlatans operating out of the whorehouse on the Potomac—is now an endangered species. Senate Bill 1349 and House Bill 3146 endeavored to eliminate local cable television franchises, long considered an “obstacle” by massive telecoms. If you don’t believe there will be a repeat of this in regard to the internet, I have a bridge to sell you.
“Broadband providers now have the same authority as cable providers to act as gatekeepers: the network owner can choose which services and equipment consumers may use,” explains John Windhausen, Jr. “Network operators can adopt conflicting and proprietary standards for the attachment of consumer equipment, can steer consumers to certain web sites over others, can block whatever Internet services or applications they like, and make their preferred applications perform better than others…. open broadband networks are vitally important to our society, our future economic growth, our high-tech manufacturing sector, and our First Amendment rights to information free of censorship or control. Even if an openness policy imposes some slight burden on network operators, these microeconomic concerns pale in comparison to the macroeconomic benefits to the society and economy at large of maintaining an open Internet.”
In the future, we may be relegated to the “slow lane” (no video or audio), or locked out entirely if a telecom disagrees with our content. Free expression of ideas, especially ideas contrary to those of the neolib global elite and transnational corporations, are now at risk more than ever.
It should be remembered that corporatism is essentially fascism, as the grand daddy of fascism, Benito Mussolini, long ago explained. Fascists not only favor and enforce censorship—ultimately they violently suppress all opposition.
In the not too distant future, as the internet becomes yet another tawdry and dumbed-down consumerist venue surrounded by lawyers and gun turrets, we may be reduced to handing out our content via DVD on street corners.
Of course, this will be defined as terrorism and we will be punished accordingly.
First off, Fidel, fascism is a hyper-nationalist version of statism. Therefore, any ideology that supports less government intervention and more private ownership is most definitely NOT fascist.
Not wanting to increase gov't regulation of the internet is not the same thing as wanting corporations to have control over it. It's advocating that consumers ultimately have control. By deregulating the communications industry, the door will open for more competition, thereby automatically reducing the likelihood that consumers will have fewer choices. If companies A, B and C control the entirety of the 'net, and thus what information we receive, and the industry is entirely deregulated, I can absolutely without question guarantee that you will see the arrival of a competitor whose business model is to serve those customers who want more choice.
That is a what a free market does.
Currently, the corporations that you note are in bed with gov't have industry control precisely because of gov't intervention. AT&T, for example, had a monopoly on communications for some time (as Ma Bell) via gov't protection. What you are advocating - while well-intentioned - will ultimately be the cause of less choice, not the protector of more.
While you denounce the gov't being in bed with corporations, you simultaneously wish for more of the same ... where there is regulation there is lobbying and where there is lobbying there is corporatism. I should think this fact is obvious by now.
Not wanting to increase gov't regulation of the internet is not the same thing as wanting corporations to have control over it. It's advocating that consumers ultimately have control. By deregulating the communications industry, the door will open for more competition, thereby automatically reducing the likelihood that consumers will have fewer choices. If companies A, B and C control the entirety of the 'net, and thus what information we receive, and the industry is entirely deregulated, I can absolutely without question guarantee that you will see the arrival of a competitor whose business model is to serve those customers who want more choice.
That is a what a free market does.
Currently, the corporations that you note are in bed with gov't have industry control precisely because of gov't intervention. AT&T, for example, had a monopoly on communications for some time (as Ma Bell) via gov't protection. What you are advocating - while well-intentioned - will ultimately be the cause of less choice, not the protector of more.
While you denounce the gov't being in bed with corporations, you simultaneously wish for more of the same ... where there is regulation there is lobbying and where there is lobbying there is corporatism. I should think this fact is obvious by now.
Here's a nice definition of fascism see if you can relate it to the corporate takeover of the Internet which you propose:
Mussolini said that fascism should more properly be called "corporatism" since it was, under Mussolini, a blending of state and corporate power. Mussolini ought to know; he was the first fascist leader. As an economic system, fascism was widely admired in the west (Churchill considered Mussolini "a great man" and liked the economic aspects of fascism). In America fascism was, unsurprisingly, extremely popular among the upper class. The leading advocates of a fascist economic system to fight the depression – Germany in the late thirties had beaten the depression – were the Bush family and other elite clans. There was even a weird kind of half-assed coup attempt staged against FDR by those same interests in the mid thirties. Fascism isn’t a puppet of the ruling class. It is an extension.
Definition one: it is an economic system in which corporations (or the wealthy elite) are essentially the government and vice versa.
Mussolini said that fascism should more properly be called "corporatism" since it was, under Mussolini, a blending of state and corporate power. Mussolini ought to know; he was the first fascist leader. As an economic system, fascism was widely admired in the west (Churchill considered Mussolini "a great man" and liked the economic aspects of fascism). In America fascism was, unsurprisingly, extremely popular among the upper class. The leading advocates of a fascist economic system to fight the depression – Germany in the late thirties had beaten the depression – were the Bush family and other elite clans. There was even a weird kind of half-assed coup attempt staged against FDR by those same interests in the mid thirties. Fascism isn’t a puppet of the ruling class. It is an extension.
Definition one: it is an economic system in which corporations (or the wealthy elite) are essentially the government and vice versa.
Have you read anything about net neutrality or you're happy with letting 3 or 4 companies take over the networks. Are you for deregulation in all instances, even utilitilities?
Nice definition on Wikipedia about Deregulation.:
Deregulation is the process by which governments remove restrictions on business in order to (in theory) encourage the efficient operation of markets. The stated rationale for deregulation is often that fewer regulations will lead to a raised level of competitiveness, therefore higher productivity, more efficiency and lower prices overall. Deregulation is different from liberalization because a liberalized market, allowing any number of players, can be regulated to protect the consumer's rights, especially to prevent de facto or even legal oligopolies. However, the terms are often used interchangeably within deregulated/liberalised industries.
Deregulation gained momentum in the 1970s, influenced by research at the University of Chicago and the theories of Ludwig von Mises, Friedrich von Hayek, and Milton Friedman, among others. A notable early example of deregulation in the United States is the Airline Deregulation Act, which sought to reintroduce market forces to the heavily regulated commercial airline industry. Subsequent deregulation has had a mixed record.
One problem that encouraged deregulation was the way in which the regulated industries often controlled the government regulatory agencies, using them to serve the industries' interests. Even where regulatory bodies started out functioning independently, a process known as regulatory capture often sees industry interests come to dominate those of the consumer. A similar pattern has been observed with the deregulation process, itself often controlled by the regulated industries.
Perceived failures of deregulation (such as the failure of the Savings & Loan sector of the U.S. during the 1980s) have led to limited re-regulation, and more balanced approaches to regulation that emphasize the quality of regulation over the quantity. That is, instead of simply removing (or adding) regulations on business, the point is to regulate business intelligently, using as sophisticated an economic theory as possible. Many processes labelled deregulation where anyway examples of re-regulation alongside a market liberalisation process taking state-owned service providers into the private sector.
Nice definition on Wikipedia about Deregulation.:
Deregulation is the process by which governments remove restrictions on business in order to (in theory) encourage the efficient operation of markets. The stated rationale for deregulation is often that fewer regulations will lead to a raised level of competitiveness, therefore higher productivity, more efficiency and lower prices overall. Deregulation is different from liberalization because a liberalized market, allowing any number of players, can be regulated to protect the consumer's rights, especially to prevent de facto or even legal oligopolies. However, the terms are often used interchangeably within deregulated/liberalised industries.
Deregulation gained momentum in the 1970s, influenced by research at the University of Chicago and the theories of Ludwig von Mises, Friedrich von Hayek, and Milton Friedman, among others. A notable early example of deregulation in the United States is the Airline Deregulation Act, which sought to reintroduce market forces to the heavily regulated commercial airline industry. Subsequent deregulation has had a mixed record.
One problem that encouraged deregulation was the way in which the regulated industries often controlled the government regulatory agencies, using them to serve the industries' interests. Even where regulatory bodies started out functioning independently, a process known as regulatory capture often sees industry interests come to dominate those of the consumer. A similar pattern has been observed with the deregulation process, itself often controlled by the regulated industries.
Perceived failures of deregulation (such as the failure of the Savings & Loan sector of the U.S. during the 1980s) have led to limited re-regulation, and more balanced approaches to regulation that emphasize the quality of regulation over the quantity. That is, instead of simply removing (or adding) regulations on business, the point is to regulate business intelligently, using as sophisticated an economic theory as possible. Many processes labelled deregulation where anyway examples of re-regulation alongside a market liberalisation process taking state-owned service providers into the private sector.
Fidel said:
Yes, a BLENDING OF STATE AND CORPORATE POWER!!!!!
That is EXACTLY what you are advocating.
Geees.
I am advocating the abolition of state power over the internet, and absolute private ownership. There would be more competition and LESS chance of an overall reduction in choice. In what way has the FCC provided MORE choice in any communications medium? And while you're researching that, have a boo at their history of censorship ...
You're thick as a brick, you know??
Here's an article in which SMALL cable companies and internet providers are AGAINST net neutrality laws ... these are the folks that you seem to believe will be marginalised without net neutrality laws when in fact they are the ones that stand to benefit most from an open market ..
http://news.com.com/Smaller+cable+firms+take+aim+at+Net+neutrality+fans/2100-1028_3-6069873.html
Note: increased competition = MORE consumer choice.
What you advocate will without question DECREASE consumer choice, making it only profitable for LARGE companies in this sector. Allowing network owners to charge more for 'bandwith hogs' as the article above calls companies like Google and Yahoo will allow for greater profitablity which in turn allows for more competition.
http://news.com.com/Smaller+cable+firms+take+aim+at+Net+neutrality+fans/2100-1028_3-6069873.html
Note: increased competition = MORE consumer choice.
What you advocate will without question DECREASE consumer choice, making it only profitable for LARGE companies in this sector. Allowing network owners to charge more for 'bandwith hogs' as the article above calls companies like Google and Yahoo will allow for greater profitablity which in turn allows for more competition.
So eventually you would wind up with, say, 10 big companies running most stuff, like with oil, like with Wallmart kinda thing.
We used to have thousands of small shops, all gone now, empty or converted to flats.
Economies of scale mean that Tesco and a few others run the ballgame and jiggle the numbers amongst each other so that none of them goes bust and the illusion of "competition" doesn't get fessed up.
Look look, theres six of us. That means we have a competitive market Mr Government so leave us alone.
The way its been run recently has done really well, which means they'll probably change it......
US retains hold of the internet
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/4441544.stm
US retains hold of the internet
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/4441544.stm
