Milan Kopcok, Fotolia.com
When Sir Tim Berners-Lee invented the web back in the early 1990s, he wrote a protocol that is open and free to use and akin to the spirit of the Free Software movement itself. To this day, he conceives the web as a means to connect people more than just connecting machines.
Big corporate telecom companies would have you believe otherwise. The likes of Comcast and Verizon would have you believe that the Internet can't just work like that; that it's not sustainable. They say that for the Internet to work, it has to be tiered; it has to have an expensive and fast freeway for "premium" content, delivered from corporations to consumers (and, God forbid!, not the other way around), and a goat path for everybody else. Otherwise, the Net will collapse under its own weight; it will implode.
Speaking of goat paths, I hooked up to the Internet for the first time in 1995. My 28.8K modem (that could also send faxes, which was neat) would ring up the Internet cafe down the road – the only Internet provider nearby at the time.
At first, I paid by the minute and tended to connect late in the evening, when the phone rates were cheaper. After a while, I got a sweet "wavy" flat rate, which meant that during the day I still had to pay by the minute, but for 12 glorious hours, from 8pm to 8am, I could go nuts and surf and download to my heart's content.
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