The free internet is seriously threatened

This is really horrible. Read what's going on in some excerpts from an article by Elliot D. Cohen entitled, "The Great American Firewall: Why the Net is poised to become a global weapon of mass deception":

Hindsight is often touted as better than foresight, yet such a truism should not blind us to an imminent threat before it happens. Like someone who takes up with an abusive mate and rationalizes the threat to life and limb until the battering leaves undeniable, indelible scars, there are good reasons right now to expect the worst when it comes to the survival of the free Internet. Now unfolding is a legal-political-corporate plot for turning a vibrant, democratic Internet into a global web of corporate and government deceit. The tell-tale signs exist but as in domestic abuse, the perpetrators (federal government and a small group of interconnected, powerful telecom and mainstream media monopolies) have done their utmost to keep it hidden behind closed doors.

Under the veil of a virtual mainstream media blackout, on June 27, 2005, the United States Supreme Court granted giant cable companies like Comcast and Verizon the legal right to dominate and control the Internet. It ruled that broadband Internet was an information service like cable TV rather than an interactive telecommunication service like the telephone (National Cable & Telecommunications Association vs. Brand X Internet Services). This gave these behemoths the green light to exclude Independent Service Providers (ISPs) from using their pipes, thereby laying the foundation for a corporate dominated and controlled Internet. Succinctly, in controlling the conduit of communication across the Internet, these companies now had acquired the legal right to control the content (Web of Deceit: How Internet Freedom Got the Federal Ax, And Why Corporate News Censored the Story). Moreover, in writing this decision, the Court also left the door open for telephone companies like ATT to control telephone modem connectivity to the Internet. As a result, just three weeks after the decision was handed down,
the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) seized the opportunity to grant this right, effectively ushering in the beginning of the end of free-access Internet.

Here's what it's going to look like if big business has its way:

Presently, behemoth telecom corporations like Comcast, Verizon, and AT&T are poised to set up toll booths on the Internet. According to this plan, only content providers with deep pockets would be given optimum Internet connectivity. This would leave the rest of the Internet community running slowly or not at all. The net result would be the demise of Internet neutrality. No longer would all of us have an equal voice within the freest and most comprehensive democratic forum ever devised by humankind. This would accordingly be yet a further maneuver in the gradual dismantling of the free, democratic Internet.

Indisputably, the Internet is currently on a path of becoming an extension of the corporate media, owned and operated by a few giant corporations that control the information Americans receive. This erosive trend threatens to infect the Internet just as it has radio, broadcast, and cable TV. The transition, however, has not been politically benign. Rather, big money has teamed with neoconservative politics to usher in an age in which quid pro quo between mainstream media corporations and government largely define what Americans see and hear.

This is, of course, what the right wing people want: to destroy the ability to communicate for the rest of us. It is very troubling.