Never fear- internet "freedom" is on the way! Photo from Flickr by soggydan.John McCain, a self-confessed luddite who relies on his wife to handle his technology for him,  is sponsoring a bill he calls "The Internet Freedom Act". That's a pretty awesome name for a bill, huh? Who the hell wouldn't want that? You're probably pretty much ready to sign on the dotted line, right?

Unfortunately, the goal of this bill is to give "freedom" (a word politicians can freely use for any policy they are in favor of) to ISPs and Telecommunications companies to dissect internet traffic and start regulating the interent based on the type of data, or perhaps, who that data comes from. To date, this cutthroat practice has been kept in check by an FCC philosophy called 'net nuetrality', which guides their internet regulation to make the internet as data agnostic as possible, free of this kind of inspection and discrimination.

If you're not in favor having your internet service packaged and charged according to the type of data it is- video, VOIP, music, peer to peer, music, etc.- then I hope you'll let your legislator know that this is not acceptable. Under this plan, companies like Comcast, Verizon and AT&T would also have the ability to throttle back any content that was in competition with their business interest.

Are you a Skype user? Well, I guarantee that you won't be once the Telcom company decides to slow down all Skype traffic to encourage you to use their own phone service. Google products are in particlar danger- Google and the ISPs have been fighting over Google's bandwidth usage for years now, and this would give the ISPs a strong upper hand by allowing them to limit Google traffic. Oh, and did I mention that John McCain is the single largest recipient of Telecom funding in Congress? I'm not implying that McCain in their pocket, but I'm certain he's not technically savvy enough to know when he's being used.