Political for a minute

I’m late to the party, as usual, but this is pretty important to me. You see, I’m a writer. Not a famous one, most days not even a very good one, but a writer nonetheless. And the internet has given me back a voice that I thought I had lost more than a decade ago. Through blogging and reading blogs and meeting new people through my blog I have found my voice and I now get to do cool things like write for Pokerworks and Truckin’ and this little corner of the intarweb.

But that ability feels really threatened right now, by a movement to take away something called Net Neutrality. There’s more info here, but basically Net Neutrality is the covenant that the internet is based on, that the ‘net moves information, and doesn’t make decisions on what information moves based on content. Some big businesses and Congresspersons are looking to change that, and it would really cramp my style, and have a negative impact on my personal income. I have been fortunate enough to have three nice folks come up and sign on as sponsors for this blog, and they pay me a little money each month to do so. If this legislation to preserve Net Neutrality doesn’t go through, my blog would quite possible load more slowly, or not at all, depending on the whims of the local internet provider. So my sponsors would probably pull out. And the website that I write for would probably either go away, or not be able to pay me to write for them anymore, because their traffic would be killed as well.

It’s not so much about the money, but that’s a motivation that folks can more easily understand. It’s about the potential to lose my voice. Without this little corner of the blogosphere, and the few of you that come here and read my scribblings, I’m just another guy screaming into the void, and I think that would drive me even battier. So many of us would lose our voice, and so many of the cool things on the internet, like etree.org, wikipedia, flickr, would all go away. So click on the little banner to the right and write your congressperson.

Please.