The political theory implications of this are just too profound to ignore: (from http://www.thenation.com/doc/20060213/chester ) "The nation's largest telephone and cable companies are crafting an alarming set of strategies that would transform the free, open and nondiscriminatory Internet of today to a privately run and branded service that would charge a fee for virtually everything we do online. Content from these providers would have first priority on our computer and television screens, while information seen as undesirable, such as peer-to-peer communications, could be relegated to a slow lane or simply shut out. To ward off the prospect of virtual toll booths on the information highway, some new media companies and public-interest groups are calling for new federal policies requiring "network neutrality" on the Internet. Common Cause, Amazon, Google, Free Press, Media Access Project and Consumers Union, among others, have proposed that broadband providers would be prohibited from discriminating against all forms of digital content Instead of the free and open network that offers equal access to all, they [corporations] want to reduce the Internet to a series of business decisions between consumers and providers." To which, Cory Doctorow at Boing Boing responds: "I wonder if Yahoo will pay me $0.0025 for every email I receive at my mail server from Yahoo subscribers? I could clean up! Or is it only giant oligopolies that get to tax the rest of the Internet?" So, the big question is (as always), do centralized hierarchies with "power" have enough to force the rest of us into a world of their making, or does "power" reside somewhere else? I, for one, think that the Internet is too elusive to co-opt. After all, it was designed to be elusive, robust. You can't connect up millions of people globally and think that they are going to sit idly by while the old school attempts to regain control of their prodigal child. I seem to recall someone saying: "The more you tighten your grip, Tarkin, the more star systems will slip through your fingers."