If you work at a company that uses the Internet to sell to customers or
to buy from suppliers you should care about the net neutrality discussion.
You should, but you probably don't have the money to buy some politicians
to do something about it, and unfortunately the biggest companies do,
and they're busy doing just that:
Who would have thought that twitter and facebook could foment a revolution?
Yet Wael Ghonim says it did. He's one of the people behind the
"We are all Khaled Said" facebook page, and he spent a dozen days in jail for it:
Here's his
TED Talk:
"Because of the Internet, the truth prevailed.
And everyone knew the truth.
And everyone started to think that this guy can be my brother."
Here's a post from that facebook page on 3 March 2011:
"I really want you ALL to understand that your support to Free Egypt &
Egyptians is vital. Don’t you ever think that sitting on FaceBook
supporting & commenting help help Egypt. A whole revolution started on
Facebook & is now bringing Freedom & starting a new modern Egypt."
Other Egyptian organizers say similar things:
"Online organising is very important because activists have been able
to discuss and take decisions without having to organise a meeting which
could be broken up by the police," he said.'
Many of the Egyptians involved were poor and not usually thought
of as Internet users, but
David D. Kirkpatrick expalined that in the NY Times 9 Feb 2011,
Wired and Shrewd, Young Egyptians Guide Revolt:
The day of the protest, the group tried a feint to throw off the
police. The organizers let it be known that they intended to gather at
a mosque in an upscale neighborhood in central Cairo, and the police
gathered there in force. But the ...organizers set out instead for a
poor neighborhood nearby, Mr. Elaimy recalled.
Starting in a poor neighborhood was itself an experiment. “We always
start from the elite, with the same faces,” Mr. Lotfi said. “So this
time we thought, let’s try.” '
The NY Times story goes into detail about how the online organizing
interfaced with and instigated the initial meatspace protests.
And you don't need a laptop or a desktop computer to use
social media. As Reese Jones
points out,
in 2010 75% of the population of Egypt had cell
phones (60 million phones in service likely with SMS)
possible to message via Facebook via SMS at
http://m.facebook.com/.
And this was all after similar efforts in Tunisia had successfully
exiled their tyrant and inspired the Egyptians, who in turn inspired
the Lybians, etc.
And what inspired the Tunisians to start was Wikileaks posts of U.S. cables
showing the U.S. thought the Tunisian dictator was just as clueless and
corrupt as the Tunisians thought.
So yes, social networking on the Internet has fomented multiple revolutions.
If you work at a company that uses the Internet to sell to customers or to buy from suppliers you should care about the net neutrality discussion.
