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Highlands Today

Star Wars Or Profit Wars?

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Joyce Minor

Published: October 7, 2007

The Internet never ceases to amaze me. The wealth of information, products, and services available at the click of a mouse is astounding.

Granted, some of it is trash, and not worth the two seconds it takes to pull it up. But most of it is reliable, up-to-the-minute current, and verifiable in a few extra clicks. Wow! We are living Star Trek.

When I was in college, churning out a research paper required hours and hours hunched in a keaster-numbing, straight-backed, wooden, library chair, buried so far back in the stacks, you could literally get lost there and no one would find you for days. I spent so many nights with my nose in a crumbling book, I developed dust bunnies on my eyebrows.

Now, a student can access almost any library in the world from the comfort and security of her/his dorm room, from the back seat of a car, or from a blanket on some beach "where no man has gone before." I love it!

What I don't love is paying a monthly fee for access to the Internet. Shouldn't the information highway be just like the interstate highway — free to all? Everyone (with the possible exception of Al Gore) knows that no one person invented the Internet. And no one person or company owns it.

The information highway is not a toll road, yet private companies have set up "toll booths" at every "on ramp" to a highway that rightfully belongs to all of us. Who do they think they are? And how long is government going to continue to let them get away with it?

Maybe I'll just go out and construct a toll booth on south US 27 and begin charging every car to enter Sebring. No, it's not my highway. But the Internet doesn't belong to the phone company, nor to the cable companies, AOL, or Netscape. Yet they, and dozens of others, all stand by their locked "gateways" and collect their fixed fees from every person or company entering the information highway.

Companies that make and install the equipment necessary for Internet access have every right to sell their products as well as their installation and repair services. Likewise, companies that make software for Internet access have the right to sell their browser products. But use of the Internet is not theirs to sell, daily, monthly, or any other way. And it's about time someone stood up and told them so.

No one should ever be stranded on the shoulder of the information highway because he/she can't afford the price of admission. I think we should all be able to turn on our computers whenever and wherever we want and just say, "Beam me up, Scottie."

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