When I first logged on back in 1989, ARPNET’s descendant was the realm of government, librarians, and cybernauts both amateur and professional. BBSs, SLED, Gopher, Usenet, IRC, among others, gave people the opportunity to express themselves beyond the gatekeepers of published works, free and independent. Lynx, still one of my favorite browsers, lead me to what would become the World Wide Web, now commonly referred to as “the Internet”, a glowing green trail of links unspoiled by advertisements. Back then the majority of people did not have personal computers, the main bottleneck to use with school and library terminals few, far between, and perpetually claimed by nerds and/or computer science students; paltry oases in the desert primeval.

And then, the explosion: Netscape, Compuserve, Delphi, Prodigy . . . AOL. Color! Pictures, real time chat rooms, blinking text from Hell; the desert bloomed. PCs dropped in price and proliferated, as did the sharing of opinions. For good or bad, ordinary folk were able to share their online travels in web logs at sites such as Geocities where knowledge of programming was not required. 

I don’t want to re-tell the whole story from this point. I wanted to give whoever reads this a little reminding hint of what it was like before the Net’s ubiquity. We were isolated, limited, anchored, knowing only what a few outlets — television, radio, print media — fed us. The Net can be a rambling, frothing mess but it also offers Everyone what used to be controlled by the very few (1%, if you will). Killing neutrality will not necessarily kill the Net but will make it another irrelevant medium and give the crackers (not hackers) a juicy challenge.