We’re at a crossroads in the history of the Internet. War for the Web explores this digital frontier, seeking answers to the future by delving into its past. We will investigate the beginnings of the Internet, its exponential growth in the past decade, and how this phenomenal culture of innovation—which spawned advances such as Google, Facebook, and Amazon—may be in jeopardy.

The SEC has moved network neutrality from the murky back rooms of day-to-day operations into the bright light of of shareholder resolutions. 

This is a significant turn for the SEC and it opens up a new avenue in the campaign for net neutrality. As the SEC helpfully reminds us, “One of the key rights of shareholders is the right to vote their shares on important matters that affect the companies they own.” The SEC gives companies a fair amount of discretion on resolutions. In previous years, the SEC’s Division of Corporation Finance ruled that similar net neutrality proposals pertained to “ordinary business” and could be excluded from shareholder ballots. 

The telcos have reason to be afraid. Proxy fights have derailed business plans and taken down CEOs. Most successful campaigns have been carried out by activist fund managers with substantial stakes in relatively small companies (by stock exchange standards). 

The Benedictine Sisters of Mount St. Scholastica, the Nathan Cummings Foundation, and Trillium Asset Management have led the effort to put this on shareholder ballots. They will need help to move it forward. Proposals must claim a minimum percentage of support in order to be allowed on the ballot next year.

This time of year about 20 percent of U.S. households receive proxy voting forms, and most are promptly discarded. If you ask your parents and grandparents, chances are good someone owned some shares of Ma Bell at one time and now has voting rights in a telco.

If your only investments are in mutual funds, you can still make your voice heard. Contact the fund management company, tell them you support net neutrality, and ask them how they are planning to vote on the issue.

We are running a guest commentary today. Eric Null is a third-year law student at Cardozo Law School in New York City. He is passionate about corporate and intellectual property law, as well as technology and telecommunications policy. Follow him @ericnull or check out his papers. While researching a paper about municipal broadband networks, I was struck by the tremendous benefits that municipal networks can provide. It can be the first high-speed Internet link for an area without broadband, or it can provide some much-needed competition in areas that currently have access to broadband, but for some reason that existing access is unsatisfactory (e.g. price, service). Municipalities, in theory, can run the network for the benefit of the public rather than with a vicious profit maximization motive. Indeed, municipal networks bring many benefits. But first, a little history. In the United States, cable providers have set up regional monopolies for themselves, and “competitors” such as DSL and satellite are characterized by slower connection speeds and it is arguable that they are actual substitutes to cable access. Certainly within the cable industry, any “competitive” cable company attempting to compete with incumbents is met with high costs of building new infrastructure and lack of customer base. Municipalities can pick up where smaller, private entities cannot succeed. Municipalities have had a long history of investing in critical infrastructure, and they have the mentality for long-term planning that private companies simply cannot enjoy. A large company like Verizon likely has to justify any expansion of its network to its investors and ensure them that the venture will return a profit relatively quickly. Not so with municipalities; a city network allows its citizens to benefit indirectly (and directly) over the long-term. Thus, city governments can be a formidable competitor in the telecom and cable industries. Some states, regrettably, have banned or restricted the practice. In Nixon v.

While I was talking with him on the phone Thursday night, he checked his Web site and about 175,000 people had bought his special through PayPal. He expected 200,000 total downloads by the weekend, which meant he would have grossed $1 million. After covering costs of about $250,000 for the live production and the Web site, that’s a $750,000 profit. And he owns the rights, and the long tail of buyers, in perpetuity. The transparency of the enterprise, including its cost in relation to how many people bought in, was the subject of media coverage all last week. ... “O.K., so NBC is this huge company and they have all these studios and these satellites to beam stuff out,” he said, “but on the Web, both NBC.com and LouisCK.com have the same amount of bandwidth. We are equals and there are things you can do with that. This has been a fun little experiment.”

To understand their logic, consider this thought experiment: Imagine that you own a freeway -- say, Highway 101 through Silicon Valley -- and you had the power to pluck a car from a traffic jam with a helicopter and deposit it on a clear stretch of the road. Naturally, drivers who could afford the service would be happy to sign up. "That highway is like the Internet, and the individual cars are the packets of data. The ISP is essentially the gatekeeper that controls the flow of cars on the highway. If the ISP is allowed to snatch any car from the back of a very long line and put it in front of everybody else when the driver of the car pays a priority delivery fee, would the ISP have an incentive to keep the road congested or to expand the road capacity?" they wrote. The answer is pretty obvious: If you can make more money by keeping your network congested, why would you invest money to make it less crowded?

The truth is that if we want to make sure small businesses can grow with the assistance of broadband, the Internet must remain open.

Black and Latino communities are coming together to keep the Internet open and free from discrimination. Because communities of color rely on the Internet and are increasingly embracing wireless technology, we are organizing to protect our online communication rights. These rights are currently at risk: FCC Net Neutrality rules provide few protections for wireless users — and a pending congressional resolution would overturn these rules and hand control of the Internet to corporations. What’s more, the Department of Justice has acknowledged that AT&T’s proposed merger with T-Mobile is a serious threat to wireless competition and would raise prices for consumers.

“Access to the internet is akin to a civil rights issue for the 21st century,” said David Cohen, Comcast’s executive vice president. “It’s that access that enables people in poorer areas to equalize access to a quality education, quality health care and vocational opportunities.”

"Quite frankly, people in lower-income communities, mostly people of color, have such limited access to broadband than people in wealthier communities."

Whether it's legal for a wireless carrier to cripple tethering services is unclear. Verizon agreed to follow open Internet principles as a condition of acquiring the spectrum that it uses for 4G wireless phones. One interpretation of that condition is that the company shouldn't attempt to restrict tethering on its 4G network -- though apparently it's still free to do so on the 3G network. … But aside from neutrality issues, Verizon's move clearly seems hard to justify from a pricing standpoint. Given that the company is already going to charge new users based on the amount of data they consume, there's no reason for it to also impose a surcharge for tethering.

Free Press will file a complaint today with the Federal Communications Commission against Verizon for violating the rules that govern the licenses for its LTE network. Licensees of the C Block of the upper 700 MHz block, over which Verizon runs its LTE network, may not “deny, limit, or restrict” the ability of their customers to use the applications or devices of the customers’ choosing. Recent reports reveal that Verizon has been doing just that by asking Google to disable tethering applications in the Android Market. Tethering applications, which allow users to make their phones into mobile hot-spots, implicate the customers' ability to use both the applications and devices of their choice. Free Press argues that by preventing customers from downloading tethering applications from the Android Market, Verizon is restricting not only the applications available to them, but also limits use of tethered devices such as laptop or tablet computers.

Today, take a moment to learn about a promising documentary and pledge some support to make sure it gets made! A short description:

Imagine if your favorite website was blocked or slowed down because it competed with the corporation that “owned” the Internet bandwidth. How would you react if your posts on Facebook were censored by the government? What would happen if independent blogs and news media became priced out of the Internet because they couldn’t afford the rates charged for a new Internet fast lane? What kind of power should lie within the governments? Should they have the ability to have a virtual Kill Switch?

We find these threats to the free and open Internet to be the single greatest danger to democracy today. #killswitch the film will inform and inspire action in a population largely unaware of these important issues.