Diane Hawkins’s letter in the Acorn (“Our government should keep hands off the Internet”) has several common misconceptions about the ’net and the role of the government in general.

Let me set her straight.

The Internet is a creation of the U.S. government and started life as a defense research project. It evolved into an academic tool and then became the commercial powerhouse that we know today.

During this time, the government has stepped back from it, turning both the ownership of the technology and the responsibility for its organization to the community who uses it.

It’s now an immensely valuable resource, and the argument about “Internet neutrality” is really about who gets to own that resource.

At the moment the Internet is owned by all of us; it’s a resource we all share. A consortium of powerful interests—corporations—are making a play for it; they want to own it, and the way they would do this is by taking over the protocols that operate the flow of network traffic.

The Federal Communications Commission, acting on our behalf, is resisting their efforts.

This sets up another of those “powerful interests versus the government” situations, and as with the other great debate, the stakes are high enough for a lot of disinformation to be spread around.

In this case, the government isn’t going to take over the Internet because it still “sort of” owns it. They just want the thing to work because it’s now vital to our security as a nation and they realize that the fragmentation that would come with its breakup could jeopardize this.

There’s actually nothing stopping companies from setting up their own version of the Internet, but those who’ve tried have discovered it’s a very hard sell–nobody wants it.

That’s why they want chunks of the original. Martin Usher Thousand Oaks