The web has its roots in revolutionary ideas.
Many of the core programs that run the web and built its foundation, were created as part of the Free Software Movement. The Free Software Movement advocates that software should be free to use, distribute, and modify. By having these shareable resources available, we see a more rapid pace of technological innovation.
Publishing a website, using free software and any computer, has mostly been within the technical and financial means of anyone interested in doing it, provided they have an Internet connection, or access to one.
When you publish a website, you begin on a level playing field with any other website on the Internet. Other websites may have better servers that are able to handle more traffic, or they may have slicker content or better marketing, but the idea of net neutrality means that the companies and organizations that operate the Internet cannot prioritize any one person or company’s content over anyone else’s.
Although the Internet was originally built by the U.S. government, the organizations that shape the Internet today and that make decisions regarding its rules and protocols are mostly International and open membership and many of them rely on volunteers.
There are some very large companies that have considerable interest in the Internet and the World Wide Web and would like to change it in ways that would benefit them. Media companies would like to eliminate net neutrality in order to raise their profits and gain an advantage over smaller content creators. Apple wants all music and mobile apps on the Internet to pass through their tollgates. Google wants to be the organizer of all the web’s data. Microsoft wants people to pay for software. Banks want to continue taking a cut of each financial transaction, and are working hard to get no-fee or open competitors, such as Bitcoin, out of the picture.
In spite of all the pressures, the web remains free and it is still a place where anyone with the technical knowledge (and who doesn’t live in certain parts of the world) can publish a website to an estimated potential audience of 2.92 billion people. The more people who have the basic skills required to be web publishers, the better it is for the continued freedom of speech on the Internet.
For this reason, WatzThis? isn’t comfortable with mandatory changes to the way websites are published that could raise the financial or technical bar to becoming a web publisher.
We worry that Mozilla’s recent announcement that future versions of Firefox will only support secure web pages could be such a barrier. Fortunately, it looks like Mozilla is concerned with that as well, and have partnered with the ISRG to make SSL certificates and web encryption free beginning in the summer of 2015.
We’re looking forward to seeing how this new certificate authority will work and whether sites secured with a free SSL certificate will truly be equal in every way with sites using paid certificates. If installing an SSL certificate is required and if free certificates turn out to be less trusted than paid ones (which cost anywhere from $10 to $500), the result could be a creation of two classes of web sites — which is exactly the result that supporters of net neutrality (including Mozilla) oppose.