Firstly, yes, I know that ads are the price to be paid for free content. But if your content isn’t that great in the first place, and particularly if it isn’t your content, then please, eliminate yourself and/or your ads from the web altogether. Consider these two scenarios:

1. I am trying to watch the Oscar-award nominated-and-probably-winning film The King’s Speech. I have a newborn child still on the breast, and therefore actually visiting the theater is out of the question. I go to MoviesOnline.cc but they’ve dropped the ball again; it’s apparently not available on iTunes yet either. Having exhausted all of my options, I turn to Google and search for it: Watch The King’s Speech Online. Now, yes I admit that I’m attempting to watch a (somewhat illegal) movie and that is a service, and one which I’m willing to pay for, and typically have to in the end – so why am I required to go through fifteen sites asking me to fill out surveys or buy a Facebook theme?
2. I am looking for information on Katy Holmes latest addition to her wardrobe. Do you really need to have three Google Ads links, a banner ad, several Google Ads throughout the intro to the post and then a score of tiny square banner ads again, all before even getting to the post content? No one’s going to click your link for a free green Macbook. They don’t exist.

Thank you for agreeing, the Internet, I look forward to your prompt removal of all ads. You don’t want to go the way of the television, or worse, local radio, do you?

Google, among others, routed heavily for the FCC to allow the space to be used publicly for Internet access, rather than sold off to big companies like Verizon who would then control what can or can’t be done with the space.

According to USA Today, “white space spectrum will be unlicensed and free – like Wi-Fi – to anybody who wants to use it.” Whether or not that means you’ll be able to get free Internet or not is hard to say, but don’t count on it. If free Internet was the result of this decision, you could simply stream TV online and cut out cable networks entirely, something that cable providers are unlikely to accept without a fight.

The FCC is also apparently investigating the big cable companies like Comcast and Time-Warner to see if they’re using the transition from analog to digital to hike up prices, great news considering how cable TV five years ago cost around $20 and now with all of the digital add-on features, you’re looking at closer to $50 or more.

The piece also pointed out that while the United States invented the Internet, we now rank 14th in broadband access and speeds. I dream of a President with the wisdom to see that making America a technological leader again, whether it be via the Internet, cell communication or automotive concerns, is an obvious step in continuing our ability to thrive as a people with such a high standard of living.

So today when I saw this image at the bottom of a forward menacing my inbox, which read “i’m emailing for the greater good” I started laughing both cheeks of my buttocks off. I was instantly reminded of those forwards that tell you to tell 10 other people or Jesus will lose the battle with Satan, or the countless Internet petitions that I’ve signed with the glimmer of hope that I really will end the war in Iraq and send a monkey’s trainer to Mars.

I just had to click on it to see what the situation was. And I must say, I was quite surprised.

i’m MAKING A DIFFERENCE is a website sponsored by Microsoft. It’s a ploy, of course, to get people to use Windows Live and Messenger more often, but it does seem to come with a benefit: every time someone who’s registered with the service uses Live or Messenger, Microsoft donates some cash to their partner causes (such as the Red Cross, National AIDS Fund, Sierra Club, StopGlobalWarming.org, MS, Unicef, National Humane Society, and more). So you can literally help fight everything from breast cancer to puppies just by using Microsoft services.

Of course, no one actually uses any of Microsoft’s web services, but…

According to that, Internet Explorer’s current versions hold 52% of the browser market share. The other major players hold 47.5%, which leaves half a percent to all of the other guys out there. Just 5 years ago IE held over 84% of the market share.

That’s a major hit.

Even still, in our wonderfully future-filled science fiction modernity, we’ve discovered, patented and mass distributed as many ways to avoid both the depression we’ve convinced ourselves that everyday life is made up of as well as the actual striving to become one of those great figures of lifestyle that we wish we were. We’ve installed screens in everything possible, connected them across all of the world and replaced every aspect of our lives inside of them. Our friends, jobs, and free time, even our thoughts, are all stored up inside of our various screens, even as small as they continue to get over the years. And so we have an entirely new chance at creating ourselves; who we are, who we can make ourselves into, even as we’ve opened up a whole new door as to what we want to make ourselves into, who our new heroes and idols will be.

Not that I’m against our wonderful Internet New Reality, in any way &em; or at least not all together. The actual fact which is as indisputable as global warming or the modern day automobile is that the Internet’s information rivals the knowledge of God. Humor me the idea that God is a creation of man &em; even if God, even in the most fundamentalist, evangelical, literal Biblical translation of the sense, is real, all that we as mortal sinners know of him is what our feeble human minds can imagine; a great deal less than the actual, omnipotent being Himself would be capable of, I’m certain &em; and I think you’ll find it easier to believe that the entire human race (or at least that percentage which are connected to the Internet) share a collective at least equal to what we can imagine God to know if not more, considering all of the other deities that other cultures seem to know so certainly of as well. So with all of the knowledge that can exist doing so in one place (which now with our iPhones and WiFi, is nearly every place) and being so easily accessible at any time, we can literally have the entire world at our fingertips. So yes, of course the Internet is a valuable tool. This is the point where everyone can wonder why they’ve continued reading this far if all I was going to say was such an obvious statement as The Internet is a valuable tool.

But it’s not a single shred more valuable than a paint brush or a hammer or a simple pulley. All three of those can be used to do great things, even if their individual purposes seems simplistic and singular. A paint brush can be used for something as mundane as covering rust on a car’s bumper, or it can be used to create letters and language or the Mona Lisa. A hammer can pound a nail into a chair or chisel away David. A pulley can pull water from a well or a young child’s life from the same hole.

All the same, the Internet can be used to replace the living, the doing, the walking around neighborhoods, meeting friends for drinks or meeting new friends, or picking out fruit and washing the dishes. It can be used to understand what effects Democracy might have on a new, emerging China or what ingredient might go best in tonight’s stew. Hours can be disappeared watching dogs ride skateboards or reading what a Presidential candidate actually plans to do, or if they have even taken the time yet to plan to do anything. We live in an immediately brilliant and amazing time. It’s as if both the wheel and the car were invented in the same day, only hours apart, and now we don’t know what to do with all of this new found freedom and powerful knowledge. The question, I think, is whether or not we’ll be able to understand what we have and turn that into something good, use it for something beneficial to our own lives and the future history of our civilization, or instead watch it follow in the heels of books and the radio and television and capitalism, conglomerated, made expensive and kept mostly in the hands of a few out of touch people in a world of multiplying billions.