Don't Tread On My Internet: Reason Challenges the Eternal Assault on Online Freedom

The iron-willed tenacity that Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Some Dump on the Pacific) brings to her decades-long efforts to eradicate scary information from the Web thingy deserves some sort of recognition, so we've rendered our paean to leaving the Internet the hell alone in neon, flickering, Geocities-era glory. Remember the 1990s? That's when the Internet as we know it got launched and first started offering cool ways to share information, make money, and accomplish brand-new tasks.

Politicians have been trying to screw with it ever since.

Net neutrality can really hurt poor countries, warns Mike Godwin. Then again, some totalitarian poor countries (Anthony Fisher is looking at you, Cuba) inflicted crappy Internet on themselves.

Which makes sense, because government has always been the biggest threat to the whole Internet thing, through overregulation, making it "fairer" and less sexy, breaking it outright, or snooping on our online activities.

And politicians are always looking for a new way to rip us off when they're not working with their well-connected buddies to muzzle us.

But the cool stuff just doesn't stop coming (and some of it is intended to thwart the control freaks).

So, quickly before Dianne Feinstein gets the word: Don't Tread On My Internet.