Back in August, when Tom Evslin of Fractals of Change proposed a possible project for NewAssignment.Net, it was informed by intimate knowledge of how the Internet works. Jeff Jarvis wrote “Put him on the short list of people who made the Internet the Internet. When he headed up AT&T’s Internet services, he introduced flat-rate pricing and brought on the masses. He went on to see the power of VOIP before the industry did.”

So we asked Tom to post his latest ideas on how an organized network of citizen journalists could help guard the Internet from exploitation by Internet Service Providers (ISPs).

Eternal Vigilance in Distributed Form
by Tom Evslin

The Internet has made a new kind of citizen journalism possible. The Internet may need citizen journalists to keep it open and useful in the United States.

It’s pretty clear that we don’t have a problem with content-based Internet blocking in the US today. That doesn’t mean that we won’t tomorrow. “The price of liberty is eternal vigilance.” But that’s not what this post is about.