We spend so much of our lives online — from work and shopping to social networking and entertainment. But a Washington appeals court recently overturned crucial policies that ensure a fair and open internet for everyone. Net neutrality rules ensure a level playing field and prevent big corporations like Comcast, Verizon and AT&T from blocking content, increasing your bill and lowering your connection speed.

At the moment, your Internet generally works like this: You pay a company — AT&T, or Comcast, or Verizon, or Time Warner — for monthly online access. Once you’re connected, you can go to whatever legally permissible website your heart desires and, whether it’s the New York Times or Netflix, it takes you the same amount of time no matter where you’re trying to go. Read more. 

When Barack Obama was running for president in 2007, he earned a great deal of credibility with tech-savvy voters by expressing support for net neutrality that was rooted in an understanding that this issue raises essential questions about the future of open, free and democratic communications in America. Obama “got” that net neutrality represented an Internet-age equivalent of the First Amendment—a guarantee of equal treatment for all content, as opposed to special rights to speed and quality of service for the powerful business and political elites that can buy an advantage. Read more. 

From YouTube, to Pandora, to Spotify, streaming music is piloting our listening habits in fascinating new ways. Eric Harvey explores how these developments are affecting ideas of taste, access, and ownership in the 21st century.

On-demand streaming music has been part of the collective imagination for more than a century. It can be traced back to the 1888 publication of Edward Bellamy’s million-selling science fiction novel Looking Backward, in which a man falls asleep in 1887 and wakes up in 2000. Amidst the mind-blowing technological developments he encounters on his journey is a “music room,” in which 24-hour playlists are piped in to subscribers via phone lines. With no shortage of astonishment, the man proclaims that “an arrangement for providing everybody with music in their homes, perfect in quality, unlimited in quantity, suited to every mood, and beginning and ceasing at will” is perhaps the pinnacle of human achievement. Read more.