Good Intentions

Oh, holy of holies. Spring Break. A full week without thinking about law school. OR IS IT?

I know some people (who shall remain nameless) will probably spend the whole week outlining or something insane. And that IS insane.

I mean, my basic plan is to (perhaps) catch up on reading and (perhaps) start studying for finals. But I am fully aware that there is a strong chance those things will not happen.

In other news, the only thing I must do this week is mock trial practice. Not so bad.

Anyway, fellow law students, it’s time to relax. Just a little.

So instead of finishing my motion to suppress evidence, I’ve decided to blog. Who’s surprised?

I was chatting with a friend today about how cliqueish law school is. It’s high school redux. I’m not particularly pleased about this (and I’m relatively sure that every law student ever blogs about this fact), since I was under the impression I graduated from high school four years ago.

Digression: Four years ago? Holy hell. Time certainly flies. It’s almost been a year since I was in Europe. This is getting scary now.

Anyway, we were remarking on the fact that people will do low things when they want their self-esteem boosted. My goal in law school has been to get in, do my best, fly under the radar of the catty and Type A personalities, learn some stuff, meet some people, and get out. Others are trying to relive their glory days in high school.

It’s time to move on, people. We’re in professional school, and the legal community here is small. People will remember you for years if you rub them the wrong way. Don’t mess this up before you even get a chance to really mess it up (read: in front of a judge).

It looks like Net Neutrality is under attack again, this time by Senator Diane Feinstein (D-CA).

For those of you who do not know, Net Neutrality is a concept among Internet aficionados describing the fact that the Internet essentially belongs to all of us, and should remain that way. The fear among supporters of Net Neutrality is that ISPs could, conceivably, throttle off bandwidth to certain websites and only allow traffic on that ISP’s connections to other ones.

Let’s say Amazon and Comcast sign an exclusivity agreement. So, that would mean that the packets traveling from your computer to Amazon would be at a priority. Doesn’t sound too bad. But let’s say you want to go find a book at Barnes and Noble instead. So you try to load the page and…nothing. Comcast has locked off websites competing with Amazon because of that agreement. Or, perhaps you try to get onto the Barnes and Noble site, and suddenly you see a page saying you have been charged X dollars for accessing Barnes and Noble.

These are the fears of Net Neutrality supporters, and rightly so. ISPs could also implement tiered plans, where for a basic fee you get basic access to some sites, with more sites opening up based upon the more you pay the ISP.

The Internet needs to remain free and open for all. It has really replaced the landed media as the Fourth Estate; it keeps politicians, businesses, even religions accountable. I expect China to do the censorship song and dance game, not our own politicians here in the good old US of A, protected by that First Amendment thingie.

Net Neutrality should be a huge interest to lawyers though, because the Internet is the Old West for the law right now. It’s only been recently that statutes have even mentioned the Internet, and it’s really my generation and younger who are most used to it; in fact, I believe my generation was the first to actually grow up using the Internet. We saw it formed from BBS systems and newsgroups to Google Groups, Facebook, and WordPress.

My fellow law students, we should become the staunchest of Net Neutrality defenders. The Internet is inexorably tied up in our futures, and I for one will not tolerate restrictions or censorship (outside of things that are criminal, of course), especially by entities which are solely driven by power and money in the guise of morality (politicians and ISPs).