The recent events in countries like Egypt, Tunisia, Libya and several other places have once more reminded us why the Internet is such a game changer. It facilitates the flow of information and mass communication to levels unprecedented in history. It is organic, and in most cases, independent of national interests. It circumvents the traditional, official channels of information.

With a global network where information can spread from even the smallest source, where voices can be heard that never stood a chance going through official channels, we have reached a new era of openness and transparency. This is something we should treasure.

There is a reason why Egypt and then Libya closed off their countries from the Internet when the protests started. It was to restrict information, both to and from the protesters, and to and from the rest of the world, a desperate attempt from regimes that had lost control.

These countries lost control because they could no longer control the flow of information. Any totalitarian regime is dependent on this control. The ultimate dystopian vision of this was George Orwell’s 1984, still relevant today, but real-world examples like North Korea are not far away from that fictional example.

This is why any attempt to regulate and limit the Internet, no matter how well intentioned, is something we should all resist. Because it is all too easy that this will slowly erode what is so great about the Internet today.

A free Internet, by its very nature, counteracts any attempt to limit and control the flow of information. The Internet is a “one-to-many” communication medium like no other. Once information reaches the Internet, it can no longer be contained.

So, with emphasis: If your country is trying to limit or regulate the Internet, to work against the net neutrality concept, be wary, don’t just go along with it. Even seemingly innocent restrictions could very well be the first step down a slippery slope.

You don’t want to go down that road. Educate yourself. Make your voice heard to your elected officials. Protest. Make noise.

And use the Internet to do so, while you can.

Perceptions matter, and the perception of Nokia in the news, on the web, and in the minds of many, is that things aren’t going that well. Even in the Pingdom office, we hear “Nokia is doomed,” but do the numbers support this belief?

Looking at the statistics, Symbian leads the mobile operating system race with just over 30% of web browsing traffic. That’s down slightly from late last year, when we noted that Symbian finished 2011 as the top mobile operating system, with almost 34% of the mobile OS market.

What is even more interesting, however, is that Nokia is also ahead when we look at figures for all the mobile handset vendors. In fact, Nokia is way ahead of Apple, and Android lags far behind.

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Pingdom’s Podcast is a weekly show about Internet, web, security, and mobile stuff.

In this show, we talk mainly about Distributed Denial of Service attacks. Some fresh research shows an increase in smaller, more targeted DDoS attacks, and hacker group Anonymous has vowed to take down the Internet by launching a DDoS attack on the 13 root DNS servers.

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Every Friday we bring you a collection of links to places on the web that we find particularly newsworthy, interesting, entertaining, and topical. We try to focus on some particular area or topic each week, but in general we will cover Internet, web development, networking, performance, and other geeky topics.

This week we bring you a collection of articles focusing on OpenStack.

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By some measures, more than 7 billion people now inhabit the world, and more than a third of us are on the Internet. But how many are added each day, each week, or each minute? We think we have a pretty good idea.

Read on for some pretty amazing numbers.

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Pingdom’s Podcast is a weekly show about Internet, web, security, and mobile stuff.

In this show, we can finally talk about Saleh’s Carbon for Windows Phone app being available in Windows Marketplace. We also talk to Rich Brueckner of InsideHPC.com about the world of supercomputers.

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