I’ve been cleaning up my saved RSS feeds – a tedious but rewarding task – and came across an inspired speech by Susan Crawford that was delivered at the Freedom to Connect conference. In it, she takes a critical look at the market forces influencing network providers and decides that a crucial element for the future of the generative Internet is the “countervailing power of users/consumers.”

“User power needs to be organized in response to the network operators’ power.  It needs to be aggregated and made visible.  Without it, we’ll have no votes, no policy changes, and the oligopolists will be able to continue to act with unfettered discretion.”

To this end, Crawford is the founder of OneWebDay which seeks to be an Earth Day for the web. To make manifest the users who can provide a check on oligopolistic ISPs, OneWebDay is soliciting stories about your experience with the Internet.

OneWebDay is September 22nd and there is plenty to check out before then.