I admit that I do love the Internet! I love its vastness and total freedom. It’s all out there for me to choose from.
A tiny innovative company can present its ideas to me just as readily as a huge manufacturer. No one else gets to decide which news I can access. For sure, I don’t like some of it, but it’s up to me to choose what to believe, what to support, what to purchase. It’s a free-for-all!
It reminds me of a well-run Town Meeting. Those who care just get out there and speak their peace. In a well-run meeting, even shy concerned citizens have a chance to express their views.
But, have you ever been in a meeting where someone who is loud and aggressive and who clearly has “an agenda” just takes over the discussion? It can be unbearable, and certainly it upsets the freedom of the discourse. Such a poorly managed meeting cannot achieve its purpose when one person dominates it. Even worse, in my opinion, are the meetings overly controlled by the chair of the meeting. Sometimes they may have their own agenda and can control the outcome by controlling who gets to speak. I’ve been to public meetings of municipal boards that have felt this way. Very frustrating!
Imagine the Internet being controlled like that. We prize the openness of the Internet, what is called “Net Neutrality” and would hate to lose that. Yet, as we speak, the U.S. House and Senate are debating law changes that would give giant telecom corporations unprecedented control of the Internet. We’re not necessarily talking about any kind of monitoring of the political or moral aspects of Internet content; what’s happening is the result of huge telecom firms, such as Fairpoint, TimeWarner, Verizon and Adelphia, lobbying Congress for the right to create preferential service through their control of how the packets of information flow across the Internet!
The telecom giants want to create a two-tier Internet. They want their own content and services (and those of businesses that pay them hefty fees) to travel quickly and efficiently in the “fast lane” while all other Web sites and services would be relegated to the “slow lane.”
Left in the “slow lane,” our Internet “town square” will be lost. It will become less easy to talk to one another, exchange views, find information from many diverse sources of news and opinion, blog, contact candidates and engage in our democracy.
The Internet will be more about selling things – entertainment, TV, films, games and other things – and will no longer be about citizen interaction.
H.R. 5252 – Communications Opportunity, Promotion and Enhancement Act and S. 2686 – the so-called Communications, Consumer’s Choice, and Broadband Deployment Act would let the big telephone and cable companies get their way, and eliminate “Net Neutrality” protections. Under these proposals providers disrupt your access to web content and applications in several ways, including:
• Discriminating against competitors’ services
• Limiting diversity of content
• Favoring commercial services
• Restricting Internet telephone
Amendments are being proposed, even by Senator Snowe, showing that this is not a partisan issue. However, most of these amendments fail to adequately protect the Internet at the level of “packet flow.”
If this sounds bad to you, make your voice heard before you lose that ability! There’s a lot of information at Common Cause (www.commoncause.org), the organization run by Maine’s Chellie Pingree. Go there and look in the side-bar for Media and Democracy Telecom Reform and select Net Neutrality.
Tell your representatives that the principle of Net Neutrality must be protected and that the foxes can’t watch the chickens.
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