Net neutrality may be in serious trouble.

[NorthCarolina]

Keep the Internet Open for All
Net neutrality may be in serious trouble.

by Joseph Torres

Perhaps the greatest freedom in a democracy is freedom of speech. Throughout our nation's history, people have died fighting not only for our right to speak, but for our right to be heard.

The Internet is the greatest communications network ever created because it allows us to speak for ourselves without first asking permission from corporate gatekeepers. The Internet’s importance as a forum for speech is the result of the principle called net neutrality, which prevents the phone and cable companies that provide Internet service from discriminating against content online or interfering with the free flow of Internet traffic.

But net neutrality and the open Internet may be in serious trouble. Julius Genachowski, the chairman of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), has been holding closed-door meetings with Verizon, AT&T, Comcast, and Google that could pave the way for a corporate takeover of the Internet. The big phone and cable companies want to kill net neutrality so they can control and manipulate the content you can access on the Internet. Those who can pay will have their websites sped up; those who can't may have their sites slowed down or even blocked.

<---snip--->

The FCC, our nation's communications watchdog agency, is currently trying to modernize its Internet policy framework. Unless it succeeds, the phone and cable companies will be free to censor us online, block the websites we want to see, and track the websites we visit without disclosing their practices. The agency is under immense pressure from the lobbyists to take control of the Internet away from Internet users and turn it over to corporations.

The Center for Responsive Politics reports that these companies spent more than $20 million lobbying the federal government during the first quarter of 2010 alone.

<---snip--->

Link: http://www.commondreams.org/view/2010/07/06-5

[Coyote_Bandit]

1. Closed door meetings represent

yet still more transparency in government. Once again the desires of the corporations trump the needs and rights of flesh and blood folks. Our government clearly does not share my values. Sometimes I wonder why I even care about trying to improve it. More change I can believe in I suppose. Once again you can color me unimpressed.

[Uncle Joe]

2. The is why the corporate media; trashed Al Gore prior to the coup/selection of 2000.

They viewed the Internet as a growing threat against their ability to disseminate the flow of information and manipulate the American People via brainwashing.

The same corporate supremacist forces are now trying to recapture that manipulative ability by undermining the founding First Amendment Principle of the Internet, that being Net Neutrality.

If you believe the nation has largely gone to hell in a hand-basket over the past few decades, the elimination of Net Neutrality can only further and hasten that trend.

Regardless of political party, there must be a historical, heavy political price paid by any politician abandoning this clear principle to defend the American People's First Amendment power.

When you lose the First Amendment, you can kiss every other freedom goodbye as well, for they are all endangered.

Thanks for the thread, NorthCarolina.

[joe black]

5. They did it to Howard Dean too.

The day after he said he'd break up the MSM types the scream incident came out the next day or so.

[msongs]

3. internet needs to be a public utility, NOT controlled by Obama's corporate buddies nt

[spin]

4. Notice how BP gets away with violating First Amendment rights...

BP plc And The Administration Replace First Amendment With $40,000 Fine And Class D Felony

CNN's Anderson Cooper, one of the few people who apparently hasn't or isn't leaving the troubled news network (surely Ted Turner has learned by now from CNBC that his female anchors should wear transparent body suits, show belly button deep cleavage, and install a stripper pole or seventeen for those ever more elusive Nielsen points), reports some troubling developments out of New Orleans. "The coast guard today announced new rules keeping photographers, reporters and anyone else from coming within 65 feet of any response vessel or booms, out on the water or on beaches. In order to get closer you need to get direct permission from the coast guard captain of the Port of New Orleans. Shots of oil on beaches with booms - stay 65 feet away. Pictures of oil soaked booms useless laying in the water because they haven't been collected like they should. You can't get close enough to see that. And believe me, that is out there. But you only know that if you get close to it, and now you can't without permission. Violators could face a fine of $40,000 and class D felony charges. The coast guard tried to make the exclusion zone 300 feet before scaling it down to 65 feet." While Cooper's conclusion is spot on, "we are not the enemy here, those of us down here trying to accurately show what is happening down here, we are not the enemy. If we can't show what is happening, warts and all, no one will see what is happening, and that makes it very easy to hide failure and hide incompetence", it doesn't matter, and little by little, nothing else matters, except for what the administration, the Fed, and the megacorps think it is in America's best interest to be able to see, hear, read, do, and what assets they have, where they can invest... especially if all this is done in conjunction with maxing out yet another credit card to buy the latest and greatest weekly edition of the iPhone. emphasis added
http://www.zerohedge.com/article/bp-plc-and-administration-replace-first-amendment-40000-fine-and-class-d-felony

Big Multinational Corporations don't like the peons having the right to free speech. Both Republicans and Democrats bow at their feet to do their bidding.