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Net Neutrality 10-03-2006

October 3, 2006 by Liz Leave a Comment

Net Neutrality Links

I’m adding this link to the Net Neutrality Page.

The telecom slayers [via Eat4Today]

For more than a year, telecom lobbyists, who include former Bill Clinton press secretary Mike McCurry, have outgunned Scott and his ragtag army of bloggers, Internet entrepreneurs and consumer-rights activists on Capitol Hill. But on this fall day in his bare-bones office in Washington, Scott is grinning in victory. He knows he has succeeded in tripping up the lobbying goliaths with a simple weapon that couldn’t be more appropriate in the battle over the Internet: a low-budget video posted on YouTube.com.

In the unadorned black-and-white film, college kids sit in front of a webcam and talk about the evils of an Internet without Net neutrality. “Do you want companies to control your clicks?” a goateed young man asks the camera. “This means slower connections to sites that are under competing ISPs,” another says. “Let’s keep the Internet free!” After a guitar solo and a hazy image of the American flag, the video goes black and directs viewers to SavetheInternet.com.

In the first week after it was posted on YouTube on Aug. 17, the video was viewed over 350,000 times, according to figures provided by the site. By comparison, the infamous “macaca” video of Virginia Sen. George Allen calling a man of Indian decent the racial slur, was viewed 200,000 times in roughly the same amount of time. A testament to the power of viral marketing, the Net neutrality video “is doing the work of 30 full-time communications professionals,” [Ben] Scott [coordinator of SavetheInternet] says. “And the best part is, I have no idea who made it.”

In fact, the video was made in a little over an hour by Ben Going, a 21-year-old waiter from Huntsville, Ala., and an aspiring Internet filmmaker. Going says he pieced the video together because he feels that his hobby, his business, his way of life, is under attack. He is not alone. All summer long, hundreds of Web users like Going have flooded the Internet with videos and blog postings. An online petition in favor of Net neutrality has gathered more than 1.1 million signatures, and a letter-writing campaign spawned online has resulted in a flood of letters to Congress members. Barry Piatt, communications director for Sen. Byron Dorgan of North Dakota, a leading Net neutrality advocate, says his office has received close to 1 million letters on Net neutrality, “a virtually unprecedented level” of mail for any issue, let alone one as technical as this one. And the “overwhelming majority” of the letters, Piatt says, favor Net neutrality.

[ . . . ]

The battle erupted in the wake of a 2005 Supreme Court ruling, which changed the regulatory classification of ISPs and removed the nondiscrimination protections on the Internet. Facing fewer restrictions on how they could govern the Internet, the likes of AT&T and Verizon made no secret that they intended to create a lucrative Internet fast lane, open only to Web sites that can pay. Critics quickly responded that an Internet where only those who can pay the rent can display their wares will stifle innovation and choice. “Consumers will have all of the choices and selection of a former Soviet Union supermarket,” says Maine Sen. Olympia Snowe, a key ally of Net neutrality.

Here is the link for the above referred to YouTube videol: Save the Internet

–ME “Liz” Strauss

Related
NET NEUTRALITY PAGE

Filed Under: Business Life, Community, SOB Business, Successful Blog, Trends Tagged With: Barry-Piatt, bc, Ben-Going, Ben-Scott, Bill-Clinton, George-Allen, Met-Meutrality, Mike-McCurry, Olympia--Snow, SaveTheInternet, YouTube.com

Net Neutrality 7-1-2006

July 1, 2006 by Liz 2 Comments

Net Neutrality Links

I’ve added these links to the Net Neutrality Page today.

Stopping the Big Giveaway – by John Kerry

The Commerce Committee voted on net neutrality and it failed on an 11-11 tie. This vote was a gift to cable and telephone companies, and a slap in the face of every Internet user and consumer.

It will not stand.

I voted against this lousy bill for two reasons: because net neutrality and internet build-out are crucial to building a more modern and fair Information Society, and both were pushed aside by the Republicans.

. . . Why are United States Senators afraid to say that companies should be expected to foster growth by building out their broadband networks to increase access?

. . . This bill was passed in committee over our objections. Now we need to fight to either fix it or kill it in the full Senate. Senator Wyden has already drawn a line in the sand — putting a “hold” on the bill, which prevents it from going forward for now. But there will be a day of reckoning on this legislation soon, make no mistake about it, and we need you to get engaged — pressure your Senators, follow the issue, demand net neutrality and build-out.

It’s not just net neutrality that is at stake

Kos wrote yesterday that the Net Neutrality amendment was defeated yesterday in the Commerce Committee, and there have been several diaries about that since. A bill that was kept however has not been remarked upon here. This is the revival of the broadcast flag, which the FCC had mandated several years ago but was struck down by a court. Now the entertainment industry is trying to bring the broadcast flag back with a new law. . . .

With respect to the broadcast flag however, Republicans take precisely the opposite position. By supporting the broadcast flag, they are saying that it is necessary for the government to control which of those transmissions that we listen to or watch on TV we can record: something that is unprecedented. It has been taken for granted up until now by everyone that if you can hear something on the radio or hear it on TV you should be able to record it, but the broadcast flag would change all that. The government would require all electronic devices that are capable of receiving digital TV or radio signals to implement restrictions blocking recording of those signals if the producer of the signal has embedded in it a flag indicating that it does not want the signal recorded. In other words, the government will mandate that you no longer control what you do with your electronic devices, but the corporations of the entertainment industry do.

–ME “Liz” Strauss

Related
NET NEUTRALITY PAGE

Filed Under: Business Life, Community, SOB Business, Successful Blog, Trends Tagged With: bc, broadcast-flag, Commerce-Committee, Daily-Kos, FCC, John-Kerry, Net-Neutrality, SaveTheInternet

Net Neutrality 5-17-2006

May 17, 2006 by Liz Leave a Comment

Net Neutrality Links

I’ve added these links to the Net Neutrality Page today.

Pro-Internet Democracy Blogs Run Ads for Corporate Takeover of Net: Another Example of Why BuzzFlash Won’t Accept Advertising
[via Truth Dig ]

The ad in question leads to an Orwellian flash that tries to convince the viewers that the government is trying to “interfere” with the Internet and that this will destroy it, which is exactly what the people behind the ads are trying to do. . . . (See http://www.dontregulate.org/)

If you watch the ad, you find it is sponsored by a coalition misleadingly called “Hands Off the Internet”.If you look at the members of “Hands Off the Internet,” they are the very Telecom companies who have given large donations to members of Congress to pass legislation — now having cleared a House Committee — to allow them to squeeze democracy out of the Internet in order to increase their profits. Members of the cynically named “Hands Off the Internet” coalition include AT&T, BellSouth and Cingular, along with some “front” organizations that again employ the Bush tactic of sounding like they are on your side when they are trying to get away with grand larceny (see
http://www.handsoff.org/hoti_docs/aboutus/members.shtml). As many on the Net have noted with contempt, the group is masterminded by former Clinton Press Secretary Mike McCurry.

A BuzzFlash reader pointed out this entire scam to us and how he had tried to get the progressive sites to have the ad removed on their sites, but to no avail.
The ad is part of a package offered by a company known as BlogAds. (See this url if you want to know which liberal blog sites financially benefit from BlogAds: http://www.blogads.com/advertise/liberal_blog_advertising

Proposed Rule Changes Would Tangle the Web

Many people believe the Internet’s decentralized structure guarantees that no company or oligopoly could control it. Internet censorship – whether by corporate or state interests – simply sounds impossible. Yet not only is it theoretically possible, but the history of telecommunications regulation tells us it is probable. By the time the telecoms start changing what you see on your screen, it will be too late to complain.

PDF Panel On Net Neutrality
[via The Original Blog]

Like it or not, the Internet is not a public entity. It is not a company for which others provide service and it is not a public good. It is a nebulous arrangement of interconnections between private networks. If the net neutrality guys would like the government to compensate the private companies that have invested hundreds of billions to make it work, and declare those pipes a public good, that’s fine. The tab will be staggering.

That will do wonders for the deficit and guarantee great service. After all, the government does everything really well, right?

If, instead, you want a competitive environment, then you keep what you have. Existing competition has moved us this far, so why not let it continue? Some suggest the answer is because there are only two competitors – cable and telcos. That ignores the possibility that the DBS guys will ever develop the technology to compete. That ignores the possibility that governments will provide wi-fi as a public good, and it ignores the possibility that Google or someone else will provide wi-max to compete with the cable and telco guys?

It also assumes that two competitors is somehow inadequate for real competition. Honestly, I think a football field would get crowded with four teams.

. . . Cable faces different competition on the programming side. They face competition from satellite and now telcos on video. They face competition for phone service from wireless, VoIP, and the telcos. They face competition for data services from telcos, cities increasingly providing wi-fi, PC by satellite (which admittedly is inferior currently, but that will change shortly), etc.

Competition works. But you have to let it. For Congress to act now, absent an actual threat, would be the height of folly.

–ME “Liz” Strauss

Related
NET NEUTRALITY PAGE

Filed Under: Business Life, Community, Successful Blog, Trends Tagged With: bc, BlogAds, decentralized_Internet, Dontregulate.org, Google, Internet_censorship, Mike_McCurry, Net_Neutrality, SaveTheInternet, telecommunications_regulation, VOIP, wi-fi-

Net Neutrality 5-15-2006

May 15, 2006 by Liz Leave a Comment

Net Neutrality Links

I’ve added these links to the Net Neutrality Page today.

Peter Svennson, Hack AP Reporter, Screws Up Net Neutrality Story by Mark Stoller

The public deserves real discourse about this issue. People care about the internet. We should have a real conversation about the public policy implications of what we do with this platform upon which millions rely. And if we decide to hand it over to the telcos, so be it. But the press delivered first apathy, and then warmed over spin and lies. That’s not democracy. That’s not journalism. It’s stenography.

I wanted to believe that the press were working the public’s interest. I really did. I no longer believe this, because of writers like Peter Svennson.

Telecoms Create Front Site to Combat Net Neutrality

Basically, what follows is my analysis of a little site called “dontregulate.org”. They seem inocuous. They’ve got ads going through blogads.org, which, MLW, Booman, and other lefty sites, including ActForLove, use to get ads based upon their sites. Now, they’ve got this fascinating flash video to start the site, and from there, it just turns into arguments against net neutrality, looking all like it’s a regular internet site that regular people put up, with regular drawings and Flash movies…

For more info, SaveTheInternet has also made it the big lie of the week

Soon, The New Design Won’t Matter

But, in a couple of months time, it’s likely that all TechCrunch will have to do is pi** off a large Telco or two (or a congressman in a back pocket) and, ‘voila’, you and I won’t be able to visit them anymore, anyway.

–ME “Liz” Strauss

Related
NET NEUTRALITY PAGE

Filed Under: Business Life, Community, Successful Blog, Trends Tagged With: AP, bc, DailyKos, Dontregulate.org, Net_Neutrality, Peter_Svennson, rwebdesigns, SaveTheInternet, TechCrunch

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