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Corporate Congress Critters Kill Net Neutrality |
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by Kurt Nimmo Another Day in the Empire Entered into the database on Thursday, April 27th, 2006 @ 11:20:01 MST |
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Corporate whores in Congress have officially inaugurated the process
of turning the internet into another platform for ephemeral junk culture, an
interactive version of television where there are 500 channels and nothing on.
“Internet carriers, including AT&T Inc., have been strident supporters
of upending the Internet’s tradition of network neutrality and have lobbied
Congress to make it happen. They argue that Web sites, particularly those featuring
video and audio that require significant bandwidth, should be able to pay extra
so that users don’t have to wait as long for downloads,” reports
the San
Francisco Chronicle. “Internet carriers say they would use the money
they earn to expand the Internet’s capacity.” I suppose this would
operate the same way multinational oil corporations use their massive profits
to search for new oil reserves or expand refining capacity. “By a 34-22
vote, members of the House Energy and Commerce Committee rejected a Democratic-backed
Net neutrality amendment that also enjoyed support from Internet and software
companies including Microsoft, Amazon.com and Google,” writes Declan
McCullagh for CNET News. In the early 90s, I was drawn to the internet primarily because it was a decentralized
communication medium born as a “neutral network,” that is to say
no one interest or body controlled the entire network or even large chunks.
“When Tim Berners-Lee started to sell the idea of a ‘World Wide
Web’, he did not need to seek the approval of network owners to allow
the protocols that built the internet to run,” writes Lawrence
Lessig, professor of law at Stanford Law School and founder of its Center
for Internet and Society. “Likewise, when eBay launched its auction service,
or Amazon its bookselling service, neither needed the permission of the telephone
companies before those services could take off. Because the internet was ‘end-to-end’,
innovators and users were free to offer new content, new applications or even
new protocols for communication without any permission from the network. So
long as these new applications obeyed simple internet protocols (’TCP/IP’),
the internet was open to their ideas. The network did not pick and choose the
applications or content it would support; it was neutral, leaving that choice
to the users.” Congress, as a craven and slavish handmaid to corporate interests and domination,
is in the process of squashing internet neutrality. It’s all about control
and corporate centralization, not innovation and expanding capacity. It’s
about making sure the internet serves the commercial and political purposes
of large corporations. It’s also about locking the alternative media out
of the only effective medium it has at its disposal. If you doubt this, see
if you can find a truth movement channel on one of your 500 cable television
channels. Once upon a time, television was considered part of the public commons and
its signal was transmitted over airwaves owned by the people. It was stolen
and hopes dashed in short order by private and corporate interests many decades
ago. Even the charade of noblesse oblige—or corporate broadcasters pretending
to be trustees obliged to protect what the people own, or think they own—is
long gone and the Fairness Doctrine is dead as well, killed by “deregulation”
(an excuse for theft by corporate leviathans) under Reagan, Bush, and Clinton.
In fact, the airwaves have become, like virtually everything else of value,
a “raw commodity for financial speculation,” as David
Bollier writes. Public access television—an arrangement made between mega-corporations
and the public when the medium was handed over by thieves and charlatans operating
out of the whorehouse on the Potomac—is now an endangered species. Senate
Bill 1349 and House Bill 3146 endeavored to eliminate local cable television
franchises, long considered an “obstacle” by massive telecoms. If
you don’t believe there will be a repeat of this in regard to the internet,
I have a bridge to sell you. “Broadband providers now have the same authority as cable providers to
act as gatekeepers: the network owner can choose which services and equipment
consumers may use,” explains John
Windhausen, Jr. “Network operators can adopt conflicting and proprietary
standards for the attachment of consumer equipment, can steer consumers to certain
web sites over others, can block whatever Internet services or applications
they like, and make their preferred applications perform better than others….
open broadband networks are vitally important to our society, our future economic
growth, our high-tech manufacturing sector, and our First Amendment rights to
information free of censorship or control. Even if an openness policy imposes
some slight burden on network operators, these microeconomic concerns pale in
comparison to the macroeconomic benefits to the society and economy at large
of maintaining an open Internet.” In the future, we may be relegated to the “slow lane” (no
video or audio), or locked out entirely if a telecom disagrees with our content.
Free expression of ideas, especially ideas contrary to those of the neolib global
elite and transnational corporations, are now at risk more than ever. It should be remembered that corporatism is essentially fascism, as
the grand daddy of fascism, Benito Mussolini, long ago explained. Fascists not
only favor and enforce censorship—ultimately they violently suppress all
opposition. In the not too distant future, as the internet becomes yet another
tawdry and dumbed-down consumerist venue surrounded by lawyers and gun turrets,
we may be reduced to handing out our content via DVD on street corners. Of course, this will be defined as terrorism and we will be punished
accordingly.
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