Stephen Lendman
Saturday, July 09, 2011
http://sjlendman.blogspot.com/2011/07/appeals-court-rejects-more-media.html
In six editions of "The Media Monopoly" and subsequent update titled, "The New Media Monopoly," Ben Bagdikian explained how deregulation let major media corporations consolidate to oligopoly size.
Since 1983, the number of corporations owning most newspapers, magazines, book publishers, recorded music, movie studios, television and radio stations shrunk from 50 to a handful, including Time-Warner, Disney, News Corp., Viacom, Comcast, and Bertelsmann AG.
In 1996, Telecommunications Act backers claimed it would increase competition, lower prices, and improve service. In fact, TV station ownership limits were raised to let broadcast giants own twice as many local stations as before, charge what they wished, and dismiss public concerns in the process.
For radio, all national ownership limits were removed, and, in large urban areas, one company could own up to eight stations in a major market. In smaller ones, two companies could own them all.
The bill also consigned new digital television broadcast spectrum space only to current TV station owners, and let cable companies increase their local monopoly positions. Media and telecom giants were clear winners. Consumers lost out.
Yet in October 2007, FCC chairman Kevin Martin proposed lifting the 1975 media cross-ownership rule, forbidding one company from owning a newspaper and television or radio station in the same city even though some conglomerates already did like News Corp. In November, he amended his plan to allow cross ownership only in large markets where competition already exists, with deceptive loopholes through waivers to permit it anywhere.
In 2003, FCC Michael Powell also tried loosening ownership rules, despite opponents saying relaxing them would further stifle debate, inhibit new ideas, weaken diversity, and more greatly consolidate oligopoly power.
In June 2004, the Third US Circuit Court of Appeals ruled favorably for the Media Access Project (MAP) in Prometheus Radio Project v. FCC, ordering the agency to reconsider its ill-advised ownership rule changes that included:
-- ending cross-ownership restrictions that prohibits a company from owning a newspaper and TV or radio station in the same city;
-- eliminating the previous ban on radio/TV cross-ownership, and replacing both types with a single set of cross-media limits;
-- a dodgy "diversity index" based on assigning varying weights to different media to determine if markets retained enough. It not, ownership limits would be restricted, but the formula proposed was deceptive and dishonest, including for smaller markets; and
-- redefining National Market Share to let ownership ceilings rise unfairly.
In fact, the public overwhelmingly wants more, not less consolidation. On July 7, an important victory was won when the same Third Circuit Court issued its long-awaited verdict, throwing out proposed FCC rules changes.
The Prometheus Radio Project (PRP) "builds participatory radio as a tool for social justice organizing and a voice for community expression. (It) advocate(s) for a more just media system, and help(s) grassroots organizations build communications infrastructure to strengthen their communities and movements."
PRP explained the court decision on its web site, accessed through the following link:
http://www.prometheusradio.org/node/2532
Headlining "Federal Court Rejects Media Consolidation in Prometheus vs. FCC," it hailed PRP's "second historic victory" this year, saying:
The Third Circuit Court rejected FCC rules changes "that would have allowed one company to own a newspaper and broadcast stations in the same market," despite some already doing it.
Other FCC broadcast ownership limits were also upheld, as well as agreement that proposed changes failed to consider how women and minorities would be affected.
Media Access Project's PRP attorney Andrew Jay Schwartzman hailed the decision, saying:
"We won on almost every point. This decision is a vindication of the public's right to have a diverse media environment," despite how little now exists, except through alternative media sources, especially online.
On January 4, PRP won another victory when the Community Radio Act became law, permitting thousands of new stations nationally. Praising the decision, PRP's Policy Director Brandy Doyle said:
"Media matters. Thousands of people fought to pass the (law), and thousands more spoke out loudly when the FCC tried to further consolidate broadcast media." However, despite important victories, "we must continue to push the FCC to do the right thing for community radio."
On July 12, ahead of implementing the Local Community Radio Act, "the FCC will again propose new rules." Key is ensuring low-power urban FM community radio stations channel space as Congress mandated.
"Commercial broadcasters must share the airwaves with the urban churches, schools, and non-profits who have waited more than a decade to serve their communities with radio."
On July 7, a Free Press.net press release also hailed the court ruling. Corie Wright (who argued with Schwartzman for PRP) called it:
"a sweeping victory for the public interest. In rejecting the arguments of the industry and exposing the FCC's failures, the court wisely concluded that (media) competition....not more concentration will provide Americans with the local news and information they need and want."
Nonetheless, she said dominant media giants still lobby hard for rules changes, very much against the public interest that won this battle but can't relax.
This win, however, prevented one company from owning a city's dominant newspaper, eight radio stations, three television stations, and a major cable operation, shutting out most other voices entirely.
Distorted Major Media Coverage
On July 7, New York Times writer Bill Carter headlined, "Court Overturns FCC Cross-Ownership Rule," downplaying the decision's importance, saying:
"In a narrow ruling unlikely to have an immediate effect on current broadcasters," the court "did not rule on the merits" of FCC's proposed changes. "Instead, (it) said that the FCC had failed to allow sufficient time for official notice and public comment on them," distorting what, in fact, happened in typical Times fashion, suppressing vital information from its readers.
Wall Street Journal writer Amy Schatz was no better, headlining, "Appeals Court Bumps Up Pressure to Overhaul Media-Ownership Rule," unsurprisingly siding with media giants while ignoring the decision's importance.
Bloomberg's Sophia Pearson and Todd Shields also offered a distorted, biased account, headlining, "FCC's Rules on Media Cross-Ownership Are Vacated by Federal Appeals Court," saying:
The court ruled that the FCC "failed to provide adequate notice," downplaying the decision's importance like The Times, including by quoting Newspaper Association of America president John Sturm calling the decision "very disappointing. We're back to the original rule that was passed in 1975. It strains credulity to understand why that is."
In fact, following daily major print and broadcast media explains clearly why less (lots less), not more, concentration is needed.
Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago and can be reached at lendmanstephen@sbcglobal.net.
Also visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com and listen to cutting-edge discussions with distinguished guests on the Progressive Radio News Hour on the Progressive Radio Network Thursdays at 10AM US Central time and Saturdays and Sundays at noon. All programs are archived for easy listening.
http://www.progressiveradionetwork.com/the-progressive-news-hour
Showing posts with label FCC. Show all posts
Showing posts with label FCC. Show all posts
Wednesday, July 27, 2011
Saturday, May 28, 2011
After approving NBC buyout, FCC Commish becomes Comcast lobbyist
Nate Anderson
5-11-11
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2011/05/after-approving-comcastnbc-deal-fcc-commish-becomes-comcast-lobbyist.ars
Meredith Attwell Baker, one of the two Republican Commissioners at the Federal Communications Commission, plans to step down—and right into a top lobbying job at Comcast-NBC.
The news, reported this afternoon by the Wall Street Journal, The Hill, and Politico, comes after the hugely controversial merger of Comcast and NBC earlier this year. At the time, Baker objected to FCC attempts to impose conditions on the deal and argued that the "complex and significant transaction" could "bring exciting benefits to consumers that outweigh potential harms."
Four months after approving the massive transaction, Attwell Baker will take a top DC lobbying job for the new Comcast-NBC entity, according to reports.
The response of groups like Free Press was expected in its anger, but not without merit. "No wonder the public is so nauseated by business as usual in Washington—where the complete capture of government by industry barely raises any eyebrows," said Free Press' Craig Aaron. "The continuously revolving door at the FCC continues to erode any prospects for good public policy. We hope—but won't hold our breath—that her replacement will be someone who is not just greasing the way for their next industry job."
Such cash-ins, of course, are a bipartisan affair in Washington.
Attwell Baker this afternoon released a statement once the news broke, explaining that she would leave on June 3 and that she was "privileged to have had the opportunity to serve the country at a time of critical transformation in the telecommunications industry. The continued deployment of our broadband infrastructures will meaningfully impact the lives of all Americans. I am happy to have played a small part in this success."
5-11-11
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2011/05/after-approving-comcastnbc-deal-fcc-commish-becomes-comcast-lobbyist.ars
Meredith Attwell Baker, one of the two Republican Commissioners at the Federal Communications Commission, plans to step down—and right into a top lobbying job at Comcast-NBC.
The news, reported this afternoon by the Wall Street Journal, The Hill, and Politico, comes after the hugely controversial merger of Comcast and NBC earlier this year. At the time, Baker objected to FCC attempts to impose conditions on the deal and argued that the "complex and significant transaction" could "bring exciting benefits to consumers that outweigh potential harms."
Four months after approving the massive transaction, Attwell Baker will take a top DC lobbying job for the new Comcast-NBC entity, according to reports.
The response of groups like Free Press was expected in its anger, but not without merit. "No wonder the public is so nauseated by business as usual in Washington—where the complete capture of government by industry barely raises any eyebrows," said Free Press' Craig Aaron. "The continuously revolving door at the FCC continues to erode any prospects for good public policy. We hope—but won't hold our breath—that her replacement will be someone who is not just greasing the way for their next industry job."
Such cash-ins, of course, are a bipartisan affair in Washington.
Attwell Baker this afternoon released a statement once the news broke, explaining that she would leave on June 3 and that she was "privileged to have had the opportunity to serve the country at a time of critical transformation in the telecommunications industry. The continued deployment of our broadband infrastructures will meaningfully impact the lives of all Americans. I am happy to have played a small part in this success."
Tuesday, March 29, 2011
Al Franken: ‘They're coming after the Internet’
MIKE ZAPLER | 3/14/11
http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0311/51266.html
AUSTIN, Texas — Sen. Al Franken claimed Monday that big corporations are "hoping to destroy" the Internet and issued a call to arms to several hundred tech-savvy South by Southwest attendees to preserve net neutrality.
"I came here to warn you, the party may be over," Franken said. "They're coming after the Internet hoping to destroy the very thing that makes it such an important [medium] for independent artists and entrepreneurs: its openness and freedom.”
Net neutrality, he added, is "the First Amendment issue of our time."
Receiving a hero's welcome from the liberal crowd, Franken took repeated shots at big telecoms, singling out Comcast.
He said Comcast is looking to change the basic architecture of the Web by implementing a pricing scheme that allows moneyed interests to pay for faster speeds, leaving everyone else behind. That would be a particularly bad development for the independent musicians and artists gathered here, he said.
"The real end for Comcast is to put Netflix out of business entirely," Franken said, because of the threat that Netflix's streaming video business could pose to Comcast's cable franchise. "In the end, the American people will end up paying a lot more for worse service."
Comcast is now embroiled in a dispute with Level 3, a networking company that carries online video feeds for Netflix, over fees Comcast wants to charge to carry the high-bandwidth content.
In response to Franken’s comments, a Comcast spokeswoman said Monday that the dispute with Level 3 isn’t about net neutrality but is “a peering issue.” “Under the FCC order for the Comcast NBCU transaction, Comcast is required to comply with the FCC’s recent open Internet rules even if they are overturned in court. Our customers can access all Netflix content,” said Sena Fitzmaurice, Comcast’s vice president of government communications.
Franken, who was an aggressive opponent of the Comcast acquisition of NBC Universal, implored SXSW attendees to fight the political influence of the big telecom firms.
"Unfortunately one thing these big corporations have that we don't is the ability to purchase favorable political outcomes," he said. "Big telecoms have lots of [lobbyists], and good ones, too. ... The end of net neutrality would benefit no one but these corporate giants."
Franken said talk of a "government takeover" of the Internet by net neutrality critics has as much credibility as claims of "death panels" in the health care legislation and claims that "Obama's a Muslim," calling them a "pantheon of lies."
Franken finished up his half-hour speech by imploring the crowd to preserve net neutrality to avoid a future in which they're "stuck listening to the Black Eyed Peas and reminiscing about the days before you had to sell out to make it.”
“Let's not let the government sell us out,” he said. “Let's fight for net neutrality. Let's keep Austin weird. Let's keep the Internet weird. Let's keep the Internet free."
http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0311/51266.html
AUSTIN, Texas — Sen. Al Franken claimed Monday that big corporations are "hoping to destroy" the Internet and issued a call to arms to several hundred tech-savvy South by Southwest attendees to preserve net neutrality.
"I came here to warn you, the party may be over," Franken said. "They're coming after the Internet hoping to destroy the very thing that makes it such an important [medium] for independent artists and entrepreneurs: its openness and freedom.”
Net neutrality, he added, is "the First Amendment issue of our time."
Receiving a hero's welcome from the liberal crowd, Franken took repeated shots at big telecoms, singling out Comcast.
He said Comcast is looking to change the basic architecture of the Web by implementing a pricing scheme that allows moneyed interests to pay for faster speeds, leaving everyone else behind. That would be a particularly bad development for the independent musicians and artists gathered here, he said.
"The real end for Comcast is to put Netflix out of business entirely," Franken said, because of the threat that Netflix's streaming video business could pose to Comcast's cable franchise. "In the end, the American people will end up paying a lot more for worse service."
Comcast is now embroiled in a dispute with Level 3, a networking company that carries online video feeds for Netflix, over fees Comcast wants to charge to carry the high-bandwidth content.
In response to Franken’s comments, a Comcast spokeswoman said Monday that the dispute with Level 3 isn’t about net neutrality but is “a peering issue.” “Under the FCC order for the Comcast NBCU transaction, Comcast is required to comply with the FCC’s recent open Internet rules even if they are overturned in court. Our customers can access all Netflix content,” said Sena Fitzmaurice, Comcast’s vice president of government communications.
Franken, who was an aggressive opponent of the Comcast acquisition of NBC Universal, implored SXSW attendees to fight the political influence of the big telecom firms.
"Unfortunately one thing these big corporations have that we don't is the ability to purchase favorable political outcomes," he said. "Big telecoms have lots of [lobbyists], and good ones, too. ... The end of net neutrality would benefit no one but these corporate giants."
Franken said talk of a "government takeover" of the Internet by net neutrality critics has as much credibility as claims of "death panels" in the health care legislation and claims that "Obama's a Muslim," calling them a "pantheon of lies."
Franken finished up his half-hour speech by imploring the crowd to preserve net neutrality to avoid a future in which they're "stuck listening to the Black Eyed Peas and reminiscing about the days before you had to sell out to make it.”
“Let's not let the government sell us out,” he said. “Let's fight for net neutrality. Let's keep Austin weird. Let's keep the Internet weird. Let's keep the Internet free."
Saturday, March 12, 2011
Corporations don't have 'personal privacy' rights, Supreme Court rules
AT&T had fought the release of FCC documents based on a law that shields records which might result in an invasion of privacy. An appellate court sided with AT&T, but the Supreme Court did not. March 02, 2011
David G. Savage, Los Angeles Times
http://articles.latimes.com/2011/mar/02/business/la-fi-court-corporations-20110302
Corporations do not have a right to "personal privacy," the Supreme Court ruled unanimously, at least when it comes to the Freedom of Information Act and the release of documents held by the government.
Last year's ruling giving companies a free-speech right to spend money on campaign ads prompted liberal critics to say the court's conservatives were biased in favor of corporate rights.
While not alluding to the criticism, Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. took a scalpel to a corporate-rights claim from AT&T Inc. that its "personal privacy" deserves to be protected. The ordinary meaning of "personal" does not refer to an impersonal company, he said.
"We do not usually speak of personal characteristics, personal effects, personal correspondence, personal influence or personal tragedy as referring to corporations or other artificial entities," he wrote. "In fact, we often use the word 'personal' to mean precisely the opposite of business-related: We speak of personal expenses and business expenses, personal life and work life, personal opinion and a company's view."
The decision means the Federal Communications Commission may release documents that were compiled during an investigation in 2004 over whether AT&T had overcharged schools and libraries for use of the Internet. The company paid a $500,000 settlement.
When some of its competitors sought release of the documents through the Freedom of Information Act, AT&T objected. It cited an exception in the law that shields law enforcement records which might result in an "unwarranted invasion of personal privacy."
AT&T won a ruling based on that provision from the U.S. 3rd Circuit Court of Appeals in Philadelphia. Its judges noted one part of the law defines "person" to include not just an individual but also a "partnership, association or corporation."
Then U.S. Solicitor Gen. Elena Kagan appealed the issue to the Supreme Court. She said the Freedom of Information Act had never been interpreted to protect the "personal privacy" of companies.
All the justices agreed in FCC v. AT&T, with the exception of Kagan, who did not participate. "We trust that AT&T will not take it personally," Roberts said in a parting comment.
david.savage@latimes.com
David G. Savage, Los Angeles Times
http://articles.latimes.com/2011/mar/02/business/la-fi-court-corporations-20110302
Corporations do not have a right to "personal privacy," the Supreme Court ruled unanimously, at least when it comes to the Freedom of Information Act and the release of documents held by the government.
Last year's ruling giving companies a free-speech right to spend money on campaign ads prompted liberal critics to say the court's conservatives were biased in favor of corporate rights.
While not alluding to the criticism, Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. took a scalpel to a corporate-rights claim from AT&T Inc. that its "personal privacy" deserves to be protected. The ordinary meaning of "personal" does not refer to an impersonal company, he said.
"We do not usually speak of personal characteristics, personal effects, personal correspondence, personal influence or personal tragedy as referring to corporations or other artificial entities," he wrote. "In fact, we often use the word 'personal' to mean precisely the opposite of business-related: We speak of personal expenses and business expenses, personal life and work life, personal opinion and a company's view."
The decision means the Federal Communications Commission may release documents that were compiled during an investigation in 2004 over whether AT&T had overcharged schools and libraries for use of the Internet. The company paid a $500,000 settlement.
When some of its competitors sought release of the documents through the Freedom of Information Act, AT&T objected. It cited an exception in the law that shields law enforcement records which might result in an "unwarranted invasion of personal privacy."
AT&T won a ruling based on that provision from the U.S. 3rd Circuit Court of Appeals in Philadelphia. Its judges noted one part of the law defines "person" to include not just an individual but also a "partnership, association or corporation."
Then U.S. Solicitor Gen. Elena Kagan appealed the issue to the Supreme Court. She said the Freedom of Information Act had never been interpreted to protect the "personal privacy" of companies.
All the justices agreed in FCC v. AT&T, with the exception of Kagan, who did not participate. "We trust that AT&T will not take it personally," Roberts said in a parting comment.
david.savage@latimes.com
Wednesday, December 29, 2010
Steve Wozniak to the FCC: Keep the Internet Free
http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2010/12/steve-wozniak-to-the-fcc-keep-the-internet-free/68294/
Yes, my guard stood hard when abstract threats
Too nobel to neglect
Deceived me into thinking
I had something to protect
Good and bad, I define these terms
Quite clear, no doubt somehow
Ahh, but I was so much older then
I'm younger than that now
-- Bob Dylan
Steve Wozniak to the FCC: Keep the Internet Free
Dec 21 2010
To whom it may concern:
I have always loved humor and laughter. As a young engineer I got an impulse to start a Dial-a-Joke in the San Jose/San Francisco area. I was aware of such humor services in other countries, such as Australia. This idea came from my belief in laughter. I could scarcely believe that I was the first person to create such a simple service in my region. Why was I the first? This was 1972 and it was illegal in the U.S. to use your own telephone. It was illegal in the U.S. to use your own answering machine. Hence it also virtually impossible to buy or own such devices. We had a monopoly phone system in our country then.
The major expense for a young engineer is the rent of an apartment. The only answering machine I could legally use, by leasing (not purchasing) it from our phone company, the Codaphone 700, was designed for businesses like theaters. It was out of the price range of creative individuals wanting to try something new like dial-a-joke. This machine leased for more than a typical car payment each month. Despite my great passion and success with Dial-a-Joke, I could not afford it and eventually had to stop after a couple of years. By then, a San Francisco radio station had also started such a service. I believe that my Dial-a-Joke was the most called single line (no extensions) number in the country at that time due to the shortness of my jokes and the high popularity of the service.
Moving ahead, I have owned four homes in my life. None of these had cable TV, even though one was a new development where the law required cable. None of these had DSL, including my current home, which is only .8 miles up a hill from the populous (constant-homes) town I live in. I pay for a T1 line, which costs many times what DSL runs for about 1/10 the bandwidth. That's as close as I can come to broadband where I live. The local phone providers don't have any obligation to serve all of their phone customers with DSL. They also have no requirement to service everyone living in the geographic area for which they have a monopoly. This is what has happened without regulatory control, despite every politician and president and CEO and PR person since the beginning of the Internet boon saying how important it was to ensure that everyone be provided broadband access.
As a side note, I once phoned the cable company in the town I lived in. I could look from my bedroom window at homes ¾ of a mile away which had cable. I told the cable company that I would be willing to pay the cost of laying cable to my home. The cable company looked into it and got back to me that they could not do this because there were not enough homes on my hill to pay for the monthly rental of running their cable on telephone poles.
In the earliest days of satellite TV to homes, you would buy a receiver and pay a fee to get all the common cable channels. I had a large family (two adults, six kids) and felt like making every room a lot easier to wire for TV. Rather than place a satellite receiver in each room, I'd provide all the common channels on a normal cable, like cable companies do. In my garage, I set up three racks of satellite receivers. I paid for one receiver to access CNN. I paid for another to access TNT. I paid for others to access HBO and other such networks. I had about 30 or 40 channels done this way. I had modulators to put each of these channels onto standard cable TV channels on one cable, which was distributed throughout my home. I could buy any TV I liked and plug it in anywhere in the home and it immediately watch everything without having to install another satellite receiver in that room. I literally had my own cable TV 'company' in the garage, which I called Woz TV, except that I even kept signals in stereo, a quality step that virtually every cable company skipped.
Then I got this idea that I could pretty easily run my signal through the wires in conduits up and down our 60-home neighborhood. The neighborhood had been partially wired for cable before the cable company went bankrupt as the neighborhood was being developed. I phoned HBO and asked how much they would charge me just to be a nice guy and share my signal with 60 neighbors. What came back was an answer that I couldn't do such a personal thing. I had to be a cable company charging my neighbors certain rates and then a percentage of what I was charging, with minimums, had to be paid for HBO. I instantly realized that you couldn't do something nice in your garage as a normal person and I gave up the idea.
The Internet has become as important as anything man has ever created. But those freedoms are being chipped away.
When young, I remember clearly how my father told me why our country was so great, mainly based on the constitution and Bill of Rights. Over my lifetime, I've seen those rights disregarded at every step. Loopholes abound. It's sad. For example, my (Eisenhower Republican) father explained the sanctity of your home and how it could not easily be entered. It was your own private abode. And you had a right to listen to any radio signals that came because the air was free and if it came into your home you had a right to listen to it. That principle went away with a ban on radios that could tune in cell phone frequencies in the days of analog cell phones. Nobody but myself seemed to treat this as a core principle that was too much to give up.
I was also taught that space, and the moon, were free and open. Nobody owned them. No country owned them. I loved this concept of the purest things in the universe being unowned.
The early Internet was so accidental, it also was free and open in this sense. The Internet has become as important as anything man has ever created. But those freedoms are being chipped away. Please, I beg you, open your senses to the will of the people to keep the Internet as free as possible. Local ISP's should provide connection to the Internet but then it should be treated as though you own those wires and can choose what to do with them when and how you want to, as long as you don't destruct them. I don't want to feel that whichever content supplier had the best government connections or paid the most money determined what I can watch and for how much. This is the monopolistic approach and not representative of a truly free market in the case of today's Internet.
Imagine that when we started Apple we set things up so that we could charge purchasers of our computers by the number of bits they use. The personal computer revolution would have been delayed a decade or more. If I had to pay for each bit I used on my 6502 microprocessor, I would not have been able to build my own computers anyway. What if we paid for our roads per mile that we drove? It would be fair and understandable to charge more for someone who drives more. But one of the most wonderful things in our current life is getting in the car and driving anywhere we feel like at this moment, and with no accounting for cost. You just get in your car and go. This is one of the most popular themes of our life and even our popular music. It's a type of freedom from some concerns that makes us happy and not complain. The roads are already paid for. You rarely hear people complain that roads are "free." The government shines when it comes to having provided us pathways to drive around our country. We don't think of the roadways as being negative like telecommunication carriers. It's a rare breath of fresh air.
I frequently speak to different types of audiences all over the country. When I'm asked my feeling on Net Neutrality I tell the open truth. When I was first asked to "sign on" with some good people interested in Net Neutrality my initial thought was that the economic system works better with tiered pricing for various customers. On the other hand, I'm a founder of the EFF and I care a lot about individuals and their own importance. Finally, the thought hit me that every time and in every way that the telecommunications careers have had power or control, we the people wind up getting screwed. Every audience that I speak this statement and phrase to bursts into applause.
That's how the people think. They don't want this to encroach on their Internet freedom.
I was brought up being told that one of the main purposes of our government is to help people who need help. When I was very young, this made me prouder than anything else of my government. I felt that way until the year that the San Jose Draft board voted 5-3 to call me not a student because I'd submitted my grades instead of the proper form, and made me 1A for service in Vietnam. As soon as I got a safe draft lottery number, they sent me a letter saying that they would grant me a 2S student deferment, because then they could get a shot at me in a later year. What was this game? Why was the government doing this sort of thing to a citizen? They aren't always about helping the people.
We have very few government agencies that the populace views as looking out for them, the people. The FCC is one of these agencies that is still wearing a white hat. Not only is current action on Net Neutrality one of the most important times ever for the FCC, it's probably the most momentous and watched action of any government agency in memorable times in terms of setting our perception of whether the government represents the wealthy powers or the average citizen, of whether the government is good or is bad. This decision is important far beyond the domain of the FCC itself.
Sincerely,
Woz
Steve Wozniak is a computer engineer who co-founded Apple Computer, Inc. with Steve Jobs. He created the Apple I and Apple II series computers in the mid-1970s. After earning the National Medal of Technology in 1985, Wozniak left Apple to work on various business and philanthropic ventures.
Yes, my guard stood hard when abstract threats
Too nobel to neglect
Deceived me into thinking
I had something to protect
Good and bad, I define these terms
Quite clear, no doubt somehow
Ahh, but I was so much older then
I'm younger than that now
-- Bob Dylan
Steve Wozniak to the FCC: Keep the Internet Free
Dec 21 2010
To whom it may concern:
I have always loved humor and laughter. As a young engineer I got an impulse to start a Dial-a-Joke in the San Jose/San Francisco area. I was aware of such humor services in other countries, such as Australia. This idea came from my belief in laughter. I could scarcely believe that I was the first person to create such a simple service in my region. Why was I the first? This was 1972 and it was illegal in the U.S. to use your own telephone. It was illegal in the U.S. to use your own answering machine. Hence it also virtually impossible to buy or own such devices. We had a monopoly phone system in our country then.
The major expense for a young engineer is the rent of an apartment. The only answering machine I could legally use, by leasing (not purchasing) it from our phone company, the Codaphone 700, was designed for businesses like theaters. It was out of the price range of creative individuals wanting to try something new like dial-a-joke. This machine leased for more than a typical car payment each month. Despite my great passion and success with Dial-a-Joke, I could not afford it and eventually had to stop after a couple of years. By then, a San Francisco radio station had also started such a service. I believe that my Dial-a-Joke was the most called single line (no extensions) number in the country at that time due to the shortness of my jokes and the high popularity of the service.
Moving ahead, I have owned four homes in my life. None of these had cable TV, even though one was a new development where the law required cable. None of these had DSL, including my current home, which is only .8 miles up a hill from the populous (constant-homes) town I live in. I pay for a T1 line, which costs many times what DSL runs for about 1/10 the bandwidth. That's as close as I can come to broadband where I live. The local phone providers don't have any obligation to serve all of their phone customers with DSL. They also have no requirement to service everyone living in the geographic area for which they have a monopoly. This is what has happened without regulatory control, despite every politician and president and CEO and PR person since the beginning of the Internet boon saying how important it was to ensure that everyone be provided broadband access.
As a side note, I once phoned the cable company in the town I lived in. I could look from my bedroom window at homes ¾ of a mile away which had cable. I told the cable company that I would be willing to pay the cost of laying cable to my home. The cable company looked into it and got back to me that they could not do this because there were not enough homes on my hill to pay for the monthly rental of running their cable on telephone poles.
In the earliest days of satellite TV to homes, you would buy a receiver and pay a fee to get all the common cable channels. I had a large family (two adults, six kids) and felt like making every room a lot easier to wire for TV. Rather than place a satellite receiver in each room, I'd provide all the common channels on a normal cable, like cable companies do. In my garage, I set up three racks of satellite receivers. I paid for one receiver to access CNN. I paid for another to access TNT. I paid for others to access HBO and other such networks. I had about 30 or 40 channels done this way. I had modulators to put each of these channels onto standard cable TV channels on one cable, which was distributed throughout my home. I could buy any TV I liked and plug it in anywhere in the home and it immediately watch everything without having to install another satellite receiver in that room. I literally had my own cable TV 'company' in the garage, which I called Woz TV, except that I even kept signals in stereo, a quality step that virtually every cable company skipped.
Then I got this idea that I could pretty easily run my signal through the wires in conduits up and down our 60-home neighborhood. The neighborhood had been partially wired for cable before the cable company went bankrupt as the neighborhood was being developed. I phoned HBO and asked how much they would charge me just to be a nice guy and share my signal with 60 neighbors. What came back was an answer that I couldn't do such a personal thing. I had to be a cable company charging my neighbors certain rates and then a percentage of what I was charging, with minimums, had to be paid for HBO. I instantly realized that you couldn't do something nice in your garage as a normal person and I gave up the idea.
The Internet has become as important as anything man has ever created. But those freedoms are being chipped away.
When young, I remember clearly how my father told me why our country was so great, mainly based on the constitution and Bill of Rights. Over my lifetime, I've seen those rights disregarded at every step. Loopholes abound. It's sad. For example, my (Eisenhower Republican) father explained the sanctity of your home and how it could not easily be entered. It was your own private abode. And you had a right to listen to any radio signals that came because the air was free and if it came into your home you had a right to listen to it. That principle went away with a ban on radios that could tune in cell phone frequencies in the days of analog cell phones. Nobody but myself seemed to treat this as a core principle that was too much to give up.
I was also taught that space, and the moon, were free and open. Nobody owned them. No country owned them. I loved this concept of the purest things in the universe being unowned.
The early Internet was so accidental, it also was free and open in this sense. The Internet has become as important as anything man has ever created. But those freedoms are being chipped away. Please, I beg you, open your senses to the will of the people to keep the Internet as free as possible. Local ISP's should provide connection to the Internet but then it should be treated as though you own those wires and can choose what to do with them when and how you want to, as long as you don't destruct them. I don't want to feel that whichever content supplier had the best government connections or paid the most money determined what I can watch and for how much. This is the monopolistic approach and not representative of a truly free market in the case of today's Internet.
Imagine that when we started Apple we set things up so that we could charge purchasers of our computers by the number of bits they use. The personal computer revolution would have been delayed a decade or more. If I had to pay for each bit I used on my 6502 microprocessor, I would not have been able to build my own computers anyway. What if we paid for our roads per mile that we drove? It would be fair and understandable to charge more for someone who drives more. But one of the most wonderful things in our current life is getting in the car and driving anywhere we feel like at this moment, and with no accounting for cost. You just get in your car and go. This is one of the most popular themes of our life and even our popular music. It's a type of freedom from some concerns that makes us happy and not complain. The roads are already paid for. You rarely hear people complain that roads are "free." The government shines when it comes to having provided us pathways to drive around our country. We don't think of the roadways as being negative like telecommunication carriers. It's a rare breath of fresh air.
I frequently speak to different types of audiences all over the country. When I'm asked my feeling on Net Neutrality I tell the open truth. When I was first asked to "sign on" with some good people interested in Net Neutrality my initial thought was that the economic system works better with tiered pricing for various customers. On the other hand, I'm a founder of the EFF and I care a lot about individuals and their own importance. Finally, the thought hit me that every time and in every way that the telecommunications careers have had power or control, we the people wind up getting screwed. Every audience that I speak this statement and phrase to bursts into applause.
That's how the people think. They don't want this to encroach on their Internet freedom.
I was brought up being told that one of the main purposes of our government is to help people who need help. When I was very young, this made me prouder than anything else of my government. I felt that way until the year that the San Jose Draft board voted 5-3 to call me not a student because I'd submitted my grades instead of the proper form, and made me 1A for service in Vietnam. As soon as I got a safe draft lottery number, they sent me a letter saying that they would grant me a 2S student deferment, because then they could get a shot at me in a later year. What was this game? Why was the government doing this sort of thing to a citizen? They aren't always about helping the people.
We have very few government agencies that the populace views as looking out for them, the people. The FCC is one of these agencies that is still wearing a white hat. Not only is current action on Net Neutrality one of the most important times ever for the FCC, it's probably the most momentous and watched action of any government agency in memorable times in terms of setting our perception of whether the government represents the wealthy powers or the average citizen, of whether the government is good or is bad. This decision is important far beyond the domain of the FCC itself.
Sincerely,
Woz
Steve Wozniak is a computer engineer who co-founded Apple Computer, Inc. with Steve Jobs. He created the Apple I and Apple II series computers in the mid-1970s. After earning the National Medal of Technology in 1985, Wozniak left Apple to work on various business and philanthropic ventures.
Fake Net Neutrality: Like Letting Enron Write the Electricity Rules
http://my.firedoglake.com/scarecrow/2010/12/21/fake-net-neutrality-what-does-corporate-capture-look-like/
Fake Net Neutrality: Like Letting Enron Write the Electricity Rules
By: Scarecrow
Tuesday December 21, 2010
David Dayen’s post this a.m. summarizes concerns about the apparent regulatory capture of the Federal Communications Commission, which is about to issue new rules to undermine internet open access, aka, “net neutrality.” NYT coverage is here.
I’ll leave to Tim Karr and others to describe the technical features and sell outs that have allowed the Western World’s Worst internet/broadband structure to become slower, more expensive and more discriminatory than services in other countries. Senator Al Franken gave an excellent speech, worth watching on the full range of policy issues.
It may help to have an analogous framework on how to think about what corporate capture of the internet and broadband service means, not just in terms of speed and coverage but in terms of content and pricing. It’s not just that our service is slower and we face monopoly pricing, it’s that a tiny handful of corporations are seizing control of what we’ll be allowed to watch and read.
Suppose that President Eisenhower had proposed we build an interstate highway system, but we’d allow only three or four large corporations to carve up and own all the main interconnections, determine the tolls and decide who got to drive on them during which hours. The corporations could also decide where the on/off ramps were, which communities they did or didn’t serve, where the routes went, depending on which provided better tax breaks.
And suppose these same companies owned a couple of auto companies, and they could decide whether cars and trucks made by their affiliate companies got better access, more lanes, higher speeds and lower tolls than cars/trucks sold by competitors.
Then suppose the Justice Department and the FTC did not think it their job to enforce the anti-trust laws of the United States, while the federal highway regulators did not believe they should have rules requiring open access, fair pricing, and non-discrimination.
Welcome to the forthcoming US policy on broadband/internet access.
We’re now told that the Democratic appointees on the FCC plan to develop a master plan for how this will all work. But until the Obama Administration and Congress forcefully and clearly direct the FCC to adopt and enforce rules for open, non-discriminatory access to the internet, the FCC has no framework consistent with the public interest for talking about some master plan. I doubt they’re even having a relevant conversation.
We saw an analogous battle over access to another network, the electricity transmission infrastructure. That industry spent over two decades struggling with the concepts of open access, non-discrimination, and efficient pricing. And after some failures and very bad false starts — recall California — we’ve made some progress there.
The electricity transmission system now connects the whole country, but its operation, once wholly balkanized, is now split between two types of system operators.
In over half the country, the transmission system is operated regionally by an independent, non-profit organization overseen by a federal regulator. Each independent system operator (ISO) functions under open access, non-discrimination rules. Every supplier, every generator, regardless of ownership, and every buyer/community/utility gets open access to the entire grid on non-discriminatory terms. Every technology/fuel source — wind, solar, coal, gas, nuclear, etc, can get on the grid just by connecting to the interconnected grid and agreeing to the open access rules. This system keeps the lights on in well over half the country, and the same model functions in about a dozen countries world wide.
However, in the rest of the US — mostly the deep South (think Southern Company) and the West (outside California) — the transmission system is owned and operated in a balkanized fashion by a [usually] private regional utility monopoly that has a vested interest in making sure competitors and/or non-preferred technologies are not given the same access as their own generators. If the owner’s lines are “full” or “congested,” the owners can allow their generators to serve their loads but curtail anyone else. Competitors are not allowed to connect to the grid under the same rules; buyers (e.g., municipal utilities) can’t buy from others and use the owner’s lines without negotiating special access deals and paying fees to the owner. The federal regulators tolerate this discrimination, because they can’t overcome the campaign contributions and political influence the monopolists have in Congress. Sound familiar?
Today’s FCC announcement reminds me of where the California electricity restructuring debate was in 1995, about the time Enron and its trader friends (remember “screw granny”?) were at the height of their influence and they were helping the large utilities write the rules that guaranteed discrimination and included rules that we knew would enable Enron’s gaming the system. Those of us who objected and demanded the system operators function as quasi-public entities and guarantee open access and non-discrimination were accused of being socialists plotting a government takeover, even a Soviet 5-year Plan! We’ve been here before, and what’s coming next will be ugly.
It’s blindingly obvious that “citizens” like AT&T, Verizon and Comcast, the nation’s largest cable provider, should never be allowed to write the rules for the internet and broadband access. Nor should their captured regulators ever sanction discrimination and anti-competitive mergers that allow Comcast to gobble up NBC.
John Chandley
Fake Net Neutrality: Like Letting Enron Write the Electricity Rules
By: Scarecrow
Tuesday December 21, 2010
David Dayen’s post this a.m. summarizes concerns about the apparent regulatory capture of the Federal Communications Commission, which is about to issue new rules to undermine internet open access, aka, “net neutrality.” NYT coverage is here.
I’ll leave to Tim Karr and others to describe the technical features and sell outs that have allowed the Western World’s Worst internet/broadband structure to become slower, more expensive and more discriminatory than services in other countries. Senator Al Franken gave an excellent speech, worth watching on the full range of policy issues.
It may help to have an analogous framework on how to think about what corporate capture of the internet and broadband service means, not just in terms of speed and coverage but in terms of content and pricing. It’s not just that our service is slower and we face monopoly pricing, it’s that a tiny handful of corporations are seizing control of what we’ll be allowed to watch and read.
Suppose that President Eisenhower had proposed we build an interstate highway system, but we’d allow only three or four large corporations to carve up and own all the main interconnections, determine the tolls and decide who got to drive on them during which hours. The corporations could also decide where the on/off ramps were, which communities they did or didn’t serve, where the routes went, depending on which provided better tax breaks.
And suppose these same companies owned a couple of auto companies, and they could decide whether cars and trucks made by their affiliate companies got better access, more lanes, higher speeds and lower tolls than cars/trucks sold by competitors.
Then suppose the Justice Department and the FTC did not think it their job to enforce the anti-trust laws of the United States, while the federal highway regulators did not believe they should have rules requiring open access, fair pricing, and non-discrimination.
Welcome to the forthcoming US policy on broadband/internet access.
We’re now told that the Democratic appointees on the FCC plan to develop a master plan for how this will all work. But until the Obama Administration and Congress forcefully and clearly direct the FCC to adopt and enforce rules for open, non-discriminatory access to the internet, the FCC has no framework consistent with the public interest for talking about some master plan. I doubt they’re even having a relevant conversation.
We saw an analogous battle over access to another network, the electricity transmission infrastructure. That industry spent over two decades struggling with the concepts of open access, non-discrimination, and efficient pricing. And after some failures and very bad false starts — recall California — we’ve made some progress there.
The electricity transmission system now connects the whole country, but its operation, once wholly balkanized, is now split between two types of system operators.
In over half the country, the transmission system is operated regionally by an independent, non-profit organization overseen by a federal regulator. Each independent system operator (ISO) functions under open access, non-discrimination rules. Every supplier, every generator, regardless of ownership, and every buyer/community/utility gets open access to the entire grid on non-discriminatory terms. Every technology/fuel source — wind, solar, coal, gas, nuclear, etc, can get on the grid just by connecting to the interconnected grid and agreeing to the open access rules. This system keeps the lights on in well over half the country, and the same model functions in about a dozen countries world wide.
However, in the rest of the US — mostly the deep South (think Southern Company) and the West (outside California) — the transmission system is owned and operated in a balkanized fashion by a [usually] private regional utility monopoly that has a vested interest in making sure competitors and/or non-preferred technologies are not given the same access as their own generators. If the owner’s lines are “full” or “congested,” the owners can allow their generators to serve their loads but curtail anyone else. Competitors are not allowed to connect to the grid under the same rules; buyers (e.g., municipal utilities) can’t buy from others and use the owner’s lines without negotiating special access deals and paying fees to the owner. The federal regulators tolerate this discrimination, because they can’t overcome the campaign contributions and political influence the monopolists have in Congress. Sound familiar?
Today’s FCC announcement reminds me of where the California electricity restructuring debate was in 1995, about the time Enron and its trader friends (remember “screw granny”?) were at the height of their influence and they were helping the large utilities write the rules that guaranteed discrimination and included rules that we knew would enable Enron’s gaming the system. Those of us who objected and demanded the system operators function as quasi-public entities and guarantee open access and non-discrimination were accused of being socialists plotting a government takeover, even a Soviet 5-year Plan! We’ve been here before, and what’s coming next will be ugly.
It’s blindingly obvious that “citizens” like AT&T, Verizon and Comcast, the nation’s largest cable provider, should never be allowed to write the rules for the internet and broadband access. Nor should their captured regulators ever sanction discrimination and anti-competitive mergers that allow Comcast to gobble up NBC.
John Chandley
Net Neutrality Advocates Decry FCC 'False' Solution
http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2010/12/21-9
Published on Tuesday, December 21, 2010 by CommonDreams.org
Net Neutrality Advocates Decry FCC 'False' Solution and 'Squandered Opportunity'
Statements by Free Press and ACLU
WASHINGTON - The media advocacy group Free Press released the following statement in response to actions by the FCC today:
FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski. The rule passed by the FCC today does not reclassify wireless broadband service as a telecommunications service, which the ACLU and other proponents of network neutrality have long urged. Treating broadband access as similar to phone service would have allowed the FCC to rely on its broader regulatory authority. By a 3-2 vote Tuesday, the Federal Communications Commission approved new rules intended to prevent Internet providers like AT&T, Comcast and Verizon from acting as gatekeepers on the Web. The rules, however, heavily favor the industry they are intended to regulate, and leave consumers with minimal protections. Democratic Commissioners Mignon Clyburn and Michael Copps voted with Chairman Julius Genachowski, while Republican Commissioners Robert McDowell and Meredith Attwell Baker voted against.
Free Press Managing Director Craig Aaron made the following statement:
“We are deeply disappointed that the chairman chose to ignore the overwhelming public support for real Net Neutrality, instead moving forward with industry-written rules that will for the first time in Internet history allow discrimination online. This proceeding was a squandered opportunity to enact clear, meaningful rules to safeguard the Internet’s level playing field and protect consumers.
“The new rules are riddled with loopholes, evidence that the chairman sought approval from AT&T instead of listening to the millions of Americans who asked for real Net Neutrality. These rules don't do enough to stop the phone and cable companies from dividing the Internet into fast and slow lanes, and they fail to protect wireless users from discrimination. No longer can you get to the same Internet via your mobile device as you can via your laptop. The rules pave the way for AT&T to block your access to third-party applications and to require you to use its own preferred applications.
“Chairman Genachowski ignored President Obama's promise to the American people to take a 'back seat to no one' on Net Neutrality. He ignored the 2 million voices who petitioned for real Net Neutrality and the hundreds who came to public hearings across the country to ask him to protect the open Internet. And he ignored policymakers who urged him to protect consumers and maintain the Internet as a platform for innovation. It’s unfortunate that the only voices he chose to listen to were those coming from the very industry he’s charged with overseeing."
The American Civil Liberties Union released this statement:
The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) today passed a new rule clarifying the legal authority of the FCC to enforce network neutrality principles. Network neutrality principles protect free speech online by prohibiting the owner of a network from prioritizing some content on the Internet while slowing other content.
The rule approved today by the FCC includes full network neutrality protections for the wired Internet, which includes cable and DSL service to homes and businesses, but provides lesser protections for wireless broadband service and may allow wireless broadband providers to block certain applications and services that compete with their own applications and services. The American Civil Liberties Union has called for network neutrality protections on both the wired and wireless Internet as important safeguards for free speech.
"Network neutrality principles are essential to protecting the First Amendment rights of Americans who rely on the Internet as a forum for free speech. While the new FCC rule creates stronger network neutrality protections for Americans who use the wired Internet, it fails to provide adequate protections for Americans who rely on wireless broadband service," said Chris Calabrese, ACLU Legislative Counsel. "By creating two sets of regulations – one for the wired Internet and one for wireless broadband – and failing to ground them in the strongest legal protections available, the FCC has failed to protect free speech and Internet openness for all users. The ACLU will continue to fight for full network neutrality protections. Internet openness is key to protecting our First Amendment rights."
The rule passed by the FCC today does not reclassify wireless broadband service as a telecommunications service, which the ACLU and other proponents of network neutrality have long urged. Treating broadband access as similar to phone service would have allowed the FCC to rely on its broader regulatory authority under Title II of the Communications Act to enforce network neutrality principles.
Published on Tuesday, December 21, 2010 by CommonDreams.org
Net Neutrality Advocates Decry FCC 'False' Solution and 'Squandered Opportunity'
Statements by Free Press and ACLU
WASHINGTON - The media advocacy group Free Press released the following statement in response to actions by the FCC today:
FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski. The rule passed by the FCC today does not reclassify wireless broadband service as a telecommunications service, which the ACLU and other proponents of network neutrality have long urged. Treating broadband access as similar to phone service would have allowed the FCC to rely on its broader regulatory authority. By a 3-2 vote Tuesday, the Federal Communications Commission approved new rules intended to prevent Internet providers like AT&T, Comcast and Verizon from acting as gatekeepers on the Web. The rules, however, heavily favor the industry they are intended to regulate, and leave consumers with minimal protections. Democratic Commissioners Mignon Clyburn and Michael Copps voted with Chairman Julius Genachowski, while Republican Commissioners Robert McDowell and Meredith Attwell Baker voted against.
Free Press Managing Director Craig Aaron made the following statement:
“We are deeply disappointed that the chairman chose to ignore the overwhelming public support for real Net Neutrality, instead moving forward with industry-written rules that will for the first time in Internet history allow discrimination online. This proceeding was a squandered opportunity to enact clear, meaningful rules to safeguard the Internet’s level playing field and protect consumers.
“The new rules are riddled with loopholes, evidence that the chairman sought approval from AT&T instead of listening to the millions of Americans who asked for real Net Neutrality. These rules don't do enough to stop the phone and cable companies from dividing the Internet into fast and slow lanes, and they fail to protect wireless users from discrimination. No longer can you get to the same Internet via your mobile device as you can via your laptop. The rules pave the way for AT&T to block your access to third-party applications and to require you to use its own preferred applications.
“Chairman Genachowski ignored President Obama's promise to the American people to take a 'back seat to no one' on Net Neutrality. He ignored the 2 million voices who petitioned for real Net Neutrality and the hundreds who came to public hearings across the country to ask him to protect the open Internet. And he ignored policymakers who urged him to protect consumers and maintain the Internet as a platform for innovation. It’s unfortunate that the only voices he chose to listen to were those coming from the very industry he’s charged with overseeing."
The American Civil Liberties Union released this statement:
The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) today passed a new rule clarifying the legal authority of the FCC to enforce network neutrality principles. Network neutrality principles protect free speech online by prohibiting the owner of a network from prioritizing some content on the Internet while slowing other content.
The rule approved today by the FCC includes full network neutrality protections for the wired Internet, which includes cable and DSL service to homes and businesses, but provides lesser protections for wireless broadband service and may allow wireless broadband providers to block certain applications and services that compete with their own applications and services. The American Civil Liberties Union has called for network neutrality protections on both the wired and wireless Internet as important safeguards for free speech.
"Network neutrality principles are essential to protecting the First Amendment rights of Americans who rely on the Internet as a forum for free speech. While the new FCC rule creates stronger network neutrality protections for Americans who use the wired Internet, it fails to provide adequate protections for Americans who rely on wireless broadband service," said Chris Calabrese, ACLU Legislative Counsel. "By creating two sets of regulations – one for the wired Internet and one for wireless broadband – and failing to ground them in the strongest legal protections available, the FCC has failed to protect free speech and Internet openness for all users. The ACLU will continue to fight for full network neutrality protections. Internet openness is key to protecting our First Amendment rights."
The rule passed by the FCC today does not reclassify wireless broadband service as a telecommunications service, which the ACLU and other proponents of network neutrality have long urged. Treating broadband access as similar to phone service would have allowed the FCC to rely on its broader regulatory authority under Title II of the Communications Act to enforce network neutrality principles.
The FCC's weak new "open Internet" rules
http://www.salon.com/technology/dan_gillmor/2010/12/21/fcc_network_neutrality/index.html
Tuesday, Dec 21, 2010
The FCC's weak new "open Internet" rules
A partisan vote on Tuesday displeases everyone. And everyone's right
Dan Gillmor
The neutering of the Internet is now the unofficial policy of the Federal Communications Commission. Contrary to the happy talk from FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski at a rule-making announcement today in Washington, the move is well underway to turn the Internet into a regulated playground for corporate giants.
Tuesday's FCC vote on rules purportedly designed to ensure open and free networks was a 3-2 partisan charade, with Genachowski and the other two Democratic commissioners in favor and the two Republicans against. It did nothing of the sort. The short-term result will be confusion and jockeying for position. Genachowski's claim that the rules bring "a level of certainty" to the landscape was laughable unless he was talking about lobbyists and lawyers; their futures are certainly looking prosperous. The longer-range result will be to solidify the power of the incumbent powerhouses -- especially telecommunications providers and the entertainment industry -- to take much more control over what we do online.
It's almost not worth the trouble of telling you what's in the rules, because they are so meaningless. About the only redeeming feature is a requirement that ISPs be more transparent about how they manage their networks. I would expect to see a bare minimum of compliance here, and little if any enforcement except an occasional wrist-slap, if that.
But when it came to rules that might boost network neutrality -- the notion that end users (you and me) should decide what content and services we want without interference from the ISPs -- the FCC's order paid lip service to the concept while enshrining its eventual demise. In theory, land-line carriers (traditional phone and cable companies, for the most part) won't be allowed to play favorites. In practice, the new rules invite them to concoct new kinds of services that do precisely that.
But even that fuzzy concept won't apply to mobile carriers, which means that discrimination will be explicitly permitted by companies like AT&T and Verizon for customers of the iPhone and iPad, among other devices that are increasingly the most important entry point to the Internet.
The rules are also an open invitation to ISPs to spy on their customers. Genachowski's repeated references to users' right to use "legal" content were code words for the entertainment industry's push to have ISPs become their enforcement arms in the copyright wars. Hollywood wants your ISP to watch everything people do, and then block users who are alleged to be infringing.
If Genachowski and his supporters think that they've done the right thing because they're being attacked from all sides, they're missing the reality. Sometimes, when everyone hates what you've done, you've done the wrong thing.
The FCC majority didn't have the courage, or the political support from the Obama administration (yes, another broken promise), to push for regulations that would address net neutrality in any meaningful way. So the protests from open-Internet folks was immediate, and justified.
Republicans and their house organ, Fox News, talk about Tuesday's vote as a "plan to regulate the Internet," and they're half-right. They mouth platitudes about freedom and liberty. They end up with a free-fire zone for corporations -- an oligopoly of content and services for captive consumers.
But they're right to be wary of regulation, because we've seen the corrosive effect of regulation in so many other arenas already. The FCC is already a captive of telecom companies in its traditional operations. Why would anyone expect this to be any different when it comes to the Internet? And the law of unintended consequences tells us that any regulations would be sure to have effects we can't foresee today. That's the issue the network-neutrality advocates also usually fail to address.
What wasn't on the table in the FCC's deliberations was actual competition. Unlike many other countries, the United States doesn't require Internet providers to share their lines and networks. By "share" I don't mean "give away" -- this is essentially about renting capacity to other companies that want to be ISPs. That's how the Internet got so big so fast in the first place: Phone companies were not allowed to prevent other ISPs from offering service on phone lines, but now they're allowed to prevent similar competition, and the market is a stifling oligopoly as a result.
If you think the Internet should be an enhanced form of cable television, you should be happy where we're heading. If you think it should be the messy and complex result of what innovators want to create, and what customers at the networks' edges want to do with the creations, you should worry.
A longtime participant in the tech and media worlds, Dan Gillmor is director of the Knight Center for Digital Media Entrepreneurship at Arizona State University's Walter Cronkite School of Journalism & Mass Communication. Follow Dan on Twitter: @dangillmor.
Tuesday, Dec 21, 2010
The FCC's weak new "open Internet" rules
A partisan vote on Tuesday displeases everyone. And everyone's right
Dan Gillmor
The neutering of the Internet is now the unofficial policy of the Federal Communications Commission. Contrary to the happy talk from FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski at a rule-making announcement today in Washington, the move is well underway to turn the Internet into a regulated playground for corporate giants.
Tuesday's FCC vote on rules purportedly designed to ensure open and free networks was a 3-2 partisan charade, with Genachowski and the other two Democratic commissioners in favor and the two Republicans against. It did nothing of the sort. The short-term result will be confusion and jockeying for position. Genachowski's claim that the rules bring "a level of certainty" to the landscape was laughable unless he was talking about lobbyists and lawyers; their futures are certainly looking prosperous. The longer-range result will be to solidify the power of the incumbent powerhouses -- especially telecommunications providers and the entertainment industry -- to take much more control over what we do online.
It's almost not worth the trouble of telling you what's in the rules, because they are so meaningless. About the only redeeming feature is a requirement that ISPs be more transparent about how they manage their networks. I would expect to see a bare minimum of compliance here, and little if any enforcement except an occasional wrist-slap, if that.
But when it came to rules that might boost network neutrality -- the notion that end users (you and me) should decide what content and services we want without interference from the ISPs -- the FCC's order paid lip service to the concept while enshrining its eventual demise. In theory, land-line carriers (traditional phone and cable companies, for the most part) won't be allowed to play favorites. In practice, the new rules invite them to concoct new kinds of services that do precisely that.
But even that fuzzy concept won't apply to mobile carriers, which means that discrimination will be explicitly permitted by companies like AT&T and Verizon for customers of the iPhone and iPad, among other devices that are increasingly the most important entry point to the Internet.
The rules are also an open invitation to ISPs to spy on their customers. Genachowski's repeated references to users' right to use "legal" content were code words for the entertainment industry's push to have ISPs become their enforcement arms in the copyright wars. Hollywood wants your ISP to watch everything people do, and then block users who are alleged to be infringing.
If Genachowski and his supporters think that they've done the right thing because they're being attacked from all sides, they're missing the reality. Sometimes, when everyone hates what you've done, you've done the wrong thing.
The FCC majority didn't have the courage, or the political support from the Obama administration (yes, another broken promise), to push for regulations that would address net neutrality in any meaningful way. So the protests from open-Internet folks was immediate, and justified.
Republicans and their house organ, Fox News, talk about Tuesday's vote as a "plan to regulate the Internet," and they're half-right. They mouth platitudes about freedom and liberty. They end up with a free-fire zone for corporations -- an oligopoly of content and services for captive consumers.
But they're right to be wary of regulation, because we've seen the corrosive effect of regulation in so many other arenas already. The FCC is already a captive of telecom companies in its traditional operations. Why would anyone expect this to be any different when it comes to the Internet? And the law of unintended consequences tells us that any regulations would be sure to have effects we can't foresee today. That's the issue the network-neutrality advocates also usually fail to address.
What wasn't on the table in the FCC's deliberations was actual competition. Unlike many other countries, the United States doesn't require Internet providers to share their lines and networks. By "share" I don't mean "give away" -- this is essentially about renting capacity to other companies that want to be ISPs. That's how the Internet got so big so fast in the first place: Phone companies were not allowed to prevent other ISPs from offering service on phone lines, but now they're allowed to prevent similar competition, and the market is a stifling oligopoly as a result.
If you think the Internet should be an enhanced form of cable television, you should be happy where we're heading. If you think it should be the messy and complex result of what innovators want to create, and what customers at the networks' edges want to do with the creations, you should worry.
A longtime participant in the tech and media worlds, Dan Gillmor is director of the Knight Center for Digital Media Entrepreneurship at Arizona State University's Walter Cronkite School of Journalism & Mass Communication. Follow Dan on Twitter: @dangillmor.
FCC Passes Net Neutrality Rules
http://www.tomsguide.com/us/Net-Neutrality-FCC-Julius-Genachowski-broadband-transparency,news-9478.html
FCC Passes Net Neutrality Rules
December 22, 2010
Kevin Parrish
It's the beginning or the end of the Internet, depending on which side of the line you're standing on.
Tuesday the Federal Communications Commission approved new rules that prohibit phone and cable companies from discriminating against or favoring Internet content and services.
The news arrived by way of a presentation in Washington D.C. By FCC chairman Julius Genachowski. According to reports, the FCC's three Democrats voted to pass the new rules and the two Republicans voted against them, calling the rules "unnecessary regulation." Afterward the Republican party on Capitol Hill quickly responded to Genachowski's speech, vowing to block the new negotiations by introducing a "resolution of disapproval."
In the meantime, the new "net neutrality" rules are broken down into six primary components:
1. Consumers and innovators have a right to know the basic performance characteristics of their Internet access and how their network is being managed.
2. Consumers and innovators have a right to send and receive lawful traffic. Consumers can go where they want, say what they want, experiment with ideas-- commercial and social, and use the devices of their choice. The rules thus prohibits the block of lawful content, apps, services and the connection of devices to the network.
3. Consumers and innovators have a right to a level playing field. The FCC rules state that no central authority, public or private, should have the power to pick winners and losers on the Internet. This is essentially a ban on unreasonable discrimination.
4. Broadband providers need meaningful flexibility to manage their networks to deal with congestion, security and other issues. The section also honors the business practice of tiered pricing.
5. The principle of Internet openness applies to mobile broadband. This means that there is only one Internet, and it must remain an open platform despite the device used for access. Mobile broadband providers are thus required to remain transparent and are prohibited from blocking websites or blocking certain applications provided by competitors.
6. The FCC will remain vigilant in promptly enforcing the rules and vigilant in monitoring developments in areas such as mobile and the market for specialized services which may affect Internet openness.
To enforce the new rules, the FCC has launched an Open Internet Advisory Committee that will assist the Commission in monitoring the state of Internet openness and the effects of the rules. It has also launched an Open Internet Apps Challenge at challenge.gov to stimulate app developers into creating tools that will help consumers monitor their own broadband connections.
"Today, for the first time, we are adopting rules to preserve basic Internet values," Genachowski said. "For the first time, we'll have enforceable rules of the road to preserve Internet freedom and openness."
FCC Passes Net Neutrality Rules
December 22, 2010
Kevin Parrish
It's the beginning or the end of the Internet, depending on which side of the line you're standing on.
Tuesday the Federal Communications Commission approved new rules that prohibit phone and cable companies from discriminating against or favoring Internet content and services.
The news arrived by way of a presentation in Washington D.C. By FCC chairman Julius Genachowski. According to reports, the FCC's three Democrats voted to pass the new rules and the two Republicans voted against them, calling the rules "unnecessary regulation." Afterward the Republican party on Capitol Hill quickly responded to Genachowski's speech, vowing to block the new negotiations by introducing a "resolution of disapproval."
In the meantime, the new "net neutrality" rules are broken down into six primary components:
1. Consumers and innovators have a right to know the basic performance characteristics of their Internet access and how their network is being managed.
2. Consumers and innovators have a right to send and receive lawful traffic. Consumers can go where they want, say what they want, experiment with ideas-- commercial and social, and use the devices of their choice. The rules thus prohibits the block of lawful content, apps, services and the connection of devices to the network.
3. Consumers and innovators have a right to a level playing field. The FCC rules state that no central authority, public or private, should have the power to pick winners and losers on the Internet. This is essentially a ban on unreasonable discrimination.
4. Broadband providers need meaningful flexibility to manage their networks to deal with congestion, security and other issues. The section also honors the business practice of tiered pricing.
5. The principle of Internet openness applies to mobile broadband. This means that there is only one Internet, and it must remain an open platform despite the device used for access. Mobile broadband providers are thus required to remain transparent and are prohibited from blocking websites or blocking certain applications provided by competitors.
6. The FCC will remain vigilant in promptly enforcing the rules and vigilant in monitoring developments in areas such as mobile and the market for specialized services which may affect Internet openness.
To enforce the new rules, the FCC has launched an Open Internet Advisory Committee that will assist the Commission in monitoring the state of Internet openness and the effects of the rules. It has also launched an Open Internet Apps Challenge at challenge.gov to stimulate app developers into creating tools that will help consumers monitor their own broadband connections.
"Today, for the first time, we are adopting rules to preserve basic Internet values," Genachowski said. "For the first time, we'll have enforceable rules of the road to preserve Internet freedom and openness."
The Most Important Free Speech Issue of Our Time
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/al-franken/the-most-important-free-s_b_798984.html
Al Franken
U.S. Senator, Minnesota
December 20, 2010
The Most Important Free Speech Issue of Our Time
This Tuesday is an important day in the fight to save the Internet.
As a source of innovation, an engine of our economy, and a forum for our political discourse, the Internet can only work if it's a truly level playing field. Small businesses should have the same ability to reach customers as powerful corporations. A blogger should have the same ability to find an audience as a media conglomerate.
This principle is called "net neutrality" -- and it's under attack. Internet service giants like Comcast and Verizon want to offer premium and privileged access to the Internet for corporations who can afford to pay for it.
The good news is that the Federal Communications Commission has the power to issue regulations that protect net neutrality. The bad news is that draft regulations written by FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski don't do that at all. They're worse than nothing.
That's why Tuesday is such an important day. The FCC will be meeting to discuss those regulations, and we must make sure that its members understand that allowing corporations to control the Internet is simply unacceptable.
Although Chairman Genachowski's draft Order has not been made public, early reports make clear that it falls far short of protecting net neutrality.
For many Americans -- particularly those who live in rural areas -- the future of the Internet lies in mobile services. But the draft Order would effectively permit Internet providers to block lawful content, applications, and devices on mobile Internet connections.
Mobile networks like AT&T and Verizon Wireless would be able to shut off your access to content or applications for any reason. For instance, Verizon could prevent you from accessing Google Maps on your phone, forcing you to use their own mapping program, Verizon Navigator, even if it costs money to use and isn't nearly as good. Or a mobile provider with a political agenda could prevent you from downloading an app that connects you with the Obama campaign (or, for that matter, a Tea Party group in your area).
It gets worse. The FCC has never before explicitly allowed discrimination on the Internet -- but the draft Order takes a step backwards, merely stating that so-called "paid prioritization" (the creation of a "fast lane" for big corporations who can afford to pay for it) is cause for concern.
It sure is -- but that's exactly why the FCC should ban it. Instead, the draft Order would have the effect of actually relaxing restrictions on this kind of discrimination.
What's more, even the protections that are established in the draft Order would be weak because it defines "broadband Internet access service" too narrowly, making it easy for powerful corporations to get around the rules.
Here's what's most troubling of all. Chairman Genachowski and President Obama -- who nominated him -- have argued convincingly that they support net neutrality.
But grassroots supporters of net neutrality are beginning to wonder if we've been had. Instead of proposing regulations that would truly protect net neutrality, reports indicate that Chairman Genachowski has been calling the CEOs of major Internet corporations seeking their public endorsement of this draft proposal, which would destroy it.
No chairman should be soliciting sign-off from the corporations that his agency is supposed to regulate -- and no true advocate of a free and open Internet should be seeking the permission of large media conglomerates before issuing new rules.
After all, just look at Comcast -- this Internet monolith has reportedly imposed a new, recurring fee on Level 3 Communications, the company slated to be the primary online delivery provider for Netflix. That's the same Netflix that represents Comcast's biggest competition in video services.
Imagine if Comcast customers couldn't watch Netflix, but were limited only to Comcast's Video On Demand service. Imagine if a cable news network could get its website to load faster on your computer than your favorite local political blog. Imagine if big corporations with their own agenda could decide who wins or loses online. The Internet as we know it would cease to exist.
That's why net neutrality is the most important free speech issue of our time. And that's why, this Tuesday, when the FCC meets to discuss this badly flawed proposal, I'll be watching. If they approve it as is, I'll be outraged. And you should be, too.
Al Franken
U.S. Senator, Minnesota
December 20, 2010
The Most Important Free Speech Issue of Our Time
This Tuesday is an important day in the fight to save the Internet.
As a source of innovation, an engine of our economy, and a forum for our political discourse, the Internet can only work if it's a truly level playing field. Small businesses should have the same ability to reach customers as powerful corporations. A blogger should have the same ability to find an audience as a media conglomerate.
This principle is called "net neutrality" -- and it's under attack. Internet service giants like Comcast and Verizon want to offer premium and privileged access to the Internet for corporations who can afford to pay for it.
The good news is that the Federal Communications Commission has the power to issue regulations that protect net neutrality. The bad news is that draft regulations written by FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski don't do that at all. They're worse than nothing.
That's why Tuesday is such an important day. The FCC will be meeting to discuss those regulations, and we must make sure that its members understand that allowing corporations to control the Internet is simply unacceptable.
Although Chairman Genachowski's draft Order has not been made public, early reports make clear that it falls far short of protecting net neutrality.
For many Americans -- particularly those who live in rural areas -- the future of the Internet lies in mobile services. But the draft Order would effectively permit Internet providers to block lawful content, applications, and devices on mobile Internet connections.
Mobile networks like AT&T and Verizon Wireless would be able to shut off your access to content or applications for any reason. For instance, Verizon could prevent you from accessing Google Maps on your phone, forcing you to use their own mapping program, Verizon Navigator, even if it costs money to use and isn't nearly as good. Or a mobile provider with a political agenda could prevent you from downloading an app that connects you with the Obama campaign (or, for that matter, a Tea Party group in your area).
It gets worse. The FCC has never before explicitly allowed discrimination on the Internet -- but the draft Order takes a step backwards, merely stating that so-called "paid prioritization" (the creation of a "fast lane" for big corporations who can afford to pay for it) is cause for concern.
It sure is -- but that's exactly why the FCC should ban it. Instead, the draft Order would have the effect of actually relaxing restrictions on this kind of discrimination.
What's more, even the protections that are established in the draft Order would be weak because it defines "broadband Internet access service" too narrowly, making it easy for powerful corporations to get around the rules.
Here's what's most troubling of all. Chairman Genachowski and President Obama -- who nominated him -- have argued convincingly that they support net neutrality.
But grassroots supporters of net neutrality are beginning to wonder if we've been had. Instead of proposing regulations that would truly protect net neutrality, reports indicate that Chairman Genachowski has been calling the CEOs of major Internet corporations seeking their public endorsement of this draft proposal, which would destroy it.
No chairman should be soliciting sign-off from the corporations that his agency is supposed to regulate -- and no true advocate of a free and open Internet should be seeking the permission of large media conglomerates before issuing new rules.
After all, just look at Comcast -- this Internet monolith has reportedly imposed a new, recurring fee on Level 3 Communications, the company slated to be the primary online delivery provider for Netflix. That's the same Netflix that represents Comcast's biggest competition in video services.
Imagine if Comcast customers couldn't watch Netflix, but were limited only to Comcast's Video On Demand service. Imagine if a cable news network could get its website to load faster on your computer than your favorite local political blog. Imagine if big corporations with their own agenda could decide who wins or loses online. The Internet as we know it would cease to exist.
That's why net neutrality is the most important free speech issue of our time. And that's why, this Tuesday, when the FCC meets to discuss this badly flawed proposal, I'll be watching. If they approve it as is, I'll be outraged. And you should be, too.
Thursday, December 9, 2010
Genachowski Offers Pretend Net Neutrality Proposal
http://news.firedoglake.com/2010/12/01/genachowski-offers-pretend-net-neutrality-proposal/
Genachowski Offers Pretend Net Neutrality Proposal
David Dayen
Wednesday December 1, 2010
As if there weren’t enough things going to pot today, the FCC has decided to come out with a proposal to pretend to institute net neutrality regulations.
In a speech he plans to give Wednesday in Washington, Julius Genachowski, the F.C.C. chairman, will outline a framework for broadband Internet service that forbids both wired and wireless Internet service providers from blocking lawful content. But the proposal would allow broadband providers to charge consumers different rates for different levels of service, according to a text of the speech provided to The New York Times.
Mr. Genachowski has decided not to use the commission’s telephone regulatory powers to govern broadband Internet service, a move that he proposed in May that would potentially open Internet service to heavier government regulation.
His proposal would also allow broadband providers to manage their networks to limit congestion or harmful traffic.
I don’t know how you could call this net neutrality at all. Broadband providers could charge different rates for “faster” service; they will not be subject to common carrier regulations on their product; and they can “manage their networks,” which is precisely the point of net neutrality. You can’t block content, but if you can “manage” it, you can essentially slow it out of existence.
I’ll go with Marvin Ammori on this one; we have garbage masquerading as net neutrality.
It exempts wireless. Like the Google-Verizon proposal, Julius’s makes an artificial distinction between accessing the Internet through a wire and through a wireless connection. No nondiscrimination rule applies to wireless. The Chairman’s fig leaf is to ban “blocking” on wireless, but not discrimination [...]
The proposal may not ban paid-priority. A ban on paid priority is central to any real net neutrality proposal, beginning with the Snowe-Dorgan bill of 2006. Indeed, the notion of “payment for priority” is what started the net neutrality fight; in late 2005, AT&T’s CEO said that Vonage and Google had to stop using his pipes for free. The only way a carrier could charge for priority is if basic Internet access was not sufficient for a company to compete; if Yahoo! does need priority to compete effectively, why pay? Without a ban on paid priority, we can expect basic access to deteriorate so companies have to pay for priority [...]
There may no jurisdiction for any of this anyway. In April, the D.C. Circuit interpreted Title I of the Communications Act narrowly, severely curtailing the FCC’s ability to adopt rules for Internet access [...] After a month of studying the question, the FCC General Counsel concluded the obvious: relying on Title I authority after that case was irresponsible and doomed to failure. The Chairman made a video explaining how the FCC should rely on authority under Title II, which is something that several Justices of the Supreme Court (including Scalia) thought the FCC should have done from the beginning. The Chairman described reclassifying to Title II as the principled center, but without principle, the center keeps shifting.In the proposal, the FCC will not reclassify.
So this is a pretend net neutrality proposal, which has all the problems of the status quo if not more, and which is still drawing fire from Republicans because it pretends to call itself net neutrality. They keep pushing from the right, but in reality this proposal would be a gold mine for the telecoms.
Genachowski Offers Pretend Net Neutrality Proposal
David Dayen
Wednesday December 1, 2010
As if there weren’t enough things going to pot today, the FCC has decided to come out with a proposal to pretend to institute net neutrality regulations.
In a speech he plans to give Wednesday in Washington, Julius Genachowski, the F.C.C. chairman, will outline a framework for broadband Internet service that forbids both wired and wireless Internet service providers from blocking lawful content. But the proposal would allow broadband providers to charge consumers different rates for different levels of service, according to a text of the speech provided to The New York Times.
Mr. Genachowski has decided not to use the commission’s telephone regulatory powers to govern broadband Internet service, a move that he proposed in May that would potentially open Internet service to heavier government regulation.
His proposal would also allow broadband providers to manage their networks to limit congestion or harmful traffic.
I don’t know how you could call this net neutrality at all. Broadband providers could charge different rates for “faster” service; they will not be subject to common carrier regulations on their product; and they can “manage their networks,” which is precisely the point of net neutrality. You can’t block content, but if you can “manage” it, you can essentially slow it out of existence.
I’ll go with Marvin Ammori on this one; we have garbage masquerading as net neutrality.
It exempts wireless. Like the Google-Verizon proposal, Julius’s makes an artificial distinction between accessing the Internet through a wire and through a wireless connection. No nondiscrimination rule applies to wireless. The Chairman’s fig leaf is to ban “blocking” on wireless, but not discrimination [...]
The proposal may not ban paid-priority. A ban on paid priority is central to any real net neutrality proposal, beginning with the Snowe-Dorgan bill of 2006. Indeed, the notion of “payment for priority” is what started the net neutrality fight; in late 2005, AT&T’s CEO said that Vonage and Google had to stop using his pipes for free. The only way a carrier could charge for priority is if basic Internet access was not sufficient for a company to compete; if Yahoo! does need priority to compete effectively, why pay? Without a ban on paid priority, we can expect basic access to deteriorate so companies have to pay for priority [...]
There may no jurisdiction for any of this anyway. In April, the D.C. Circuit interpreted Title I of the Communications Act narrowly, severely curtailing the FCC’s ability to adopt rules for Internet access [...] After a month of studying the question, the FCC General Counsel concluded the obvious: relying on Title I authority after that case was irresponsible and doomed to failure. The Chairman made a video explaining how the FCC should rely on authority under Title II, which is something that several Justices of the Supreme Court (including Scalia) thought the FCC should have done from the beginning. The Chairman described reclassifying to Title II as the principled center, but without principle, the center keeps shifting.In the proposal, the FCC will not reclassify.
So this is a pretend net neutrality proposal, which has all the problems of the status quo if not more, and which is still drawing fire from Republicans because it pretends to call itself net neutrality. They keep pushing from the right, but in reality this proposal would be a gold mine for the telecoms.
Monday, December 6, 2010
Google Blacklists Prison Planet.com
http://www.prisonplanet.com/google-blacklists-prison-planet-com.html
Google Blacklists Prison Planet.com
You Tube freezes Alex Jones Channel as web censorship accelerates in frightening early salvo of move towards tiered Internet system that favors large corporations while strangling independent voices
Paul Joseph Watson
Prison Planet.com
Tuesday, November 30, 2010
In a damning new lurch towards web censorship, Google’s news aggregator has blacklisted Prison Planet and Infowars despite the fact that both websites are internationally known and now attract more traffic than many mainstream media websites, while Google-owned You Tube has frozen the Alex Jones Channel based on a spurious complaint about showing Wikileaks footage that has been carried on hundreds of other You Tube channels for months.
After carrying our content for years, Google News last week purged Prison Planet and Infowars from its aggregator system, ensuring that our stories no longer appear alongside the likes of CNN and Fox News in a frightening early salvo in the move towards a tiered Internet that favors large corporations while independent voices are strangled.
Only smaller sites that re-post Prison Planet content have appeared in Google searches since early November, proving that the campaign is a deliberate effort on behalf of Google to restrict traffic to Alex Jones’ websites. Our stories have been linked almost every day on the Drudge Report for the past three weeks, as our readership figures soar past numerous corporate media websites that are carried by Google News. We are clearly a legitimate and internationally recognized news outlet and yet Google has blacklisted us because it disagrees with our political viewpoints.
In addition, Google-owned You Tube yesterday moved to freeze the popular Alex Jones Channel, which has well over 100,000 subscribers and has had over 75 million views. You Tube made a spurious claim that the channel had violated “community guidelines” by posting a segment from the infamous Wikileaks Apache footage, when the footage is in fact posted in greater length on hundreds of other You Tube channels, including Al Jazeera, Russia Today and CBS News.
When we responded to You Tube by pointing out that the Wikileaks footage in question appeared in multiple places elsewhere on You Tube in far greater length and detail, and that it was not vulgar or offensive but a real incident that was of clear public concern which was posted under fair use (USC Title 17, Section 106A-117), You Tube reacted by freezing uploading privileges for the account while also threatening to terminate it entirely.
You Tube is essentially sending a message that if you disagree with their decision, your claim won’t be considered, you will simply be punished to an even greater degree.
This is by no means the first time that Google and You Tube have engaged in open blacklisting of Alex Jones’ material.
Over many years we have documented numerous instances of censorship and attempts to chill free speech, includingYou Tube’s removal of The Obama Deception and Google’s refusal to allow its shopping cart software to carry the film after the company labeled the documentary ‘hate speech’.
With the Obama administration vowing to infiltrate and eviscerate so-called “conspiracy theories” by clamping down on free speech through the work of people like Cass Sunstein, Google and its subsidiary You Tube are now at the forefront of the agenda to turn the Internet into a sanitized and compliant forum in the same mould as cable television.
Once Google’s fiercest critics have been silenced for good the company can then set about implementing its CIA-backed total information awareness program, which will scour Twitter accounts, blogs and websites for all sorts of information left by individual users, aiming to use this data to “predict the future” and completely direct and control people’s lives and behavior.
Google CEO Eric Schmidt has announced that Google, in conjunction with the CIA, is set to become the ultimate Big Brother entity that “will know so much about its users that the search engine will be able to help them plan their lives” by constantly tracking their location via smart phones and telling them where to go and what to do.
We have previously reported on Google’s intimate and long standing connections to government spy networks. The company was founded with the aid of CIA seed money.
There is also no doubt that Google is one of the corporations at the forefront of the government’s drive to use cybersecurity as a pretext for killing the free Internet, having previously worked with the NSA and the CIA.
While Google openly spies on people via their wi-fi connections and gets away with it, the company has dispensed entirely with its “don’t be evil motto,” helping the communist Chinese government suppress dissent while simply blacklisting free speech it dislikes in the United States altogether.
There can be little doubt that this latest lurch in web censorship is part of the overall agenda to tighten the noose around independent news websites as they continue to outstrip the establishment media in terms of trustworthiness and reach.
Infowars.com alone now gets more traffic than MSNBC.com, a multi-billion dollar news operation funded by General Electric and the military-industrial complex.
The fact that millions are shunning the mainstream media and flocking to independent media outlets undoubtedly has the system running scared, exemplified by the recent rebellion against the TSA which was led by the Drudge Report.
The fact that the status quo is rapidly losing its power to influence the body politic and that this is shifting over to independent media not controlled by giant corporations has the establishment petrified, which is why they are doing everything possible to tighten the screws on websites like Prison Planet, Infowars, and Alex Jones content in general.
It is evident that the system revels in any chance to dampen the loud voice that Alex Jones, Infowars.com/PrisonPlanet.com and its supporters have raised on the Internet, effectively challenging the status quo and mainstream media spin on major news and events. With the easy passage of the web censorship bill, it is clear that what is happening now to Infowars.com and Alex Jones will soon happen to anyone without a politically-correct message, particularly when that message is capable of resonating throughout large parts of the globe.
With Homeland Security now openly seizing websites with no due course or opportunity for redress, the age of Internet censorship has now begun, with an iron curtain beginning to descend over free speech as the United States enacts policies more draconian than those of communist China.
If independent news websites and their readers don’t stand together in unison to decry Google’s efforts to kill free speech on the Internet, the web as a last outpost for the tattered and torn First Amendment will be lost forever.
Paul Joseph Watson is the editor and writer for Prison Planet.com. He is the author of Order Out Of Chaos. Watson is also a fill-in host for The Alex Jones Show. Watson has been interviewed by many publications and radio shows, including Vanity Fair and Coast to Coast AM, America’s most listened to late night talk show.
Google Blacklists Prison Planet.com
You Tube freezes Alex Jones Channel as web censorship accelerates in frightening early salvo of move towards tiered Internet system that favors large corporations while strangling independent voices
Paul Joseph Watson
Prison Planet.com
Tuesday, November 30, 2010
In a damning new lurch towards web censorship, Google’s news aggregator has blacklisted Prison Planet and Infowars despite the fact that both websites are internationally known and now attract more traffic than many mainstream media websites, while Google-owned You Tube has frozen the Alex Jones Channel based on a spurious complaint about showing Wikileaks footage that has been carried on hundreds of other You Tube channels for months.
After carrying our content for years, Google News last week purged Prison Planet and Infowars from its aggregator system, ensuring that our stories no longer appear alongside the likes of CNN and Fox News in a frightening early salvo in the move towards a tiered Internet that favors large corporations while independent voices are strangled.
Only smaller sites that re-post Prison Planet content have appeared in Google searches since early November, proving that the campaign is a deliberate effort on behalf of Google to restrict traffic to Alex Jones’ websites. Our stories have been linked almost every day on the Drudge Report for the past three weeks, as our readership figures soar past numerous corporate media websites that are carried by Google News. We are clearly a legitimate and internationally recognized news outlet and yet Google has blacklisted us because it disagrees with our political viewpoints.
In addition, Google-owned You Tube yesterday moved to freeze the popular Alex Jones Channel, which has well over 100,000 subscribers and has had over 75 million views. You Tube made a spurious claim that the channel had violated “community guidelines” by posting a segment from the infamous Wikileaks Apache footage, when the footage is in fact posted in greater length on hundreds of other You Tube channels, including Al Jazeera, Russia Today and CBS News.
When we responded to You Tube by pointing out that the Wikileaks footage in question appeared in multiple places elsewhere on You Tube in far greater length and detail, and that it was not vulgar or offensive but a real incident that was of clear public concern which was posted under fair use (USC Title 17, Section 106A-117), You Tube reacted by freezing uploading privileges for the account while also threatening to terminate it entirely.
You Tube is essentially sending a message that if you disagree with their decision, your claim won’t be considered, you will simply be punished to an even greater degree.
This is by no means the first time that Google and You Tube have engaged in open blacklisting of Alex Jones’ material.
Over many years we have documented numerous instances of censorship and attempts to chill free speech, includingYou Tube’s removal of The Obama Deception and Google’s refusal to allow its shopping cart software to carry the film after the company labeled the documentary ‘hate speech’.
With the Obama administration vowing to infiltrate and eviscerate so-called “conspiracy theories” by clamping down on free speech through the work of people like Cass Sunstein, Google and its subsidiary You Tube are now at the forefront of the agenda to turn the Internet into a sanitized and compliant forum in the same mould as cable television.
Once Google’s fiercest critics have been silenced for good the company can then set about implementing its CIA-backed total information awareness program, which will scour Twitter accounts, blogs and websites for all sorts of information left by individual users, aiming to use this data to “predict the future” and completely direct and control people’s lives and behavior.
Google CEO Eric Schmidt has announced that Google, in conjunction with the CIA, is set to become the ultimate Big Brother entity that “will know so much about its users that the search engine will be able to help them plan their lives” by constantly tracking their location via smart phones and telling them where to go and what to do.
We have previously reported on Google’s intimate and long standing connections to government spy networks. The company was founded with the aid of CIA seed money.
There is also no doubt that Google is one of the corporations at the forefront of the government’s drive to use cybersecurity as a pretext for killing the free Internet, having previously worked with the NSA and the CIA.
While Google openly spies on people via their wi-fi connections and gets away with it, the company has dispensed entirely with its “don’t be evil motto,” helping the communist Chinese government suppress dissent while simply blacklisting free speech it dislikes in the United States altogether.
There can be little doubt that this latest lurch in web censorship is part of the overall agenda to tighten the noose around independent news websites as they continue to outstrip the establishment media in terms of trustworthiness and reach.
Infowars.com alone now gets more traffic than MSNBC.com, a multi-billion dollar news operation funded by General Electric and the military-industrial complex.
The fact that millions are shunning the mainstream media and flocking to independent media outlets undoubtedly has the system running scared, exemplified by the recent rebellion against the TSA which was led by the Drudge Report.
The fact that the status quo is rapidly losing its power to influence the body politic and that this is shifting over to independent media not controlled by giant corporations has the establishment petrified, which is why they are doing everything possible to tighten the screws on websites like Prison Planet, Infowars, and Alex Jones content in general.
It is evident that the system revels in any chance to dampen the loud voice that Alex Jones, Infowars.com/PrisonPlanet.com and its supporters have raised on the Internet, effectively challenging the status quo and mainstream media spin on major news and events. With the easy passage of the web censorship bill, it is clear that what is happening now to Infowars.com and Alex Jones will soon happen to anyone without a politically-correct message, particularly when that message is capable of resonating throughout large parts of the globe.
With Homeland Security now openly seizing websites with no due course or opportunity for redress, the age of Internet censorship has now begun, with an iron curtain beginning to descend over free speech as the United States enacts policies more draconian than those of communist China.
If independent news websites and their readers don’t stand together in unison to decry Google’s efforts to kill free speech on the Internet, the web as a last outpost for the tattered and torn First Amendment will be lost forever.
Paul Joseph Watson is the editor and writer for Prison Planet.com. He is the author of Order Out Of Chaos. Watson is also a fill-in host for The Alex Jones Show. Watson has been interviewed by many publications and radio shows, including Vanity Fair and Coast to Coast AM, America’s most listened to late night talk show.
Netflix Partner Says Comcast ‘Toll’ Threatens Online Video Delivery
http://mediadecoder.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/11/29/netflix-partner-says-comcast-toll-threatens-online-video-delivery/
November 29, 2010
Netflix Partner Says Comcast ‘Toll’ Threatens Online Video Delivery
BRIAN STELTER
Level 3 Communications, a central partner in the Netflix online movie service, accused Comcast on Monday of charging a new fee that puts Internet video companies at a competitive disadvantage.
Level 3, which helps to deliver Netflix’s streaming movies, said Comcast had effectively erected a tollbooth that “threatens the open Internet,” and indicated that it would seek government intervention. Comcast quickly denied that the clash had anything to do with network neutrality, instead calling it “a simple commercial dispute.”
The dispute highlighted the growing importance of Internet video delivery — an area that some people say needs to be monitored more closely by regulators. Net neutrality, which posits that Internet traffic should be free of any interference from network operators like Comcast, is thought to be on the December agenda of the Federal Communications Commission.
“With this action, Comcast demonstrates the risk of a ‘closed’ Internet, where a retail broadband Internet access provider decides whether and how their subscribers interact with content,” Thomas C. Stortz, the chief legal officer for Level 3, said in a statement Monday.
Those issues cut to the heart of Comcast’s imminent acquisition of NBC Universal, which is in the final stages of review by the F.C.C. and the Justice Department. The F.C.C. is considering attaching a condition to the merger that would aim to keep Comcast’s Internet network open to competitors, according to public filings this month.
In theory, without government action, Comcast could speed up streams of NBC programs and slow down streams of its rivals’ programs. “This may be one of those teaching moments for consumers to understand what’s at stake,” said Michael McGuire, a media analyst for Gartner.
There is no known case of Comcast ever slowing the traffic to one of its direct competitors, but it did delay some peer-to-peer file traffic in a much-litigated case several years ago. Comcast says it supports an open Internet — but also says that it needs to be able to manage its expensive and still-evolving networks, which are essentially on- and off-ramps to the Internet.
Level 3 in essence operates a highway that connects to those ramps and handles traffic to and from individual Web sites. Comcast customers rely on the company’s on- and off-ramps from that highway. With nearly 17 million broadband Internet customers, Comcast is the nation’s largest such service provider.
The scuffle between the two started on Nov. 19, when Level 3 says Comcast demanded a recurring fee to “transmit Internet online movies and other content to Comcast’s customers who request such content.”
Three days later, under pressure from Comcast, “Level 3 agreed to the terms, under protest, in order to ensure customers did not experience any disruptions,” Mr. Stortz said.
Mr. Stortz did not cite Netflix in his statement. But just a week before Comcast’s demand, Level 3 announced a multiyear deal to support Netflix’s rapidly growing streaming service.
A recent study found that at peak times, Netflix represented 20 percent of Internet download traffic in the United States. That makes it a de facto competitor for incumbent distributors like Comcast and Time Warner Cable, which are eager to protect both the subscription television business and the emerging video-on-demand business.
Mr. Stortz implied that Comcast was taking the action to impair companies that compete with its own cable and Internet services.
A spokesman for Netflix declined to comment Monday. Netflix, which announced a new pricing structure last week, is gradually weaning its customers from DVDs by mail in favor of online streaming, making any new costs a serious concern.
Comcast on Monday rebuffed the notion that the new fees were related to Netflix by saying that the type of traffic distributed by Level 3 was irrelevant. Joe Waz, a senior vice president at Comcast, says it has had a peering agreement with Level 3 to swap traffic fairly evenly. Now Level 3 is sharply increasing its traffic, he said, while resisting a commercial agreement to pay for that.
Comcast is “already carrying huge amounts of video to our high-speed Internet customers every day through commercial arrangements, and it seems to be working for everybody else,” Mr. Waz said. “Level 3 is trying to change the rules of the game.”
If nothing else, the dispute demonstrates that consumers have little, if any, idea how convoluted it can be to transmit video to a computer or mobile phone.
Nonetheless, on Monday night, public interest groups that have steadfastly opposed the combination of Comcast and NBC Universal argued that the Level 3 case proved that Comcast would discriminate against competitors if it could.
“On its face, this is the sort of toll booth between residential subscribers and the content of their choice that a net neutrality rule is supposed to prohibit,” said Harold Feld, legal director of one such group, Public Knowledge, in a statement.
Mr. Stortz said Level 3 would be approaching government regulators this week and “asking them to take quick action to ensure that a fair, open and innovative Internet does not become a closed network controlled by a few institutions with dominant market power that have the means, motive and opportunity to economically discriminate between favored and disfavored content.”
Mr. McGuire, of Gartner, said, “There is no law here. There are only guiding principles. F.C.C. clarity on this kind of thing is going to be required.”
November 29, 2010
Netflix Partner Says Comcast ‘Toll’ Threatens Online Video Delivery
BRIAN STELTER
Level 3 Communications, a central partner in the Netflix online movie service, accused Comcast on Monday of charging a new fee that puts Internet video companies at a competitive disadvantage.
Level 3, which helps to deliver Netflix’s streaming movies, said Comcast had effectively erected a tollbooth that “threatens the open Internet,” and indicated that it would seek government intervention. Comcast quickly denied that the clash had anything to do with network neutrality, instead calling it “a simple commercial dispute.”
The dispute highlighted the growing importance of Internet video delivery — an area that some people say needs to be monitored more closely by regulators. Net neutrality, which posits that Internet traffic should be free of any interference from network operators like Comcast, is thought to be on the December agenda of the Federal Communications Commission.
“With this action, Comcast demonstrates the risk of a ‘closed’ Internet, where a retail broadband Internet access provider decides whether and how their subscribers interact with content,” Thomas C. Stortz, the chief legal officer for Level 3, said in a statement Monday.
Those issues cut to the heart of Comcast’s imminent acquisition of NBC Universal, which is in the final stages of review by the F.C.C. and the Justice Department. The F.C.C. is considering attaching a condition to the merger that would aim to keep Comcast’s Internet network open to competitors, according to public filings this month.
In theory, without government action, Comcast could speed up streams of NBC programs and slow down streams of its rivals’ programs. “This may be one of those teaching moments for consumers to understand what’s at stake,” said Michael McGuire, a media analyst for Gartner.
There is no known case of Comcast ever slowing the traffic to one of its direct competitors, but it did delay some peer-to-peer file traffic in a much-litigated case several years ago. Comcast says it supports an open Internet — but also says that it needs to be able to manage its expensive and still-evolving networks, which are essentially on- and off-ramps to the Internet.
Level 3 in essence operates a highway that connects to those ramps and handles traffic to and from individual Web sites. Comcast customers rely on the company’s on- and off-ramps from that highway. With nearly 17 million broadband Internet customers, Comcast is the nation’s largest such service provider.
The scuffle between the two started on Nov. 19, when Level 3 says Comcast demanded a recurring fee to “transmit Internet online movies and other content to Comcast’s customers who request such content.”
Three days later, under pressure from Comcast, “Level 3 agreed to the terms, under protest, in order to ensure customers did not experience any disruptions,” Mr. Stortz said.
Mr. Stortz did not cite Netflix in his statement. But just a week before Comcast’s demand, Level 3 announced a multiyear deal to support Netflix’s rapidly growing streaming service.
A recent study found that at peak times, Netflix represented 20 percent of Internet download traffic in the United States. That makes it a de facto competitor for incumbent distributors like Comcast and Time Warner Cable, which are eager to protect both the subscription television business and the emerging video-on-demand business.
Mr. Stortz implied that Comcast was taking the action to impair companies that compete with its own cable and Internet services.
A spokesman for Netflix declined to comment Monday. Netflix, which announced a new pricing structure last week, is gradually weaning its customers from DVDs by mail in favor of online streaming, making any new costs a serious concern.
Comcast on Monday rebuffed the notion that the new fees were related to Netflix by saying that the type of traffic distributed by Level 3 was irrelevant. Joe Waz, a senior vice president at Comcast, says it has had a peering agreement with Level 3 to swap traffic fairly evenly. Now Level 3 is sharply increasing its traffic, he said, while resisting a commercial agreement to pay for that.
Comcast is “already carrying huge amounts of video to our high-speed Internet customers every day through commercial arrangements, and it seems to be working for everybody else,” Mr. Waz said. “Level 3 is trying to change the rules of the game.”
If nothing else, the dispute demonstrates that consumers have little, if any, idea how convoluted it can be to transmit video to a computer or mobile phone.
Nonetheless, on Monday night, public interest groups that have steadfastly opposed the combination of Comcast and NBC Universal argued that the Level 3 case proved that Comcast would discriminate against competitors if it could.
“On its face, this is the sort of toll booth between residential subscribers and the content of their choice that a net neutrality rule is supposed to prohibit,” said Harold Feld, legal director of one such group, Public Knowledge, in a statement.
Mr. Stortz said Level 3 would be approaching government regulators this week and “asking them to take quick action to ensure that a fair, open and innovative Internet does not become a closed network controlled by a few institutions with dominant market power that have the means, motive and opportunity to economically discriminate between favored and disfavored content.”
Mr. McGuire, of Gartner, said, “There is no law here. There are only guiding principles. F.C.C. clarity on this kind of thing is going to be required.”
AT&T Gains FCC's Ear as Regulators Near Decision on Net Neutrality
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2010-12-01/net-neutrality-vote-by-u-s-fcc-set-for-december-after-year-of-conflict.html
AT&T Gains FCC's Ear as Regulators Near Decision on Net Neutrality Rules
Todd Shields
Nov 30, 2010
A U.S. regulator set a vote on rules to bar Internet service providers led by AT&T Inc. and Comcast Corp. from interfering with subscribers’ Web traffic.
Federal Communications Commission Chairman Julius Genachowski said in a statement today that he sent colleagues “draft rules of the road to preserve the freedom and openness of the Internet” for adoption at the agency’s Dec. 21 meeting.
Genachowski, a Democrat appointed by President Obama, proposed net-neutrality rules in September 2009, and debate has expanded to involve Congress, courts and companies. Proponents including technology companies said regulations are needed to keep the Internet free of restrictions, while opponents such as telephone and cable companies said rules aren’t needed and may stifle investment.
Google Inc. and Verizon Communications Inc. struck a compromise in August that didn’t call for rules on wireless Internet service. The proposal wasn’t adopted by officials. Genachowski said his rules build upon a proposal advanced in September by Representative Henry Waxman, a California Democrat, who proposed less-stringent rules for the mobile Web than for service delivered over wires.
The net-neutrality regulations before the FCC “would ensure that the Internet remains a powerful platform for innovation and job creation,” Genachowski said in his statement released by e-mail.
The proposed rules would bar Internet-service providers from blocking or slowing access to lawful content and applications, he said.
Congestion, Harmful Traffic
Providers would have flexibility to deal with congestion or harmful traffic, Genachowski said. Wireless networks would be subject to different regulations that include a no-blocking rule, and the FCC would “be prepared to step in” to address anti-competitive behavior, he said.
Net neutrality encompasses the idea that Internet-service providers can’t interfere with content they deliver to subscribers, or favor their own offerings. Technology companies backing regulations include search company Google, Internet- retailer Amazon.com and Dish Network Corp., which provides on- demand movies to subscribers using Internet lines.
Cable and phone companies that provide Web service say rules may make it difficult to manage the growing traffic on their networks and would limit investment in new Internet capacity. AT&T and Verizon, the majority owner of the largest U.S. mobile provider, Verizon Wireless, have told the FCC that rules aren’t needed for wireless networks.
Obama ‘Big Believer’
President Barack Obama, as a candidate, made net neutrality a campaign issue and has called himself a “big believer” in the approach.
Last month, Republican lawmakers toldGenachowski not to set policy they said was best left to Congress.
Democratic lawmakers released a letter yesterday urging the chairman to act this year to ensure “that the Internet remains an open network.” The letter was signed by Senators John Kerry of Massachusetts, Byron Dorgan of North Dakota and Ron Wyden of Oregon.
The regulations need three votes to pass at the FCC, where two Democrats join Genachowski to form the agency’s majority.
Genachowski said he had abandoned his proposal to put Internet service under the regulatory regime used for telephone service -- a prospect opposed by companies that said such a move could lead to rate regulation.
Not applying rules for telephone companies would be a positive for AT&T, Comcast, Verizon, Time Warner Cable Inc. and Cablevision Systems Corp., Paul Gallant, a Washington-based analyst with MF Global, said in a Nov. 19 note to clients.
Telephone regulation offered a way to reclaim authority undermined by a U.S. court, Genachowski said in May. Judges ruled in April the the FCC lacked authority to punish Comcast for interfering with subscribers’ Web traffic.
“I am satisfied that we have a sound legal basis” for proceeding without using telephone rules, Genachowski said in his statement today.
To contact the reporter on this story: Todd Shields in Washington at tshields3@bloomberg.net
To contact the editor responsible for this story: Allan Holmes at aholmes25@bloomberg.net
AT&T Gains FCC's Ear as Regulators Near Decision on Net Neutrality Rules
Todd Shields
Nov 30, 2010
A U.S. regulator set a vote on rules to bar Internet service providers led by AT&T Inc. and Comcast Corp. from interfering with subscribers’ Web traffic.
Federal Communications Commission Chairman Julius Genachowski said in a statement today that he sent colleagues “draft rules of the road to preserve the freedom and openness of the Internet” for adoption at the agency’s Dec. 21 meeting.
Genachowski, a Democrat appointed by President Obama, proposed net-neutrality rules in September 2009, and debate has expanded to involve Congress, courts and companies. Proponents including technology companies said regulations are needed to keep the Internet free of restrictions, while opponents such as telephone and cable companies said rules aren’t needed and may stifle investment.
Google Inc. and Verizon Communications Inc. struck a compromise in August that didn’t call for rules on wireless Internet service. The proposal wasn’t adopted by officials. Genachowski said his rules build upon a proposal advanced in September by Representative Henry Waxman, a California Democrat, who proposed less-stringent rules for the mobile Web than for service delivered over wires.
The net-neutrality regulations before the FCC “would ensure that the Internet remains a powerful platform for innovation and job creation,” Genachowski said in his statement released by e-mail.
The proposed rules would bar Internet-service providers from blocking or slowing access to lawful content and applications, he said.
Congestion, Harmful Traffic
Providers would have flexibility to deal with congestion or harmful traffic, Genachowski said. Wireless networks would be subject to different regulations that include a no-blocking rule, and the FCC would “be prepared to step in” to address anti-competitive behavior, he said.
Net neutrality encompasses the idea that Internet-service providers can’t interfere with content they deliver to subscribers, or favor their own offerings. Technology companies backing regulations include search company Google, Internet- retailer Amazon.com and Dish Network Corp., which provides on- demand movies to subscribers using Internet lines.
Cable and phone companies that provide Web service say rules may make it difficult to manage the growing traffic on their networks and would limit investment in new Internet capacity. AT&T and Verizon, the majority owner of the largest U.S. mobile provider, Verizon Wireless, have told the FCC that rules aren’t needed for wireless networks.
Obama ‘Big Believer’
President Barack Obama, as a candidate, made net neutrality a campaign issue and has called himself a “big believer” in the approach.
Last month, Republican lawmakers toldGenachowski not to set policy they said was best left to Congress.
Democratic lawmakers released a letter yesterday urging the chairman to act this year to ensure “that the Internet remains an open network.” The letter was signed by Senators John Kerry of Massachusetts, Byron Dorgan of North Dakota and Ron Wyden of Oregon.
The regulations need three votes to pass at the FCC, where two Democrats join Genachowski to form the agency’s majority.
Genachowski said he had abandoned his proposal to put Internet service under the regulatory regime used for telephone service -- a prospect opposed by companies that said such a move could lead to rate regulation.
Not applying rules for telephone companies would be a positive for AT&T, Comcast, Verizon, Time Warner Cable Inc. and Cablevision Systems Corp., Paul Gallant, a Washington-based analyst with MF Global, said in a Nov. 19 note to clients.
Telephone regulation offered a way to reclaim authority undermined by a U.S. court, Genachowski said in May. Judges ruled in April the the FCC lacked authority to punish Comcast for interfering with subscribers’ Web traffic.
“I am satisfied that we have a sound legal basis” for proceeding without using telephone rules, Genachowski said in his statement today.
To contact the reporter on this story: Todd Shields in Washington at tshields3@bloomberg.net
To contact the editor responsible for this story: Allan Holmes at aholmes25@bloomberg.net
Thursday, December 2, 2010
FCC Calls for 911 System that Accepts Texts
http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2373241,00.asp
FCC Calls for 911 System that Accepts Texts
Sara Yin
11.23.2010
Given that 70 percent of calls to 911 are made through a mobile phone, and 72 percent of Americans text, it is mind-boggling to realize that our national emergency hotline can't process SMS-based pleas for help.
This is why Federal Communications Commission Chairman Julius Genachowski called for a "Next-Generation 9-1-1" service that would allow Americans send mobile texts, videos, and photos to 911.
"The Virginia Tech campus shootings in 2007 are a tragic, real-life reminder of the technological limitations that 9-1-1 is now saddled with," Genachowsk said in a speech at the Arlington County Emergency Center this afternoon. "Some students and witnesses tried to text 9-1-1 during that emergency and as we know, those messages never went through and were never received by local 9-1-1 dispatchers."
Modernizing the hotline would allow Americans to text for help in situations when a call might jeopardize their safety. Furthermore, accepting mobile videos and photos could provide first responders with on-the-ground information to assess a situation in real time, the FCC said in a statement.
"Many 911 call centers don't even have broadband, and some are in communities where broadband isn't even available," Genachowski admitted. "That is unacceptable."
As Iowa probably discovered in 2009, expanding 911's communications platform would require the cooperation of numerous parties: federal, state and local partners, public safety, lawmakers, communications and broadband service providers and equipment manufacturers.
The Next-Generation 9-1-1 plan falls under the FCC-drafted National Broadband Plan. Funded by stimulus money, the plan aims to harness broadband to improve public safety, specifically through the creation of an interoperable public safety wireless broadband communication network by 2020.
In December, the FCC will lead a "Next-Generation 9-1-1 proceeding," to gauge the public's opinion.
FCC Calls for 911 System that Accepts Texts
Sara Yin
11.23.2010
Given that 70 percent of calls to 911 are made through a mobile phone, and 72 percent of Americans text, it is mind-boggling to realize that our national emergency hotline can't process SMS-based pleas for help.
This is why Federal Communications Commission Chairman Julius Genachowski called for a "Next-Generation 9-1-1" service that would allow Americans send mobile texts, videos, and photos to 911.
"The Virginia Tech campus shootings in 2007 are a tragic, real-life reminder of the technological limitations that 9-1-1 is now saddled with," Genachowsk said in a speech at the Arlington County Emergency Center this afternoon. "Some students and witnesses tried to text 9-1-1 during that emergency and as we know, those messages never went through and were never received by local 9-1-1 dispatchers."
Modernizing the hotline would allow Americans to text for help in situations when a call might jeopardize their safety. Furthermore, accepting mobile videos and photos could provide first responders with on-the-ground information to assess a situation in real time, the FCC said in a statement.
"Many 911 call centers don't even have broadband, and some are in communities where broadband isn't even available," Genachowski admitted. "That is unacceptable."
As Iowa probably discovered in 2009, expanding 911's communications platform would require the cooperation of numerous parties: federal, state and local partners, public safety, lawmakers, communications and broadband service providers and equipment manufacturers.
The Next-Generation 9-1-1 plan falls under the FCC-drafted National Broadband Plan. Funded by stimulus money, the plan aims to harness broadband to improve public safety, specifically through the creation of an interoperable public safety wireless broadband communication network by 2020.
In December, the FCC will lead a "Next-Generation 9-1-1 proceeding," to gauge the public's opinion.
Monday, August 16, 2010
Net Neutrality Advocates Blast Google, Verizon Plan
http://www.pcworld.com/article/202964/net_neutrality_advocates_blast_google_verizon_plan.html
Net Neutrality Advocates Blast Google, Verizon Plan
Emily Price, PC World
Aug 10, 2010
Net neutrality advocates claim Google and Verizon's joint policy proposal for an "open Internet" will do more harm than good when it comes to keeping networks as open to all data. Critics claim the proposal is "worse than feared" and if adopted will result in users paying premium rates to access content such as critical health care services and access to online gaming platfoms.
In a press conference Monday the two Internet giants detailed a plan that would require all broadband connections to be content neutral, preventing service providers from blocking or degrading Web traffic. While on the surface the proposal looks like Google and Verizon are looking out for the best interests of the Internet as a whole, many feel that the companies have a hidden agenda.
The biggest sore spot identified by leading net nuetrality experts centers on Google and Verizon's notion that some Internet traffic should be treated differently than other types of traffic. Things such as "advanced educational services, or new entertainment and gaming options" Google and Verizon argue these services should get preferential treatment. Many see this as Google and Verizon attempting to take steps to create a pay-to-play tier of higher bandwidth and more reliable Internet service. The end result might be either content providers or consumers will have to pay more for access to a premium version of the Internet.
Something To Hide?
Sherwin Sly, Deputy Legal Director of Public Knowledge, a Washington DC based public interest group concerned with digital culture, criticized the idea that Verizon and Google would make a proposal in the first place: "The agreement outsources the FCC's powers and authorities to the very industries these rules are supposed to oversee." Having Verizon and Google make rules about the Web is comparable to having Ford or GM makes rules about auto safety. Public Knowledge has issued a petition on its site to the FCC calling it to "take action now to protect innovation, competition and American broadband consumers" and not allow broadband companies to make rules of their own.
Free Press, a nonprofit organization working to reform the media, issued a statement calling the proposal "worse than feared" and urging policy makers to reject what they call "fake net neutrality." The Free Press says that the framework of the proposal "opens the door wide open for ISPs and deep-pocketed content companies to engage in practices that will turn the Internet platform into something that more closely resembles the closed cable TV model."
While Free Press say the proposal is disguised "as a reasonable path forward" it feels that if adopted the path will instead "lead to toll booths on the information superhighway" where users have to pay to get to get to "premium" content they want to see. "The Google-Verizon pact isn't just as bad as we feared - it's much worse. They are attacking the Internet while claiming to preserve it. Google users won't be fooled."
Is Google "Evil?"
Adam Green, co-founder of the Progressive Change Campaign Committee, suggests that traditional broadband connections will be obsolete in a few years and that the "transparency rules" suggested in the proposal for wireless carriers will simply allow Americans to "visibly watch" free and open Internet disappear.
Green also suggests that Verizon's large investment in broadband may be a motive for it to keep it alive in a world where wireless is quickly taking over. If only broadband Internet is open, it would stand to reason that more people would in turn want broadband.
Green's committee has started an emergency online petition to Google simply titled "Don't be evil - stand up for the free and open Internet." The petition has currently been signed by more than 300,000 people and contains an open letter to the company:
Dear Google,
As a Google user, I am telling you, 'Don't be evil.' The deal between Google and Verizon is evil, because it threatens the open Internet, which hundreds of millions of people rely on every day. Live up to your founding motto, walk away from this deal and save the Internet.
Sincerely,
[Add your name]
What does the FCC say?
FCC Commissioner Michael Copps posted the following statement on the FCC Website: "Some will claim this announcement moves the discussion forward. That's one of its many problems. It is time to move a decision forward-a decision to reassert FCC authority over broadband telecommunications, to guarantee an open Internet now and forever, and to put the interests of consumers in front of the interests of giant corporations."
Net Neutrality Advocates Blast Google, Verizon Plan
Emily Price, PC World
Aug 10, 2010
Net neutrality advocates claim Google and Verizon's joint policy proposal for an "open Internet" will do more harm than good when it comes to keeping networks as open to all data. Critics claim the proposal is "worse than feared" and if adopted will result in users paying premium rates to access content such as critical health care services and access to online gaming platfoms.
In a press conference Monday the two Internet giants detailed a plan that would require all broadband connections to be content neutral, preventing service providers from blocking or degrading Web traffic. While on the surface the proposal looks like Google and Verizon are looking out for the best interests of the Internet as a whole, many feel that the companies have a hidden agenda.
The biggest sore spot identified by leading net nuetrality experts centers on Google and Verizon's notion that some Internet traffic should be treated differently than other types of traffic. Things such as "advanced educational services, or new entertainment and gaming options" Google and Verizon argue these services should get preferential treatment. Many see this as Google and Verizon attempting to take steps to create a pay-to-play tier of higher bandwidth and more reliable Internet service. The end result might be either content providers or consumers will have to pay more for access to a premium version of the Internet.
Something To Hide?
Sherwin Sly, Deputy Legal Director of Public Knowledge, a Washington DC based public interest group concerned with digital culture, criticized the idea that Verizon and Google would make a proposal in the first place: "The agreement outsources the FCC's powers and authorities to the very industries these rules are supposed to oversee." Having Verizon and Google make rules about the Web is comparable to having Ford or GM makes rules about auto safety. Public Knowledge has issued a petition on its site to the FCC calling it to "take action now to protect innovation, competition and American broadband consumers" and not allow broadband companies to make rules of their own.
Free Press, a nonprofit organization working to reform the media, issued a statement calling the proposal "worse than feared" and urging policy makers to reject what they call "fake net neutrality." The Free Press says that the framework of the proposal "opens the door wide open for ISPs and deep-pocketed content companies to engage in practices that will turn the Internet platform into something that more closely resembles the closed cable TV model."
While Free Press say the proposal is disguised "as a reasonable path forward" it feels that if adopted the path will instead "lead to toll booths on the information superhighway" where users have to pay to get to get to "premium" content they want to see. "The Google-Verizon pact isn't just as bad as we feared - it's much worse. They are attacking the Internet while claiming to preserve it. Google users won't be fooled."
Is Google "Evil?"
Adam Green, co-founder of the Progressive Change Campaign Committee, suggests that traditional broadband connections will be obsolete in a few years and that the "transparency rules" suggested in the proposal for wireless carriers will simply allow Americans to "visibly watch" free and open Internet disappear.
Green also suggests that Verizon's large investment in broadband may be a motive for it to keep it alive in a world where wireless is quickly taking over. If only broadband Internet is open, it would stand to reason that more people would in turn want broadband.
Green's committee has started an emergency online petition to Google simply titled "Don't be evil - stand up for the free and open Internet." The petition has currently been signed by more than 300,000 people and contains an open letter to the company:
Dear Google,
As a Google user, I am telling you, 'Don't be evil.' The deal between Google and Verizon is evil, because it threatens the open Internet, which hundreds of millions of people rely on every day. Live up to your founding motto, walk away from this deal and save the Internet.
Sincerely,
[Add your name]
What does the FCC say?
FCC Commissioner Michael Copps posted the following statement on the FCC Website: "Some will claim this announcement moves the discussion forward. That's one of its many problems. It is time to move a decision forward-a decision to reassert FCC authority over broadband telecommunications, to guarantee an open Internet now and forever, and to put the interests of consumers in front of the interests of giant corporations."
Sunday, July 25, 2010
Why liberals should love the Second Amendment
http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2010/7/4/881431/-Why-liberals-should-love-the-Second-Amendment
Why liberals should love the Second Amendment
by Kaili Joy Gray aka Angry Mouse
Sun Jul 04, 2010
Liberals love the Constitution.
Ask anyone on the street. They'll tell you the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) is a liberal organization. During the dark days of the Bush Administration, membership doubled because so many Americans feared increasing restrictions on their civil liberties. If you were to ask liberals to list their top five complaints about the Bush Administration, and they would invariably say the words "shredding" and "Constitution" in the same sentence. They might also add "Fourth Amendment" and "due process." It's possible they'll talk about "free speech zones" and "habeus corpus."
There's a good chance they will mention, probably in combination with several FCC-prohibited adjectives, former Attorney Generals John Ashcroft and Alberto Gonzales.
And while liberals certainly do not argue for lawlessness, and will acknowledge the necessity of certain restrictions, it is generally understood that liberals fight to broadly interpret and expand our rights and to question the necessity and wisdom of any restrictions of them.
Liberals can quote legal precedent, news reports, and exhaustive studies. They can talk about the intentions of the Founders. They can argue at length against the tyranny of the government. And they will, almost without exception, conclude the necessity of respecting, and not restricting, civil liberties.
Except for one: the right to keep and bear arms.
When it comes to discussing the Second Amendment, liberals check rational thought at the door. They dismiss approximately 40% of American households that own one or more guns, and those who fight to protect the Second Amendment, as "gun nuts." They argue for greater restrictions. And they pursue these policies at the risk of alienating voters who might otherwise vote for Democrats.
And they do so in a way that is wholly inconsistent with their approach to all of our other civil liberties.
Those who fight against Second Amendment rights cite statistics about gun violence, as if such numbers are evidence enough that our rights should be restricted. But Chicago and Washington DC, the two cities from which came the most recent Supreme Court decisions on Second Amendment rights, had some of the most restrictive laws in the nation, and also some of the highest rates of violent crime. Clearly, such restrictions do not correlate with preventing crime.
So rather than continuing to fight for greater restrictions on Second Amendment rights, it is time for liberals to defend Second Amendment rights as vigorously as they fight to protect all of our other rights. Because it is by fighting to protect each right that we protect all rights.
And this is why:
(Reasons below the fold)
::
No. 1: The Bill of Rights protects individual rights.
If you've read the Bill of Rights -- and who among us hasn't? -- you will notice a phrase that appears in nearly all of them: "the people."
First Amendment:
...the right of the people peaceably to assemble
Second Amendment:
A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.
Fourth Amendment:
The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects...
Ninth Amendment:
...shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people
Tenth Amendment:
...are reserved to the states respectively, or to the people.
Certainly, no good liberal would argue that any of these rights are collective rights, and not individual rights. We believe that the First Amendment is an individual right to criticize our government.
We would not condone a state-regulated news organization. We certainly would not condone state regulation of religion. We talk about "separation of church and state," although there is no mention of "separation of church and state" in the First Amendment.
But we know what they meant. The anti-Federalists refused to ratify the Constitution without a Bill of Rights; they intended for our rights to be interpreted expansively.
We believe the Founders intended for us to be able to say damn near anything we want, protest damn near anything we want, print damn near anything we want, and believe damn near anything we want. Individually, without the interference or regulation of government.
And yet, despite the recent Heller and McDonald decisions, liberals stumble at the idea of the Second Amendment as an individual right. They take the position that the Founders intended an entirely different meaning by the phrase "the right of the people" in the Second Amendment, even though they are so positively clear about what that phrase means in the First Amendment.
If we can agree that the First Amendment protects not only powerful organizations such as the New York Times or MSNBC, but also the individual commenter on the internet, the individual at the anti-war rally, the individual driving the car with the "Fuck Bush" bumper sticker, can we not also agree that the Second Amendment's use of "the people" has the same meaning?
But it's different! The Second Amendment is talking about the militia! If you want to "bear arms," join the National Guard!
Right?
Wrong.
The United States Militia Code:
(a) The militia of the United States consists of all able-bodied males at least 17 years of age and, except as provided in section 313 of title 32, under 45 years of age who are, or who have made a declaration of intention to become, citizens of the United States and of female citizens of the United States who are members of the National Guard.
(b) The classes of the militia are—
(1) the organized militia, which consists of the National Guard and the Naval Militia; and
(2) the unorganized militia, which consists of the members of the militia who are not members of the National Guard or the Naval Militia.
Aside from the fact that the National Guard did not exist in the 1700s, the term "militia" does not mean "National Guard," even today. The code clearly states that two classes comprise the militia: the National Guard and Naval Militia, and everyone else.
Everyone else. Individuals. The People.
The Founders well understood that the militia is the people, for it was not only the right but the obligation of all citizens to protect and preserve their liberty and to defend themselves from the tyranny of the government.
And fighting against the tyranny of the government is certainly a liberal value.
No. 2: We oppose restrictions to our civil liberties.
All of our rights, even the ones enumerated in the Bill of Rights, are restricted. You can't shout "Fire!" in a crowd. You can't threaten to kill the president. You can't publish someone else's words as your own. We have copyright laws and libel laws and slander laws. We have the FCC to regulate our radio and television content. We have plenty of restrictions on our First Amendment rights.
But we don't like them. We fight them. Any card-carrying member of the ACLU will tell you that while we might agree that certain restrictions are reasonable, we keep a close eye whenever anyone in government gets an itch to pass a new law that restricts our First Amendment rights. Or our Fourth. Or our Fifth, Sixth, or Eighth.
We complain about free speech zones. The whole country is supposed to be a free speech zone, after all. It says so right in the First Amendment.
But when it comes further restrictions on the manufacture, sale, or possession of firearms, liberals are not even silent; they are vociferously in favor of such restrictions.
Suddenly, overly broad restrictions are "reasonable." The Chicago and Washington D.C. bans on handguns -- all handguns -- is reasonable, even though the Supreme Court has now said otherwise.
Would we tolerate such a sweeping regulation of, say, the Thirteenth Amendment?
Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime where of the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.
What if a member of Congress -- say, a Republican from a red state in the south -- were to introduce a bill that permits enslaving black women? Would we consider that reasonable? It's not like the law would enslave all people, or even all black people. Just the women. There's no mention of enslaving women in the Thirteenth Amendment. Clearly, when Lincoln wanted to free the slaves, he didn't intend to free all the slaves. And we restrict all the other Amendments, so obviously the Thirteenth Amendment is not supposed to be absolute. What's the big deal?
Except that such an argument is ridiculous, of course. Liberals would take to the streets, send angry letters to their representatives in Washington, organize marches, call progressive radio programs to quote, verbatim, the Thirteenth Amendment. Quite bluntly, although not literally, liberals would be up in arms.
And yet...A ban on all handguns seems reasonable to many liberals. Never mind that of 192 million firearms in America, 65 million -- about one third -- are handguns.
Such a narrow interpretation of this particular right is inconsistent with the otherwise broad interpretation of the Bill of Rights. And just as conservatives weaken their own arguments about protecting the Second Amendment when they will not fight as vigilantly for protecting all the others, so too do liberals weaken their arguments for civil liberties, when they pick and choose which civil liberties they deem worthy of defense.
No. 3: It doesn't matter that it's not 1776 anymore.
When the Founders drafted the Bill of Rights, they could not have imagined machine guns. Or armor-piercing bullets (which are not available to the public anyway, and are actually less lethal than conventional ammunition). Or handguns that hold 18 rounds. A drive-by shooting, back in 1776, would have been a guy on a horse with a musket.
Of course, they couldn't have imagined the internet, either. Or 24-hour cable news networks. Or talk radio. When they drafted the First Amendment, did they really mean to protect the rights of Bill O'Reilly to make incredibly stupid, and frequently inaccurate, statements for an entire hour, five nights a week?
Actually, yes. They did. Bill O'Reilly bilious ravings, and Keith Olbermann's Special Comments, and the insipid chatter of the entire cast of the Today show are, and were intended to be, protected by the First Amendment.
Liberals are supposed to understand that just because we don't agree with something doesn't mean it is not protected. At least when it comes to the First Amendment. And one's personal dislike of guns should be no better a reason for fighting against the Second Amendment than should one's personal dislike of Bill O'Reilly justify fighting against the First Amendment.
And yet, when discussing the Second Amendment, liberals become obtuse in their literalism. The Second Amendment does not protect the right to own all guns. Or all ammunition. It doesn't protect the right of the people as individuals.
Liberals will defend the right of Cindy Sheehan to wear an anti-war T-shirt, even though the First Amendment says nothing about T-shirts.
They will defend the rights of alleged terrorists to a public trial, even though the Founders certainly could not have imagined a world in which terrorists would plot to blow up building with airplanes.
But we do not quibble about the methods by which we practice our First Amendment rights because methodology is not the point. Red herring arguments about types of ammunition or magazine capacity or handguns versus rifles are just that -- red herrings. They distract us from the underlying purpose of that right -- to ensure a free society that can hold its government accountable. The Second Amendment is no more about guns than the First Amendment is about quill pens.
No. 4: It doesn't matter if you can use it.
Fine, you say. Have your big, scary guns. It's not like you actually stand a chance in fighting against the United States government. The Army has bigger, badder weapons than any private citizen. Your most deadly gun is no match for their tanks, their helicopters, their atom bombs. Maybe two hundred years ago, citizens stood a chance in a fight against government, but not today. The Second Amendment is obsolete.
Tell that to the Iraqi "insurgents" who are putting up a pretty good fight against our military might with fairly primitive weapons.
The Second Amendment is obsolete?
What other rights might be considered obsolete in today's day and age?
No Soldier shall, in time of peace be quartered in any house, without the consent of the Owner, nor in time of war, but in a manner to be prescribed by law.
When was the last time a soldier showed up at your door and said, "I'll be staying with you for the indefinite future"?
It's probably been a while. But of course, were it to happen, you'd dust off your Third Amendment and say, "I don't think so, pal."
And you'd be right.
What about the Twenty-Sixth Amendment? How much use does that get?
The right of citizens of the United States, who are eighteen years of age or older, to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of age.
We all know the youth vote is typically pretty abysmal. Those lazy kids can barely get out of bed before noon, let alone get themselves to the voting booth. If they're not going to use their Twenty-Sixth Amendment rights, shouldn't we just delete the damn thing altogether?
Hell no. And this is why liberals work so hard to get out and rock the vote -- to encourage citizens to exercise their rights. That is our obligation as citizens, to protect against the government infringing upon our rights by making full use of them.
And yet, when it comes to the Second Amendment, liberals do not fight to protect that right. Instead them demand more laws. Regulate, regulate, regulate -- until the Second Amendment is nearly regulated out of existence because no one needs to have a gun anyway.
And that, sadly, is the biggest mistake of all.
No. 5: The Second Amendment is about revolution.
In no other country, at no other time, has such a right existed. It is not the right to hunt. It is not the right to shoot at soda cans in an empty field. It is not even the right to shoot at a home invader in the middle of the night.
It is the right of revolution.
Let me say that again: It is the right of revolution.
Whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness it is the right of the people to alter or abolish it, and to institute new government.
To alter or abolish the government. These are not mild words; they are powerful. They are revolutionary.
The Founders might never have imagined automatic weapons. But they probably also never imagined a total ban on handguns either.
We talk about the First Amendment as a unique and revolutionary concept -- that we have the right to criticize our government. Does it matter whether we do so while standing on a soapbox on the corner of the street or on a blog? No. Because the concept, not the methodology, is what matters.
And the Second Amendment is no different. It is not about how much ammunition is "excessive" or what types of guns are and are not permissible. Liberals cling to such minutia at the expense of understanding and appreciating the larger concept that underlies this right.
So.
What is the point? Is this a rallying cry for liberals to rush right out and purchase a gun? Absolutely not. Guns are dangerous when used by people who are not trained to use them, just as cars are dangerous when driven by people who have not been taught how to drive.
No, this is a rallying cry for the Bill of Rights -- for all of our rights.
This is an appeal to every liberal who says, "I just don't like guns."
This is an appeal to every liberal who says, "No one needs that much ammunition."
This is an appeal to every liberal who says, "That's not what the Founders meant."
This is an appeal to every liberal who supports the ACLU.
This is an appeal to every liberal who has complained about the Bush Administration's trading of our civil liberties for the illusion of greater security. (I believe I’ve seen a T-shirt or two about Benjamin Franklin’s thoughts on that.)
This is an appeal to every liberal who believes in fighting against the abuses of government, against the infringement of our civil liberties, and for the greater expansion of our rights.
This is an appeal to every liberal who never wants to lose another election to Republicans because they have successfully persuaded the voters that Democrats will not protect their Second Amendment rights.
This is an appeal to liberals, not merely to tolerate the Second Amendment, but to embrace it. To love it and defend it and guard it as carefully as you do all the others.
Because we are liberals. And fighting for our rights -- for all of our rights, for all people -- is what we do.
Because we are revolutionaries.
Why liberals should love the Second Amendment
by Kaili Joy Gray aka Angry Mouse
Sun Jul 04, 2010
Liberals love the Constitution.
Ask anyone on the street. They'll tell you the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) is a liberal organization. During the dark days of the Bush Administration, membership doubled because so many Americans feared increasing restrictions on their civil liberties. If you were to ask liberals to list their top five complaints about the Bush Administration, and they would invariably say the words "shredding" and "Constitution" in the same sentence. They might also add "Fourth Amendment" and "due process." It's possible they'll talk about "free speech zones" and "habeus corpus."
There's a good chance they will mention, probably in combination with several FCC-prohibited adjectives, former Attorney Generals John Ashcroft and Alberto Gonzales.
And while liberals certainly do not argue for lawlessness, and will acknowledge the necessity of certain restrictions, it is generally understood that liberals fight to broadly interpret and expand our rights and to question the necessity and wisdom of any restrictions of them.
Liberals can quote legal precedent, news reports, and exhaustive studies. They can talk about the intentions of the Founders. They can argue at length against the tyranny of the government. And they will, almost without exception, conclude the necessity of respecting, and not restricting, civil liberties.
Except for one: the right to keep and bear arms.
When it comes to discussing the Second Amendment, liberals check rational thought at the door. They dismiss approximately 40% of American households that own one or more guns, and those who fight to protect the Second Amendment, as "gun nuts." They argue for greater restrictions. And they pursue these policies at the risk of alienating voters who might otherwise vote for Democrats.
And they do so in a way that is wholly inconsistent with their approach to all of our other civil liberties.
Those who fight against Second Amendment rights cite statistics about gun violence, as if such numbers are evidence enough that our rights should be restricted. But Chicago and Washington DC, the two cities from which came the most recent Supreme Court decisions on Second Amendment rights, had some of the most restrictive laws in the nation, and also some of the highest rates of violent crime. Clearly, such restrictions do not correlate with preventing crime.
So rather than continuing to fight for greater restrictions on Second Amendment rights, it is time for liberals to defend Second Amendment rights as vigorously as they fight to protect all of our other rights. Because it is by fighting to protect each right that we protect all rights.
And this is why:
(Reasons below the fold)
::
No. 1: The Bill of Rights protects individual rights.
If you've read the Bill of Rights -- and who among us hasn't? -- you will notice a phrase that appears in nearly all of them: "the people."
First Amendment:
...the right of the people peaceably to assemble
Second Amendment:
A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.
Fourth Amendment:
The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects...
Ninth Amendment:
...shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people
Tenth Amendment:
...are reserved to the states respectively, or to the people.
Certainly, no good liberal would argue that any of these rights are collective rights, and not individual rights. We believe that the First Amendment is an individual right to criticize our government.
We would not condone a state-regulated news organization. We certainly would not condone state regulation of religion. We talk about "separation of church and state," although there is no mention of "separation of church and state" in the First Amendment.
But we know what they meant. The anti-Federalists refused to ratify the Constitution without a Bill of Rights; they intended for our rights to be interpreted expansively.
We believe the Founders intended for us to be able to say damn near anything we want, protest damn near anything we want, print damn near anything we want, and believe damn near anything we want. Individually, without the interference or regulation of government.
And yet, despite the recent Heller and McDonald decisions, liberals stumble at the idea of the Second Amendment as an individual right. They take the position that the Founders intended an entirely different meaning by the phrase "the right of the people" in the Second Amendment, even though they are so positively clear about what that phrase means in the First Amendment.
If we can agree that the First Amendment protects not only powerful organizations such as the New York Times or MSNBC, but also the individual commenter on the internet, the individual at the anti-war rally, the individual driving the car with the "Fuck Bush" bumper sticker, can we not also agree that the Second Amendment's use of "the people" has the same meaning?
But it's different! The Second Amendment is talking about the militia! If you want to "bear arms," join the National Guard!
Right?
Wrong.
The United States Militia Code:
(a) The militia of the United States consists of all able-bodied males at least 17 years of age and, except as provided in section 313 of title 32, under 45 years of age who are, or who have made a declaration of intention to become, citizens of the United States and of female citizens of the United States who are members of the National Guard.
(b) The classes of the militia are—
(1) the organized militia, which consists of the National Guard and the Naval Militia; and
(2) the unorganized militia, which consists of the members of the militia who are not members of the National Guard or the Naval Militia.
Aside from the fact that the National Guard did not exist in the 1700s, the term "militia" does not mean "National Guard," even today. The code clearly states that two classes comprise the militia: the National Guard and Naval Militia, and everyone else.
Everyone else. Individuals. The People.
The Founders well understood that the militia is the people, for it was not only the right but the obligation of all citizens to protect and preserve their liberty and to defend themselves from the tyranny of the government.
And fighting against the tyranny of the government is certainly a liberal value.
No. 2: We oppose restrictions to our civil liberties.
All of our rights, even the ones enumerated in the Bill of Rights, are restricted. You can't shout "Fire!" in a crowd. You can't threaten to kill the president. You can't publish someone else's words as your own. We have copyright laws and libel laws and slander laws. We have the FCC to regulate our radio and television content. We have plenty of restrictions on our First Amendment rights.
But we don't like them. We fight them. Any card-carrying member of the ACLU will tell you that while we might agree that certain restrictions are reasonable, we keep a close eye whenever anyone in government gets an itch to pass a new law that restricts our First Amendment rights. Or our Fourth. Or our Fifth, Sixth, or Eighth.
We complain about free speech zones. The whole country is supposed to be a free speech zone, after all. It says so right in the First Amendment.
But when it comes further restrictions on the manufacture, sale, or possession of firearms, liberals are not even silent; they are vociferously in favor of such restrictions.
Suddenly, overly broad restrictions are "reasonable." The Chicago and Washington D.C. bans on handguns -- all handguns -- is reasonable, even though the Supreme Court has now said otherwise.
Would we tolerate such a sweeping regulation of, say, the Thirteenth Amendment?
Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime where of the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.
What if a member of Congress -- say, a Republican from a red state in the south -- were to introduce a bill that permits enslaving black women? Would we consider that reasonable? It's not like the law would enslave all people, or even all black people. Just the women. There's no mention of enslaving women in the Thirteenth Amendment. Clearly, when Lincoln wanted to free the slaves, he didn't intend to free all the slaves. And we restrict all the other Amendments, so obviously the Thirteenth Amendment is not supposed to be absolute. What's the big deal?
Except that such an argument is ridiculous, of course. Liberals would take to the streets, send angry letters to their representatives in Washington, organize marches, call progressive radio programs to quote, verbatim, the Thirteenth Amendment. Quite bluntly, although not literally, liberals would be up in arms.
And yet...A ban on all handguns seems reasonable to many liberals. Never mind that of 192 million firearms in America, 65 million -- about one third -- are handguns.
Such a narrow interpretation of this particular right is inconsistent with the otherwise broad interpretation of the Bill of Rights. And just as conservatives weaken their own arguments about protecting the Second Amendment when they will not fight as vigilantly for protecting all the others, so too do liberals weaken their arguments for civil liberties, when they pick and choose which civil liberties they deem worthy of defense.
No. 3: It doesn't matter that it's not 1776 anymore.
When the Founders drafted the Bill of Rights, they could not have imagined machine guns. Or armor-piercing bullets (which are not available to the public anyway, and are actually less lethal than conventional ammunition). Or handguns that hold 18 rounds. A drive-by shooting, back in 1776, would have been a guy on a horse with a musket.
Of course, they couldn't have imagined the internet, either. Or 24-hour cable news networks. Or talk radio. When they drafted the First Amendment, did they really mean to protect the rights of Bill O'Reilly to make incredibly stupid, and frequently inaccurate, statements for an entire hour, five nights a week?
Actually, yes. They did. Bill O'Reilly bilious ravings, and Keith Olbermann's Special Comments, and the insipid chatter of the entire cast of the Today show are, and were intended to be, protected by the First Amendment.
Liberals are supposed to understand that just because we don't agree with something doesn't mean it is not protected. At least when it comes to the First Amendment. And one's personal dislike of guns should be no better a reason for fighting against the Second Amendment than should one's personal dislike of Bill O'Reilly justify fighting against the First Amendment.
And yet, when discussing the Second Amendment, liberals become obtuse in their literalism. The Second Amendment does not protect the right to own all guns. Or all ammunition. It doesn't protect the right of the people as individuals.
Liberals will defend the right of Cindy Sheehan to wear an anti-war T-shirt, even though the First Amendment says nothing about T-shirts.
They will defend the rights of alleged terrorists to a public trial, even though the Founders certainly could not have imagined a world in which terrorists would plot to blow up building with airplanes.
But we do not quibble about the methods by which we practice our First Amendment rights because methodology is not the point. Red herring arguments about types of ammunition or magazine capacity or handguns versus rifles are just that -- red herrings. They distract us from the underlying purpose of that right -- to ensure a free society that can hold its government accountable. The Second Amendment is no more about guns than the First Amendment is about quill pens.
No. 4: It doesn't matter if you can use it.
Fine, you say. Have your big, scary guns. It's not like you actually stand a chance in fighting against the United States government. The Army has bigger, badder weapons than any private citizen. Your most deadly gun is no match for their tanks, their helicopters, their atom bombs. Maybe two hundred years ago, citizens stood a chance in a fight against government, but not today. The Second Amendment is obsolete.
Tell that to the Iraqi "insurgents" who are putting up a pretty good fight against our military might with fairly primitive weapons.
The Second Amendment is obsolete?
What other rights might be considered obsolete in today's day and age?
No Soldier shall, in time of peace be quartered in any house, without the consent of the Owner, nor in time of war, but in a manner to be prescribed by law.
When was the last time a soldier showed up at your door and said, "I'll be staying with you for the indefinite future"?
It's probably been a while. But of course, were it to happen, you'd dust off your Third Amendment and say, "I don't think so, pal."
And you'd be right.
What about the Twenty-Sixth Amendment? How much use does that get?
The right of citizens of the United States, who are eighteen years of age or older, to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of age.
We all know the youth vote is typically pretty abysmal. Those lazy kids can barely get out of bed before noon, let alone get themselves to the voting booth. If they're not going to use their Twenty-Sixth Amendment rights, shouldn't we just delete the damn thing altogether?
Hell no. And this is why liberals work so hard to get out and rock the vote -- to encourage citizens to exercise their rights. That is our obligation as citizens, to protect against the government infringing upon our rights by making full use of them.
And yet, when it comes to the Second Amendment, liberals do not fight to protect that right. Instead them demand more laws. Regulate, regulate, regulate -- until the Second Amendment is nearly regulated out of existence because no one needs to have a gun anyway.
And that, sadly, is the biggest mistake of all.
No. 5: The Second Amendment is about revolution.
In no other country, at no other time, has such a right existed. It is not the right to hunt. It is not the right to shoot at soda cans in an empty field. It is not even the right to shoot at a home invader in the middle of the night.
It is the right of revolution.
Let me say that again: It is the right of revolution.
Whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness it is the right of the people to alter or abolish it, and to institute new government.
To alter or abolish the government. These are not mild words; they are powerful. They are revolutionary.
The Founders might never have imagined automatic weapons. But they probably also never imagined a total ban on handguns either.
We talk about the First Amendment as a unique and revolutionary concept -- that we have the right to criticize our government. Does it matter whether we do so while standing on a soapbox on the corner of the street or on a blog? No. Because the concept, not the methodology, is what matters.
And the Second Amendment is no different. It is not about how much ammunition is "excessive" or what types of guns are and are not permissible. Liberals cling to such minutia at the expense of understanding and appreciating the larger concept that underlies this right.
So.
What is the point? Is this a rallying cry for liberals to rush right out and purchase a gun? Absolutely not. Guns are dangerous when used by people who are not trained to use them, just as cars are dangerous when driven by people who have not been taught how to drive.
No, this is a rallying cry for the Bill of Rights -- for all of our rights.
This is an appeal to every liberal who says, "I just don't like guns."
This is an appeal to every liberal who says, "No one needs that much ammunition."
This is an appeal to every liberal who says, "That's not what the Founders meant."
This is an appeal to every liberal who supports the ACLU.
This is an appeal to every liberal who has complained about the Bush Administration's trading of our civil liberties for the illusion of greater security. (I believe I’ve seen a T-shirt or two about Benjamin Franklin’s thoughts on that.)
This is an appeal to every liberal who believes in fighting against the abuses of government, against the infringement of our civil liberties, and for the greater expansion of our rights.
This is an appeal to every liberal who never wants to lose another election to Republicans because they have successfully persuaded the voters that Democrats will not protect their Second Amendment rights.
This is an appeal to liberals, not merely to tolerate the Second Amendment, but to embrace it. To love it and defend it and guard it as carefully as you do all the others.
Because we are liberals. And fighting for our rights -- for all of our rights, for all people -- is what we do.
Because we are revolutionaries.
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