    
Msprissy
Regular Poster
Username: Msprissy
Post Number: 35
Registered: 03-2006
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Friday, April 28, 2006 - 11:07 am: | 
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Source: radarnard@mindspring.com
From: Thomas Palmer <tp6107@yahoo.com>
Subject: The Internet is under attack........
Urban Entrepreneurs Week
American Samizdat
Filed by John Steinberg
Source: Raw Story
Raw Story (***and Bronzecomm***) is in danger. Your right to read news stories and writing that disrupt the government/Big Media symbiosis is under attack. And you probably don’t even know it.
There has been so much going on lately, what with plans to nuke Iran and the rolling mutiny among the top brass that you may well have missed another growing menace to all that we have built here.
The Internet phenomenon – the dizzying evolution from Netscape to Yahoo to Google to the new world of blogs and wikis – is the result of an essential structural attribute of the medium: the content-neutrality of the pipes we use to connect to it. It is the natural tendency of the powerful to silence and hinder anything that threatens their dominance, but the phone companies could not stop AOL, AOL could
not stop Yahoo, and Yahoo could not stop Google, because the folks who owned the pipes used to
carry all those ones and zeroes to and from your computer were not permitted to discriminate against bits they didn’t like. (The concept of the “common carrier” dates back at least to the earliest regulation of railroads more than a hundred years ago.) That level field has also resulted in the current flowering of our participatory democracy. But that flower is about to pruned or even torn out by the roots.
The Orwellian “Communications Opportunity, Promotion, and Enhancement Act of 2006,” sponsored by Congressman Joe Barton (R, Texas), will, if it becomes law, allow your Internet provider to charge you extra to read this column. It will allow your provider to block this column entirely. Congressman Ed Markey (D, Mass), who sponsored a defeated amendment that would have explicitly preserved neutrality, explains:
The Joe Barton (R-TX) sponsored telecommunications bill that is moving through the Energy & Commerce Committee in the House would fundamentally change the way
the Internet works. … In short, the Barton bill opens the door for the Bells and other
ISPs to throw out a key principle of net neutrality and enact a new era of telecom
taxes and tolls, roadblocks that would shut down the avenues of innovation that have
allowed the Internet to become what it is today.
I want to be clear: this is not the most urgent crisis we face. The prospect of war with Iran, nuclear or otherwise, is the most urgent crisis we face. But this may well be the second most urgent. Are you concerned about global warming? Great, but where will you hear about it? Do you want to protest the endless lies about and senseless destruction in Iraq? Please do, but how are you going to organize? Do you really want to be limited to a new American samizdat?
In most of my writing, the call to action is implicit – perhaps too implicit. This time I want it to be explicit and specific: do something. Unless you want the whole Internet to look like Fox News, you need to get out there and do something,
Here are what Matt Stoller calls the Verizon Six – the Democrats who voted with all 17 Republicans on the subcommittee to allow tollbooths on the Internet:
Eliot Engel: NY-17
Bart Stupak: MI-01
Ed Towns: NY-10
Al Wynn: MD-04
Charlie Gonzales: TX-20
Bobby Rush: IL-01
If any of you live in one of their districts, let them know how you feel about net neutrality.
Free Press just opened up the new site for this fight. Go to www.savetheinternet.com
and send a message through their website.
Go to www.commoncause.org and send a message through their website.
Go to the Center for Digital Democracy, which has collected a bunch more sites and action items.
"... contact your Senators and ask them to co-sponsor the Wyden bill. Don’t wait until the last minute. By the time the bill comes up for an official vote, the enemies of participatory democracy will have been twisting arms for months, and the real crown jewel of 21st century politics will have been long since auctioned off."
If we lose this fight, or we may be reduced to typewriters and mimeo machines for the next one.
***On the same subject: From The Black Commentator:
Over the last week we have become aware that Congressional Black Caucus member Bobby Rush of Chicago appears to be the sole Democratic co-sponsor of a truly catastrophic bill that would end the Internet as we know it and leave it up to AT & T, Verizon and other ISPs and owners of the Internet backbone to determine what content users will be allowed to access. This is not exaggeration, and not hyperbole.
Daily Kos explains the issue this way
Internet service provision in the U.S. is covered by telecommunications law, and has operated under the idea of "network neutrality." In it's early years, telephone companies provided most Web service, and carried most of the traffic. Because of the nature of laws regulating phone service, Web traffic was handled just like phone traffic, each "call" being equal. That means every page you surf to on the Internet is served up just like any other, as far as your ISP is concerned. You can go from Amazon.com to Aunt Harriet's family history blog equally.
Here's what's at stake with this legislation.
”The nation's largest telephone and cable companies – including AT&T, Verizon, Comcast and Time Warner – want to be Internet gatekeepers, deciding which Web sites go fast or slow and which won't load at all.
”They want to tax content providers to guarantee speedy delivery of their data. They want to discriminate in favor of their own search engines, Internet phone services, and streaming video – while slowing down or blocking their competitors. . . .
”On the Internet, consumers are in ultimate control – deciding between content, applications and services available anywhere, no matter who owns the network. There's no middleman. But without net neutrality, the Internet will look more like cable TV. Network owners will decide which channels, content and applications are available; consumers will have to choose from their menu....”
I live in Chicago and in Bobby Rush's District. I will be contacting him and asking whatz up with this? He has been confusing me constantly, lately. This is the same Bobby Rush who used to be a Black Panther.
Minnie E Miller
from the South Side of Chicago.
www.millerscribs.com
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