Seven Reasons: Why We Need Net Neutrality Now
By Tim Karr, August 3, 2009
On Friday, Reps. Ed Markey (D-Mass.) and Anna Eshoo (D-Calif.) marched across Independence Avenue and up the steps of the Capitol Building to introduce a bill that could stand as the First Amendment of the Internet age.
The Internet Freedom Preservation Act of 2009 establishes the basic rules of the road for an open Internet. And its arrival couldn’t be more timely.
We are amid the greatest technological transition in our media since the invention of the printing press. An open Internet is driving this change. It’s a communications tool that, while still in its infancy, is already storming the gates of media’s old guard. But they’re not letting us in without a fight.
Traditional media fear a system that is more decentralized, participatory and personal. While their outlets still dominate, mainstream media are threatened by a generation of users who have embraced the Internet to control their information experience.
These users no longer passively consume the news; we actively participate in it. We no longer limit our civic involvement to watching television ads and reading editorial pages. We Google candidates to learn more, create our own political networks on Facebook, and use Twitter to stay on top of the issues we care about most.
As the Internet breaks down old political, economic and social barriers, it raises new concerns about free speech, control, privacy and equality.
The Internet Freedom Preservation Act will safeguard the basic rights of our emerging media democracy. It makes Net Neutrality the standard, locking in the network’s greatest strength: its ability to give everyone a chance to be heard – whether a little-known blogger, local environmental group or giant multinational corporation.
Without Net Neutrality, this democratic Internet could fall prey to the companies that deliver Internet services. For them our new found media freedom is a threat that needs to be controlled for commercial gain.
We must act now to pass this bill. Here are seven reasons why:
1. Economic Recovery and Prosperity
"The Internet has thrived and revolutionized business and the economy precisely because it started as an open technology," Eshoo said in a statement on Friday. The Internet is so closely tied to U.S. economic recovery that President Obama and Congress earmarked more than $7 billion to help build out more high-speed connections at a time when our economy needs it most.
Obama and Congress also recognized that the economy cannot benefit by building a closed Internet. The American Reinvestment and Recovery Act requires that all federally funded networks be services that meet "nondiscrimination and network interconnection obligations" – that abide by Net Neutrality.
"The Internet is an essential infrastructure," declares Markey and Eshoo’s bill. "The national economy would be severely harmed if the ability of Internet content, service, and application providers to reach consumers was frustrated by interference from broadband telecommunications network operators."
2. Free Speech
Freedom of the press extends only to those who own one -- or so the saying goes. It once rang true in a world ruled by newspaper chains, radio and television broadcasters, and cable networks. But the Internet has changed all that, delivering the press -- and in theory its freedoms -- to any person with a good idea and a connection to the Web.
This extraordinary twist to "mass media" has catapulted many an everyday YouTube auteur to celebrity-status, while turning ideas born in a garage or dorm room into Fortune 500 companies. It is the reason so many Americans are now passionate about protecting their free speech rights on the Internet.
The Internet Freedom Preservation Act would stop would-be gatekeepers from re-routing the free-flowing Web. “To meet other national priorities, and to our right to free speech under the First Amendment of the Constitution of the United States,” the bill says, “the United States should adopt a clear policy preserving the open nature of Internet communications.”
3. Civic Participation
New media are more participatory and personal than ever before and have opened up new avenues for people to become involved with local, state and national politics. We saw it during the 2008 presidential election when tens of millions expressed their support for Obama and McCain via interactive Facebook, Twitter and e-mail forums. We are seeing it in 2009 from the streets of Tehran to the work of organizations like the Sunlight Foundation and the Center for Responsive Politics, which use the Internet as the means to open governments to public scrutiny and accountability.
This wave of digital empowerment is the gathering force for a healthier democracy, and it all depends upon a more open, affordable and accessible Internet for everyone. Expanding Internet access alone doesn’t erase concerns over what kind of information people will find when they get online. Net Neutrality guarantees that we all have an equal opportunity to play a part.
4. The Marketplace of Ideas
The Internet was the great surprise of the 20th century. Sir Tim Berners-Lee created the standard that opened the World Wide Web to everyone with an idea and a connection. At that time, few could imagine that this open architecture would fuel such a powerful eruption of economic, social and political creativity.
The Internet Freedom Preservation Act "will protect consumers and content providers because it will restore the guarantee that one does not have to ask permission to innovate," Rep. Markey said when he introduced the bill.
This is true regardless of your age, social status or location. Net Neutrality safeguards everyone’s fundamental right to an open Internet, making it possible for one person’s good idea to blossom into the next big business or, even, a movement of millions.
5. Social Justice
Broadband in America today is not equally accessible: Users are predominantly middle- or upper-class and live in urban or suburban areas. Poorer communities and communities of color, as well as communities in rural areas, have been largely left off the grid.
Imagine what it would mean, then, to provide a connection to disadvantaged areas without also extending to them Net Neutrality’s guarantee of openness. Dominant ISPs have argued for this exception, saying Net Neutrality prevents them from connecting more people. But it’s a false choice and far too high a cost to give network owners the power to shunt ideas percolating up from these communities to a digital backwater.
The Internet Freedom Preservation Act guarantees equal and unbridled access to the Internet’s engine of opportunity, leveling the playing field so that we all have a chance to be heard.
6. The Rise of the Gatekeepers
A high-speed connection is useful only if you can connect to everyone else online. Net Neutrality leaves control over your Internet experience with you, the user. Yet network operators are considering charging extra money depending on where you want to go and what you want to do online. Some are deploying technology that would sift through and filter the content that you share with others online. Such discrimination endangers the open and level playing field that has made the Internet so democratic.
As more of us rely upon a high-speed connection to do all things media – watch and make video, follow the news, listen to music, Tweet, email and call our friends – legacy media are too tempted to get in our way, steering us back via old channels where they make all decisions for us. But there’s no going back to the analog oligarchy. The Internet Freedom Preservation Act keeps the gatekeepers at bay.
7. The Obama Opportunity
Forces are coming into alignment for Net Neutrality. We have a president who is an outspoken supporter, congressional leadership willing to fight for an open Internet, and a pro-Neutrality chairman newly ensconced at the Federal Communications Commission.
Since the fight for Net Neutrality began more than three years ago, 1.6 million Americans have picked up the phone, signed petitions, spoken out publicly and written letters to urge their members of Congress to get behind Net Neutrality.
The tides have shifted. Still, giant phone and cable companies aren’t going away. They think they can squash our movement -- and over the past six months alone, they have hired 500 lobbyists in Washington to try to stop this bill.
This is our best chance to beat them back once and for all.
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Comments
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internet challenge
although we all know how's powerful and useful the internet,some points that we should consider wheter we need internet or not....consider that some estimates of losses as a result of computer crime and fraud are in the many billions of dollar per year. Consider how much money is repeatedly spent on reissuing credit and debit cards because of loss of card info, restoring systems from backups, trying to remove spyware, bots, viruses, and the like. Consider how much is spent on defensive mechanisms than only work in limited cases -- anti-virus, IDS, firewalls, DLP, and whatever the latest fad might be.
and perhaps the biggest problems continue to be the users ofthe internet and their expectations, not the Internet itself.
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to make it simple, one could
to make it simple, one could say that net neutrality is the equivalent of / consubstantial to free speech in the digital age... http://bit.ly/krUcx
Markey bill
There are a few problems with this bill. First of all, it still contains language that is much too ISP centric. I'm not talking about the old time ISPs--small mom and pop companies that used to provide internet service. those were all murdered by the anti-fairness collocation section of the 1996 telecommunications act. I'm talking about ISPs such as Verizon, AT&T, Comcast, Cablevision, Time Warner, Cox, etc.
This bill assumes an environment where no end user is really on line, but has their connection to the rest of americans "provided" to them by a giant telco. Furthermore it expects to recruit the Telcos and cable monopolies as "net police" who have to assure that we are all "lawfully using" the internet.
Don't even get me started about how this violates due process and privacy rights. it is just bad legislation.
It is as if road paving companies were recruited to "make sure all drivers were obeying the law" in such a way that it would be necessary to stop every single vehicle every few hundred feet to search for contraband. luckily road pavers are not in the business of checking out the trunks of our cars. That should also be the case for any kind of internet service providers.
Worse, we have a situation now, where those road pavers, aka companies that lay cable, have also been granted very special and absolutely NOT neutral privileges, to utilize the networks they have built on public lands, through public rights of way, to provide their own content service, often hogging vast portions of the available bandwidth for their tv, phone, and on-demand movie services.
It is as if the cable companies have been bequeathed public lands to build a superhighway, for themselves, and they have been so generous to give a tiny, leftover portion of the remaining bandwidth to us internet users. so instead of an information superhighway, we have an information dirt sidewalk.
What was the secret sauce that made the internet grow organically, as fast as technological innovations would allow?
For one thing there were collocation rules. If you wanted to be an isp, you could put your equipment in a telco central office and they would not be allowed to charge you more money than they charge their own subsidiaries for bandwidth. Again, that ended in 1996, and really more in the wake of the millennium copyright act, which did even more damage in that department.
Another major factor was the mandatory interconnection rules. Anybody on the internet was required to interconnect with anybody else who wanted to participate in the network. that's gone in the era of giant monopolist isps who don't want to connect to each other. instead, now, we have what is called tromboning, where for example, to make a local connection to somebody who is on a different service, your signal must travel many miles first, to find a node that finally interconnects the source and destination. that is killing the internet.
One of the most important factors missing from this law is that we are to have a standards based internet, with standards based devices. When there are standards based devices such as phones, computers, cables, connectors, routers, etc. then anybody anywhere can add to the network's capacity, allowing the internet to grow. In this ISP owned age though, the last 5 miles is no longer adhering to public standards, but instead to proprietary standards such as DOCSIS. the law, being ISP centered, requires isps to allow people to connect any devices they want, but that is not good enough. it should require them to follow public protocals, so for example, if i purchase a faster cable modem, and so does a friend in kansas, we will be able to communicate faster, without having to wait 10-20 years for marketing people at monopoly cable companies to decide to allow people to have faster equipment.
It is a direct conflict of interest for any company to both be able to lay cable on public lands and through public rights of way, as well as be in any kind of communications or content business.
It should be required for cable and phone companies to divest their cable laying operations, or their phone/tv/content/isp businesses... that way there is one company, which must follow common carrier laws, who lays cables and many companies offering content or internet service, which by the way wouldn't be necessary if we had real Ethernet connections into the internet, as an example, going to the home.
This is a major national security issue. If we have choke points of huge isps/cable layers/phone/tv monopolies then the entire network can easily be compromised in many ways, physically, and politically. Imagine how things would have been for Iranians who wanted to protest if they could only communicate through an easily controlled monopoly internet provider.
Look at Internet2, which Bush cut the funding of in 2001. Just like the internet 1 pre-1993, it is hardly more than a laboratory curiosity, available to a few university and government users, yet because there are no huge ISPs to get in the way, the technology for it has been advancing at the normal speed that technology moves forward. they are now upgrading from 10 Gigabits UP/DOWN per user to 100 Gigabits. at 100 Gigabits, that is 1000 times faster download, and 20,000 times faster, upload than the fastest $100/month internet service now offered in the USA from cablevision, at 100mbit. It is more like 100,000 times faster than the fastest service that Verizon offers.
So the bottom line, is that this legislation needs help. it needs to be purged of all those ISP-centric clauses that will only serve to trample the constitution and slow down the network, all while keeping people from just connecting to each other at will.
Real Net Neutrality doesn't and shouldn't have anything for ISPs in it, one way or the other.
Bill does not go far enough
I agree with Dave -- the current bill doesn't go far enough to protect consumers from monopoly interests. It's as if we gave highway construction monopolies away to the highest bidder, let them charge any toll they want once the highway is done, and then let them determine on-ramp and off-ramp placement based not on traffic needs, but on which communities pay them the most bribes. We let them do all this, even though the basis for the Internet highways were paved with taxpayer money, in the form of ARPANET and early University Networks. Additionally, we're not even allowed to have our own surface streets! There's connections back to the main highway (if we can even get our vehicle that far), and that's it. The only way to change highways is to go to their interchanges, where the monopolists collude to determine the exchange width -- whatever costs them less is good enough for us.
The problem isn't technology. Wireless mesh networks are already good enough to connect us with miles of neighbors directly. Existing radio technologies like Cognitive Radio and MIMO make the old myth of radio frequency "interference" obviously false. Yet the telecommunications monopolies have clauses in their "terms of use" that restrict us from sharing our connections to their Internet with our neighbors -- terms that say we can't even build our own surface streets or driveways even if we have the time and capability. The space requirements of collocation facilities -- the highway junctions of the Internet -- are getting smaller, and the speed of the equipment is getting faster all the time. The limit has never been what we can do with the Internet. The limit has always been the old guard monopolist interests -- telephone, cable, TV, radio, and broadcast monopolies of all forms. Technology has eliminated the need for any such monopolies, and they should all be abolished. It's time we took our Internet highways back -- we already paid for them! Where do you think your Universal Lifeline charges went? Did you know you were paying for them to lay fiber that they never deployed in your phone bill, for several years from the late 90's through early this century? We should also be able to make our own surface streets, and thus choose any local highway connector we want. Only then should we consider the Internet "neutral" and free of corporate prejudice.
FYI
Big Media mostly donates to Democrats
Time Warner is big media they own CNN, and guess who they donate to the Democrats
http://www.opensecrets.org/orgs/summary.php?id=D000000094
AT&T Donates equally to both but a tad more to Republicans
http://www.opensecrets.org/orgs/summary.php?id=D000000076
Verizon Donates equally to both but a tad more to Republicans
http://www.opensecrets.org/orgs/summary.php?id=D000000079
Music, TV, Film Mostly to Democrats
http://www.opensecrets.org/industries/indus.php?ind=B02
Internet Mostly to Democrats
http://www.opensecrets.org/industries/indus.php?ind=B12
Telephone Mostly to Republicans
http://www.opensecrets.org/industries/indus.php?ind=B08
And your point is .... ?
And your point is .... ?
HR 3458 Support from Speier
Congresswoman Jackie Speier's response to my email:
Dear Friend:
Thank you for writing me in support of H.R. 3458, the Internet Freedom Preservation Act, which would protect the Internet from blocking, censorship and discrimination by cable and telecommunications companies. I agree with you: we must preserve a neutral Internet and open network access for everyday users. I continue to support this important net neutrality legislation.
H.R. 3458 would mandate a series of public hearings around the country to ensure the American public, not private interests, shapes the conversation on the future of the Internet. Furthermore, the bill would codify basic non-interference and nondiscrimination policy for broadband, to protect the rights of consumers and safeguard an open marketplace of ideas on the Internet.
As a Representative from the Bay Area and a neighbor to Silicon Valley, I am acutely aware of how the Internet has revolutionized our economy and re-shaped our everyday lives. Since its inception, the Internet has depended upon the ability of people to connect with one another without facing discrimination in service or degradation of their ability to access the full diversity of content and programming that the World Wide Web has produced. Attempts to divide consumer broadband service into fast and slow toll lanes for increased profit are unacceptable. Such attempts would allow cable and telecommunications companies to consolidate unreasonable control over preferred content and would surely diminish the capacity for new minds to break through content chokepoints and bring their ideas and innovation to market. I will fight any efforts to block a free-flowing Internet. Please know that I will continue to keep your thoughts and concerns in mind as Congress debates future telecommunications policy.
Thank you again for taking the time to write me about this issue. I value the letters I receive from my constituents and use them to better inform my decision making process. I hope you will write me in future on matters important to you.
All the best,
Jackie Speier
Member of Congress
Odd
Obama does not want free speech, read the White House blog he wants people to turn in other people that are not agreeing on his Health care package.
http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/Facts-Are-Stubborn-Things/
Hitler and Stalin did the same thing. What this web post is encouraging is narc on people who disagree with Obama. Like Hitler did.
So I see you really don't believe in Freedom of Speech either since I joined this newsletter you always praise Obama. You believe in Government control of the media instead, which in my opinion is a lot worse then Corporations.
FYI NYC Council which is mostly Democrat votes against using the old television's White Space for internet access for the poor and better WiFi connections through out NYC.
I bet you are not even going to publish this post.
Oddly stupid
ODD: The link you cite is about identifying and rebutting myths and rumors put forward by morons like you, not about naming names. You can post anonymously, and don't have to give any names whatsoever. Once one side of any debate brings Hitler into it, that means they have already lost and are desperate.
About Whitespaces: nobody is denying that there are Democrats in Congress and other offices that are corporate lackey idiots. I usually hear them referred to as the "Conservative" Democrats (Conservadems for short) or "Blue Dog" Democrats. All they are really doing is posing as one party or the other so that they can stay in power and keep taking in lobby money -- ideology has nothing to do with it, other than corporatism. No matter what the debate is, they are on the side of corporations and never the public interest. Many of them switch parties as they feel one or the other gets them a better chance of winning their chosen seat, which wins them more lobby money. The main difference between Democrats and Republicans right now is that ALL Republicans currently in office take lobby money and ideas instead of serving their constituents (with a negligible number of exceptions), and only about a third of Democrats do the same. Look at the campaign contribution sources, not the party.
ODD - Supporting Nobama is Anti-America
ODD, You wrote . . .
"Obama does not want free speech, read the White House blog he wants people to turn in other people that are not agreeing on his Health care package."
Sad to say, but those words are accurate. In fact, the Nobama supporters in Congress have wildly promoted a "Hate Crimes" bill that plainly allows homosexuals to molest underage children with NO Law Against Their Crimes!
In fact, that stupid, immoral bill also states that ALL dissidence to Nobama is UNLAWFUL!
This Open Internet bill is sponsored by the same Double-Speak Minds that formed the criminal-supporting "Hate Crimes" bill. It is interesting that they do NOT post the text of that bill, as it is a work to discriminate against ALL who are against what President Bush, and President #44-Nobama- are forcing upon America in their tyranny rule, puppeteered by Big Bank Brotha.
Stupidity cascade
ANONYMOUS & CLAUDEA:
Excerpted from http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/Facts-Are-Stubborn-Things/
"If you get an email or see something on the web about health insurance reform that seems fishy, send it to flag@whitehouse.gov."
Only the criminally suspicious would take that to mean that the Obama administration is looking for people to become tattletales on each other. They're not asking you for names. In fact, all they're asking for are the stories. They want a chance to openly refute bogus claims, much like I'm doing here with you two.
Oh, and give up the "Nobama" crap. Its context died the day President Obama took office, yet you cling to it like a Twilight-fan does to the notion Meyer's books are about vampires.
PLEASE REMOVE MY STATEMENT
PLEASE REMOVE MY STATEMENT SEEN AT THE LINK BELOW:
http://www.savetheinternet.com/story/8313
That statement was made as an addendum to a petition/legislative email campaign submission and was NOT intended for public posting. I did not agree to public posting or to have my name and location attached to it. PLEASE REMOVE IT IMMEDIATELY.
Joanna Conrad-Pacelli
Thx for this information.
Thx for this information. It's much appreciated! Best regards.
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