The Courts Can’t Take Away Our Internet

Without a voice we have no

Without a voice we have no share of the power, and without a share of the power a share of the wealth is certainly lost and our humanity is stripped away as we are brought up struggling on the threshold with base needs and insecurity. Neutrality is really the principle of choice and choice by default. It’s a right of self determination. Without it our time and attention are stolen and we are forced to watch ads and tolerate sponsorship which quickly consolidates media and drowns out opposition and works to hold our politicians hostage. Neutrality is the same principle that is at the core of our Constitution its power sharing embodied, hard wired. It’s the seed and core principle of an Internet that was born to preserve communication under the worst of conditions. It works against the fraud that has people identify with and take pride in their own oppression. Such things cannot stand the light of increased communication and dialog. The GOP (status quo) has been in crisis and is increasingly radicalized over this.

Even given recent censorship by the Chinese State it seems a lot more trustworthy than AT&T, Time Warner and Fox. There is a real risk or even likelihood that these companies will use this ruling to prevent or reverse progressive gains in the coming election cycle. These companies like the HMOs are basically “socially useless” and represent a huge risk to the future of the people and the country. The HMO’s love to gamble and then pass along cost of their addiction and profit taking by threatening people with their very lives. In telecom and media the entire business model works on suppression, collusion, and on the creation of artificial scarcity and unnecessary metering regimes. They constantly want to charge for what is unnecessary. The also like to act as if the market were not the property of the people.

We the people are market holders and they are holders of nothing if we say so. This isn’t a matter of an unruly majority, this is a matter of a few trying to block a critical public need. These companies want all speech to be commercially underwritten, especially all political speech. They expect lock out. Sony famously said of Microsoft: They will get movies when and if we say so. This corporate culture hates collectivity because it runs counter to exploitation. They love secrecy, false claims of ownership and indemnity.

Think back:

50K gag orders issued by the Bush Administration.

AT&T Wire Tapping

Voter Fraud, stolen elections, former SC Chief Justice starting his career on voter suppression. Most SC justices to this point have been slave holders.

Rulings that find debt/money to be speech.

Rulings that find corporations to have ‘rights’

Ruling that eliminates limits on corporations trying to use other peoples money to control elections.

Filibustering civil rights legislation.

Gingrich comparing the gains in health care to civil rights passage as if Civil Rights were an atrocity.

Trying to eliminate the separation between Church and State in order to inject more dogma, division and hate.

Denying due process, trying to get rid of habeas corpus, engaging in torture (US Terrorism,) in order to silence people and their elected representatives.

Rewriting text books in Texas in a regressive way.

Lying us into a war.

Asserting everything is an issue of national security is therefore secret.

Insisting on Tort caps, the destruction of evidence and corporate immunity.

Tobacco reparations.

Think of the undue influence that some ancillary entities have on American politics and US discourse. Think of the Neo Con elements of the Israeli government and the power they have been able to exert over the US political scene. Think of Fox, where a cosmopolitan has an organization that is aimed at completely propagandizing American politics and keeping people in constant fear.

The point is not to make society safe for business but to make business serve society. The point is to make our industries and institutions contribute something for the opportunity and resources they take away. The point is to limit the aspects of commercial speech that are parasitic to speech in general and political speech in particular. There is nothing wrong with genuine product information on the other side of an ad free user generated search but there is everything wrong with a modal TV ad or a bill board that causes death, traffic and property devaluation. Currently our system of speech is largely and wrongly based on sponsorship, which in practice is censorship that holds our system of political representation hostage. Even if one doesn’t believe power can be delegated this system still acts as an effective filter even against direct action.

Enshrining the choice, making it the default and reinforcing it with proper privacy will kill the advertising, publishing and broadcast industries but these industries were already culturally and technologically obsolete.

Markets are infrastructure that without a certain minimum of regulation become mechanisms to create artificial scarcity for profit, most appeals to the market are usually an appeal to collusion. Ad a little regulation to mining and it becomes 30x safer, so what if it cost the mining companies more, they weren’t entitled to it in the first place.

Think about pharmaceuticals, we are told that Canada isn’t bright enough or moral enough to make quality pharmaceutical and that nonsense protects an industry that is based on pure unadulterated marketing. The German government found that only %1 of drugs had efficacy above chance and that was with the societal placebo in place.
If we don’t reverse this instantly we will be told that we can’t connect over seas because they don’t discriminate against so called ‘content’ and they are pirates.

Content is just communication from the past, its gets no preference. Commercial speech is not elevated speech it gets no preference and not even by much earlier more reasonable court rulings. Lets be clear, Hulu sucks, it’s the worst model possible its absolutely not free its price in political terms is infinite, we don’t want sponsorship driven media. We don’t want consoles, cable or and certainly nothing that tries to layer sponsorship atop subscription. We don’t need news (propaganda) or eye witness experts, we need communication and community. We need a low priced generic subscription that provides everything ad free with massively many redundant providers of such subscriptions across the globe. We need public backbones with public, private, cooperative media exchanges that use stuff like the “Open Streaming Platform” model. Nothing, especially not search, requires ads. Every so-called media company needs to be reduced to a totally dumb pipe with no power to influence or constrain what we look at in any way. Achieve this and among other things we will see the end of the GOP.

The final currency is attention, we are defined by what we focus on, they have not right to channelize, filter, drown out with noise or define us, this comes down to our right of self definition. When it comes to the state we will be seen as intrinsically equal and not merely created equal or equally situation or having equal opportunity.

We could insist on true mesh networks that would allow us to completely cut out these telecom providers, to completely disintermediate them and their business models. They can become as outmoded as gas stations soon will be. We can work outside their copper cables and wireless spectrum to quickly form another net composed of wireless nodes and public back bone, we might even be able to use power cables as an alternative point of entry. What ever we do we need to look to support models that undermine entities like RIAA and where possible work to get laws that prohibit their business models. Enough of them they are a risk to our future or a future worth having.