Sara Catlin

Dear FCC: Please learn from history.

I was born in the generation that grew up with the Internet, from comics with Superman and the Tandy Whiz Kids to the wireless-enable laptop I'm typing on now. And the internet has brought with it a wonderful flowering of creativity and thought, of learning and teaching, friendships and found families, that are the most valuable thing I have today - the most valuable contribution that American has given the world in my lifetime.

Today, in between a myriad other chores of living, I have visited websites in order to watch a video of a child being stoned to death in Iraq, to read a classic and influential feminist essay, to analyze a survey of socioeconomic demographics in the United States, to learn about poisonous plants in my area, to read a moving first-person account of abuse and the ways children fall through the cracks, to study the history and value of the corporately-packed literature of the Stratemeyer Syndicate, to protest to my government about a change in regulations, and certainly not least, to talk about television with my friends. (and all of that after church!)

None of those places would have survived in an internet where corporate interests were given financial subsidies on the backs of individual people and small providers.

In 1887 the US Congress passed the Interstate Commerce Act, the first of the sweeping anti-trust legislation that would shape the developing American economy for all time. The act was passed in response to price discrimination by railroads, which used their control of the means of distribution to form alliances with large corporations and create a stranglehold on the market to suppress the small farmers and businesspeople who were the foundation of American democracy.

In today's increasing white-collar US society, the valuable commodities are not raw materials of manufacturing, like steel and grain, but the raw materials of the mind: information and imagination. They're passed along the wires and waves of the internet rather than the tracks of the railroads, but the new pathways and opportunities they are creating are just as important for the new nation we're building in the new century as the old frontiers were to the old.

And just as vulnerable - if the government forgets the lessons of its past - to control and exploitation by monopolistic interests bent on destroying the free spirit of independence and competition on which this country was built. Learn from history. Keep our common carriers free. Give my generation a new frontier on which to keep building a great nation.