Dear friends of Internet freedom,

The corporate giants Google and Verizon have a plan to destroy freedom. Yes free speech is now at risk like never before. For the latest on this visit www.Democracynow.org today (08/10/2010). Yes, the plan is to create a corporate "fast lane" and a "kiddy path" for the rest of us. If the internet is to remain a vibrant and useful tool of political and social organizing we have got to take on and win this fight. In describing the re-sentencing of attorney Lyn Stuart, journalist Stephen Lendman referred to "darkness falling on America." If we let this occur it will truly be "lights out."

See today's show with Amy Goodman, inform yourselves further on this issue and stay with it. We simply cannot afford to lose this one; Please spread this message as widely as possible. Don't let darkness fall. General Joe









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Don't let darkness fall

General Joe

"The corporate giants Google and Verizon have a plan to destroy freedom. Yes free speech is now at risk like never before. For the latest on this visit www.Democracynow.org today (08/10/2010). Yes, the plan is to create a corporate "fast lane" and a "kiddy path" for the rest of us."

Hold on there - it's not Google and Verizon that are the companies to fear. The real threat is from the alliance of telecoms, including Verizon, AT&T, MCI, and the cable companies TWC, Comcast, etc.

Don't turn this into some crackpot conspiracy theory.

The Google Verizon deal is news because Google had been a big bankroller of the Network Neutrality side of the war. The NN side is, basically, the consumer-rights and freedom-of-speech side. It's also the "tech business" side, because these companies did not own internet service providers.

The telecom side was building an alliance between the internet providers and, potentially, some media companies, due to the relationships between cable companies and media companies.

Now, with Google straddling the fence, the NN side has lost a lot of power.

Now, it's critical that "civil society" groups use their political prowess to help the NN side. In fact, it's important to *expand* the NN side to include universal access.

The NN fight boils down to the classification of internet service providers as a utility. If the internet is classified as a utility, then it can be regulated like other utilities. Just as utilities have to provide service to all comers, and are forced to provide service to rural areas and low-income communities, NN advocates would like to use regulation to force data to be carried without discrimination, and give small servers the same access as large servers.

Presently, the internet is classified as an "information service", which operates on top of a regulated utility. This was determined by the Brand X case. The evidence presented was that the internet was carried over phone line - this was back in the days of modems. (For more about this issue, see below.)

Today, however, you can easily get internet service without any other service. It's basically like "dial tone" back in the day. So, it falls into a real gray area between a utility and an information service, but tilting toward a utility more every year.

The issue of internet classification is largely in the hands of the FCC and SCOTUS. The people, united, can force the reclassification of internet.

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What does it mean to be an Information Service?



As an "information service", the internet is not regulated. While this means there's more "freedom", it also means that telecom companies also have more "freedom" to price the internet any way they see fit. For example, they charge more for uploaded data than downloaded data -- but it costs exactly the same to transfer data in either direction. If they felt like it, they could charge extra to use Bittorrent.

Don't think they'd do that? look at how much the telecoms charge for SMS text messages. It's 15 cents for around 200 bytes. Meanwhile, a phone call takes upwards of 168,000 bytes per minute... yet it costs only 10 cents per minute!

Under a "network neutral" cell phone regime, the SMS message would cost nearly nothing. The phone call might cost a tad more, though, because the thrifty SMS users would no longer be subsidizing the talkers. Of course, there's high speed data, which is usually even cheaper than phone data.

What would happen under a network neutral regime is that all phone would, fundamentally, be data radios, using a single chips to communicate using a single network protocol. Voice and text and email would share the same stream, and be charged at a single rate.

Originally, the conventional wisdom was that a "free market" deregulated approach to internet would cause the broadband speeds to increase faster and be available at a lower cost. This simply hasn't been the case. The countries with the best broadband internet are the ones where government has intervened to wire the cities. So, the "neoliberal faith healing" and reclassification voodoo that was applied to telecom has failed. We're suffering for it by being charged a lot for shitty internet speeds.