Why is net neutrality important? Here is why. No matter what your political position, it shouldn't be up to Murdoch, Fox News, CNN, AT & T, Yahoo or Google or any corporation that is involved in telecommunications to decide what content the public can hear, see, smell, taste, watch or otherwise interact with the Internet. Would you let any of these entities screen your phone calls? Of course not.
Here is an example of how a telecommunications mega-corporation with vested interests in legislation and regulation of our telecomm infrastructure decided to quash political speech that they didn't agree with. It could happen to any kind of communication if net neutrality isn't taken seriously.
After hearing Sen. Ted Stevens' now infamous description of the internet as a "series of tubes," Andrew Raff sang the senator's words over a folksy ditty and anonymously posted it to MySpace.com, where about 2,500 people listened to the tune. On Tuesday, MySpace canceled the TedStevensFanClub account.
Andrew wrote the music for the song. What senators, like Ted Stevens (R-Alaska) say in Congress is not copyrighted speech. The "tedstevensfanclub" site on MySpace was taken down, and then in response to blogosphere reverberations, allegedly put back up again. It is noon on Sunday, July 23, however, and I can't get the site to work. It has a broken DLL or something. Hmmm.
Here is a Wired story about the censorship with links to a Jon Stewart / Daily Show presentation, including Steven's exact words and an animation that "explains" Internet operations according to the tube and clogged tube theory.
tags technorati : netneutrality censorship
read more | digg story
No comments:
Post a Comment