Lets give at least two cheers for President Obamas decision to ask the FCC to adopt the strictest rules possible to prevent broadband companies from blocking or intentionally slowing down legal content and from allowing content providers to pay for a fast lane to reach consumers. This move to support net neutrality against the monster communications and media companies that want to put class on the Internet (as it is now everywhere else in our society) and relegate places like TomDispatch to third class Internet citizenship is important, but as Juan Cole writes today, its also limited. I recommend the full Cole piece on how this all works. Heres just part of his ending. Tom A tiered world wide web would restore some of the lost ability of the wealthy to control the spin put on news. We know what that spin typically is. There are no labor reporters at any major metropolitan newspaper. Major labor actions are often not reported on at any length. Nor are union workers much featured in the mass media such as television. Wars benefiting munitions corporations are reported on positively. The dangers of fossil fuel consumption are discounted. In a business-class world, it is people with capital who matter and on whom reporters are told to concentrate. We’ve all heard of Donald Trump or the Koch brothers. Richard L. Trumka and Linda Chavez-Thompson of the AFL CIO are, let us say, less prominent. Even less prominent are climate scientists like Michael Mann. And, of course, northern Europeans are generally more newsworthy than people originating in other parts of the world. Race and class are not evenly distributed in the informational world of US corporate media. A lot of you have said how much you benefited from my own analyses of the Iraq War during the Bush administration. But in the 20th century I might not have been able to present that analysis to the public. I had trouble getting my op-eds published in newspapers in the old days. I wasn’t mainstream. This blog would not have existed without net neutrality, and if net neutrality ever goes away, probably so will the blog. President Obama’s support of net neutrality is welcome, but there are many problems with it. He can’t order the FCC around, since it is an independent agency. Its head comes to us from the world of ISPs and we are suspicious of him. Title II would not necessarily in and of itself prevent a tiered web, though it might impede and constrain the degree of it. And, whatever Obama accomplishes by mere administrative regulation can be undone by the next president. Presumably he is hoping to create such a weight of bureaucratic practice and tradition that it will be difficult to overturn. In the American system, the best guarantor of liberty of access to the internet and liberty of accessible publication on it is the rise of powerful economic interests that benefit from it. Thus, the guy in a white hat here is Netflix. In contrast, Comcast and other ISPs shot themselves in the foot by throttling Netflix and shaking it down, creating an ally for bloggers and civil libertarians. Senator Al Franken, with his ties to the entertainment industry (I remember when he was a comedian on Saturday Night Live), likewise has taken a powerful stand in favor of net neutrality. juancole/2014/11/internet-liberty-policy.html Heres the NYTimes on the subject this morning: nytimes/2014/11/11/technology/obama-net-neutrality-fcc.html
Posted on: Tue, 11 Nov 2014 14:50:00 +0000
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