Posted: December 20, 2010 by Davey D in 2009-Daily Hip Hop News
Tags: FCC, Free Internet, Google, Google news, Mobile Carriers are
Moving to Charge per page view as Net Neutrality Vote Awaits, Net
Neutrality, Oscar Grant, telecoms, Zennie Abraham
1
For the past 5 years.. we've been relentless about getting
information out to our community about Net Neutrality. We've written
lots of articles and posted up lots of videos on the subject. We know
it's not a sexy subject and for many its hard to understand, yet it's
the most important thing effecting Free Speech. In a nutshell, large
corporate interests are on a mission to suppress the flow of
information from the masses.
The topic of Net Neutrality being confusing, boring and off-putting
has been deliberate. There's lots of money.. we're talking billions
of dollars if Net Neutrality is deaded. This is why the big telecoms
like AT&T, Verizon and Comcast have spent almost a billion dollars
lobbying to get rid of it.
There's also huge opportunity to make a small handful of anointed
people and organizations gilded information gatekeepers or the
beneficiaries of huge sponsorship for conventions and other projects
provided they saddle up with the telecoms and use their political and
social capital to make this a non issue, keep folks in the community
confused or in some cases aggressively advocate.
For years one of the strongest supporters of Net Neutrality was
Google.. They had promised to never be an 'evil company'. A couple of
months ago they stunned everyone when they sat down with Verizon, one
of the strongest proponents of ending net neutrality.. The pair came
up with a proposal to bring before the FCC in a last-minute attempt
to scuttle a vote by congress on the issue.
In the proposal Google said it was important to keep Net Neutrality
in place on PCs, but it was every man or this case every company for
itself in the wireless world.. They proposed getting rid of this
protection. Their proposal drew widespread criticism and set off a
firestorm of protests including one that drew several hundred in
front of their Mountainview Headquarters. Google insisted that their
proposal would work great. Some wanted to believe.
Here we are the day before a historic vote by the FCC to decide
whether or not to keep Net Neutrality and now the longer game plans
of the telecoms are coming to light. They are already drawing up
pricing schemes to start charging cell phone users usage by the page
view and by the use of certain features like using Youtube, Twitter
or Facebook. We've already seen companies saying they are dropping
unlimited data packages. This is why.
The argument these telecoms have put forth has been too much
bandwidth is being used.. Thats BS.. What's their seeing is all these
new , faster, more efficient applications being used and the
potential for a handful of companies to score big..
we encourage everyone to check out this article laying out some of
the details..from Wired Magazine
Sadly deading Net Neutrality goes beyond money. It's also about
maintaining power and influence which has led companies like Google
to quietly do things like create a tier system for news and
information. Long time Tech columnist Zennie Abraham of Zennie62.com
pointed this out a few weeks ago when he pointed out that
'legacy' (corporate) news outlets were pressuring telecoms and
companies like Google to separate their product from blogs who were
beating them to the punch in covering and uncovering many stories.
Zennie pointed out that almost overnight thousands of blogs not only
lost their traffic, but revenue as Google moved to place corporate
backed news operations on the front page of their search engines and
blogs and other entities in a another section not readily available
or known to the general public. What's crazy is that you cant even
pull up the several columns that Zennie actually wrote on his own
blog. It only shows up on outlets that picked up the story such as
Seattle PI which links to this story.
Overnight you found topics that were almost exclusively driven by
bloggers disappear only to see corporate back outlets take their
place. So take a topic like 'Oscar Grant'. You look up his name in
Google News and all you see are the mainstream media who was the
subject of harsh criticism and even protests by community members for
with holding crucial information, demonizing Oscar, being embedded
with the police during protests and in recent days being a
cheerleader for Johannes Mehserle, the former cop convicted of
killing Grant. Almost overnight we no longer saw in Google search
engines outlets like Indy Bay which was by far the most popular go to
place for Grant information.
The Final Call which covered this extensively disappeared. My two
sites disappeared as well as Youth Radio, Oakland Local, Oakland
Seen, Block Report, Black Hour and about half-dozen other sites that
were doing round the clock coverage. What get eliminated from the
discussion is the investigative work by these independent journalist
that discovered Mehserle's violent past which was pretty much ignored
by Mainstream Outlets. What was missing were the stories of innocent
people arrested and roughed up by police who were out during the
protests and were umbrelled as rowdy destructive people..
The blogs and independent stories told the harrowing stories
experienced by people like Civil Rights attorney Walter Riley and
community elder who was arrested in front of his office or Joseph
Anderson a journalist who was recently arrested without warning while
actually on the air reporting. Those and many other stories disappeared.
Suppression and omission of information is what's going on as we move
in a direction of deading Net Neutrality. If the FCC votes to give
control to these corporate giants we can expect to see this increase
even more. Today its the bloggers doing politics, but soon if not
already it will be independent artists, whistleblowers and any number
of folks who feel they need to get information out but find
themselves handcuffed. This is happening now.. We hope folks pay
attention to tomorrows vote there's a lot at stake.
Be the first to know. The SavetheInternet.com Coalition has set
up a streaming website where you can witness the vote as it happens,
beginning at 10:30 a.m. ET, Tuesday, Dec. 21:
Watch the vote on Net Neutrality:www.SavetheInternet.com/FCCmtg
Join us online to watch the vote and connect with others. We'll
be hosting an online conversation with hundreds of other Net
Neutrality supporters who are working together to protect the open Internet.
Let the FCC know that we're watching: www.SavetheInternet.com/FCCmeeting
If you plan to be in Washington on Tuesday, you can come to
witness the vote in person. It's open to the public. I will be
outside the meeting with other Free Press staffers to meet with Net
Neutrality supporters and pass out information. Come see us and get
an "I Support Net Neutrality" sticker to wear into the meeting:
What: FCC Meeting on the open Internet
Where: Room TW-C305
445 12th Street, S.W
Washington, D.C.
When: Tuesday, Dec. 21, 10:30 a.m. Eastern Time
(If you plan to attend in person, please come early. We expect a
full room.)
More than 2 million people have urged the agency to create real
and lasting Net Neutrality protections. We can't let FCC
commissioners turn their backs on us and vote with Comcast and AT&T.
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