Who has the ultimate authority here? I asked. Who gave you the authority? Verizon asks the FCC. And the bloggers cry, “no one has the authority to take away my free and open Internet that will facilitate my right to free speech!”
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My housemate Siri has been a part of counter-recruitment and demilitarization organizations in the Bay area for decades. She is familiar with the challenges of trying to change the status quo, particularly at the level of the US government. We were discussing the revolution in Egypt a few days ago and Siri said something that immediately resonated with me, in regards to the indignant attitude I have encountered and puzzled over repeatedly in blogs.
She said, “People talk about democracy as though it were a right handed down to them. As though every morning democracy will be served on your breakfast platter, and you can just put your feet up and enjoy it.”
As though it’s enough to be born in America. As though democracy doesn’t depend on our voices to function on our behalf. We might call it a God-given right, but no natural law keeps it; only human law keeps it. We will keep it so long as we continue to ensure that its protection is updated to fit the technology and ideology of the times.
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To those who say: “let the markets decide,” or, “just keep the government out of it,” I say, I wonder who then is going to act on your behalf?
No ISP is designated as a common carrier in the US, and so are not yet bound to non-discriminatory service. On the “self-regulating” side, Tim Wu states quite politely back in 2003:
“Basic economic theory suggests that operators have along-term interest coincident with the public: both should want a neutral platform that supports the emergence of the very best applications. However, the evidence suggests the operators may have paid less attention to their long-term interests than might be ideal... operators indeed had implemented significant contractual and architectural limits on certain classes of applications.”1
To follow: common carrier and contract carrier designations, and a bit of the history of prickly relations between telecom cos and the government in regards to innovation
1 Tim Wu, “Network Neutrality, Broadband Discrimination,” Journal of Telecommunications and High Technology Law, Vol. 2, p. 141, 2003 < http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=388863 >
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