Net neutrality, the free speech issue of our time?

10 Apr 11 | Uncategorized

On Friday, the US House of Representatives voted, 240-179, along largely partisan lines to strip the Federal Communications Commission of any authority to regulate net neutrality. The vote has been viewed as mostly symbolic — the Democratic-controlled Senate is unlikely to pass the bill as well, and if it does, President Barack Obama has hinted he would veto it.

But the vote bodes poorly for net neutrality supporters who expected the concept to be enshrined in government regulation by now, more than two years into the Obama era. Those supporters, many of whom have gathered this weekend in Boston for the National Conference for Media Reform, have been deeply disappointed by Obama’s tepid advocacy and the weak net neutrality rules his hand-picked FCC chairman presided over last December.

Now as the political momentum in Washington seems to be headed even farther in the wrong direction — net neutrality represents a dangerous “government takeover of the internet,” its opponents have successfully claimed in the capital — US advocates are trying to ramp up their argument that the wonky, hard-to-grasp technological concept in fact represents the most important free speech issue of our time.

Senator Al Franken started using that phrase in December, and it has been a popular refrain in Boston this weekend as well.

If strong net neutrality rules fail to pass, telecommunications companies and internet service providers could block certain content on the internet, or prioritise content according to who pays the most money.

For free expression advocates, the threat requires thinking about censorship in an entirely different way. Without net neutrality, internet content could potentially be blocked not by the government, but by corporations (with the acquiescence of government institutions that won’t regulate them). And content could be blocked, slowed or prioritised not for religious, political, or ideological reasons, but for business ones.

“It’s not politically motivated, but it could have political effects,” said Aparna Sridhar, policy counsel for Free Press, hinting at what could happen if telecommunications companies carry only the content of individuals and organisations who can afford to pay for it.

 

All sides fight for 'freedom' in US net neutrality war

10 Mar 11 | Uncategorized

Critics of net neutrality in the US have come up with a particularly ingenious talking point, one that borrows the loaded rhetoric of the Tea Party movement while casting communications regulators as the enemies of freedom.

Net neutrality, warned new Republican House Speaker John Boehner in his opening salvo last week, represents nothing less than a “government takeover of the internet“.

“As far as I’m concerned,” he said, “there is no compromise or middle ground when it comes to protecting our most basic freedoms.”

Marsha Blackburn, the conservative congresswoman leading the charge against net neutrality in Washington, went one step further. Offering to speak on behalf of the entire creative community of online content providers, she declared: “They do not want a czar of the internet to determine when they can deploy their creativity over the internet.”

Net neutrality is, of course, the exact opposite of the freedom-trampling “government takeover” as it is tarred by opponents in the capital. Net neutrality is internet freedom, not its adversary. The doctrine is designed to protect consumers’ rights to access information that is unfiltered and unrestricted by telecommunications companies that stand to profit from what could constitute, come to think of it, a “corporate takeover of the internet”.

“The only freedom they are providing for,” Democratic Senator Al Franken and several colleagues snapped back at Republicans in a recent letter, “is the freedom of telephone and cable companies to determine the future of the internet, where you can go on it, what you can attach to it, and which services will win or lose on it.”

The freedom bickering has intensified in the last week, as newly empowered conservatives in Congress began an effort to cut off funding for the Federal Communications Commission’s net neutrality plans. On Wednesday, they held another hearing on the topic in a House communications and technology subcommittee.

Conservatives are counting in the showdown on their pithy catchphrase. Net neutrality, as a concept, is a messy one to grasp. But a “government takeover the internet” it is not. In fact, it’s likely many of the politicians warning of such a future don’t truly understand the stakes themselves. But once they’ve been framed as an affront to individual liberty, many Americans won’t need to hear much more.