By Marvin Ammori
Published May 3, 2010
According to this author, Marvin Ammori, “If the FCC gives away their authority to protect citizens' right to access the Internet, there is almost no list of ‘horribles’ that are not fair game.” Here is a list, which he derived of the top ten.
“Most of these ‘horribles’ have actually happened as business practices where the carriers got their way. And media companies are believed to refuse ads or stories that criticize them or oppose their position. Comcast (or AT&T or Verizon or Time Warner Cable) could do any of the following and the FCC could do Big Fat Nothing:
(1) Block your tweets, if you criticize Comcast's service or its merger.
(2) Block your vote to the consumerist.com, when you vote Comcast the worst company in the nation. No need for such traffic to get through.
(3) Force every candidate for election to register their campaign-donations webpage and abide by the same weird rules that apply to donations by text message.
(4) Comcast could even require a "processing fee," becoming the Ticketmaster of campaign contributions.
(5) Comcast could reserve the right to approve of every campaign online and every mass email to a political parties or advocacy group's list (as they do with text message short codes).
(6) If you create a small online business and hit it big, threaten to block your business unless you share 1/3 or more of all your revenues with them (apps on the iPhone app stores often are forced to give up a 1/3 or more; so are cable channels on cable TV).
(7) Block all peer to peer technologies, even those used for software developers to share software, distribute patches (world of warcraft), and distribute open source software (Linux). In fact, Comcast has shown it would love to do this.
(8) Block Daily Kos, Talking Points Memo, Moveon.org (and its emails), because of an "exclusive" deal with other blogs. Or alternatively, block FoxNews.com because of a deal with NBC and MSNBC.
(9) Monitor everything you do online and sell it to advertisers, something else that some phone and cable have done, with the help of a shady spyware company.
(10) Lie to you about what they're blocking and what they're monitoring. Hell, the FCC wouldn't have any authority to make them honest. The FCC couldn't punish them.”
Yes, this list is frightening, but on the other side of the spectrum, what would the Internet look like if the FCC takes control over the authority to regulate it instead of big corporations? Let’s take for instance the words of Mark Lloyd, who is the Associate General Counsel and Chief Diversity Officer of the FCC; appointed by President Obama.
In this video at the 1 minute mark, Mark Lloyd begins praising Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez for his great Democratic revolution. Pardon my concern for this, but for what I’ve read about Hugo Chaves, I find him to be a poor example of an excellent democratic leader.
For example, according to InsideCostaRica.com, “Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez said that the socialist model of development is the only solution for the social and environmental problems of the planet.” InsideCostaRica.com continued with a quote from his regular Sunday opinion column, “Las Lineas de Chavez”, in which Chavez stated, "Now more than ever, we must have a more humane redistribution in economic and social terms, which implies a deepening of the democratic Revolution: the speeding up of the march toward socialism, which is the solution to these tragedies.”
Continuing with Mark Lloyd; I find so many things wrong with his statements in this video. The fact that he believes that through our current media, we are not able to have a sustained, and intelligent dialogue here in the United States is a bit insulting to us as citizens. I understand his point that not everyone has equal access to the media (either television or Internet), which he claims inhibits them from participating intelligently in the democratic process, but in my opinion, if these people really wanted to get involved they could go to a public library and use the Internet there.
The problem is that when these individuals do use the Internet, they do not use it to look up and read about political information. Sure we could provide everyone with the same basic Internet access, but we still can’t control for what people are going to do with this access, and what kind of stuff they will look up, read about, and spend their time doing.
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