Wednesday, April 7, 2010

Net Neturality in Danger


Like this blog and the idea that anyone can start one that everyone can view for free? Enjoy surfing the net without restriction? Love free and easy access for just $20 a month?

Get ready to kiss it all good bye -- if you don't act.

The Internet as we know it depends on "net neutrality," the FCC policy that requires Internet providers to treat all content equally. They can't, for example, compel YouTube to pay them fees, make you pay for different levels of access to content or slow or block sites they don't like or aren't paying them.

Big media corporations hate net neutrality and want to destroy it so they can make you pay a lot more for Internet and force you to look at just their sites or ones that pay them. Unfortunately, Comcast yesterday won a catastrophic ruling from a federal appeals court significantly curbing the FCC's authority to enforce net neutrality.

Passivity has become a core American characteristic in the last two decades. Americans just stood aside as the tax code was tilted toward the rich, regulations that protected them were gutted and they were, at the very least, misled into a disastrous war. Indeed, passivity is what Fox News, for all its Sturm and Drang, seeks to breed: all that stuff about the country going to hell, Iraq being a disaster, Bush letting New Orleans drown, the need for health care and other reform? It's all lies. So you don't have to do anything. Just be passive.

We can't be passive on this one. If we are, we'll lose one of the few things that still works for ordinary people in this country, that allows for free speech and expression, that is controlled and shaped by individuals instead of huge, rapacious corporations. So don't sit on your hands. Write your federal and state representatives and the White House, do everything you can to save net neutrality.

Otherwise this blog and millions of others will go dark, destroyed by the same greedheads who have done so much damage to our country in the last 20 years.

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