After campaigning as a champion of network neutrality, President Obama has decisively broken yet another promise. The FCC votes December 21 on rules proposed by the president’s FCC chairman which will begin the transformation of the free and open internet into somethning much more like cable TV, with corporate control over content, and hundreds or thousands of “channels”, but not much worth watching.
President Obama’s FCC Sells Out on Network Neutrality – Another Constituency Thrown Under The Bus
A Black Agenda Radio commentary by Bruce A. Dixon
Bruce Dixon
Never mind the big tent,” declared a cartoon by the artist Mike Fluggenock during the 2008 presidential campaign. “There’s room for all” the caption declared “under Obama’s Big Bus.” A full two years after that historic election, it’s hard to name any part of the Democratic party’s base constituencies that President Obama has not decisively betrayed. Last week gays, women, blacks, Latinos, the environment, the peace movement, labor, the unemployed and a host of others were joined beneath the speeding wheels of the Obama bus by those millions of Americans who believe greedy corporations should not control what we see, hear, write and communicate over the internet.
President Obama campaigned on the promise that he would take a back seat to nobody in guaranteeing the free and open internet. Two years out, it’s abundantly clear thatu the president lied to us, and to the American people on network neutrality.
The pending merger between Comcast and NBC would create a gigantic corporation with both the motive and means to privilege the delivery of its own content over the enormous fraction of the internet that they own, and to slow down, inhibit, or apply surcharges to content originating from outside. Neither the administration’s Justice Department or FCC have lifted a finger to oppose it. So-called compromise rules announced last week by Obama’s FCC Chairman Julius Genachowki pay only the faintest lip service to the concept that the internet should be a common carrier available to all, and provide vast loopholes for internet providers to apply punitive charges to content and content providers they disfavor.
Thanks to the Obama administration, which once enjoyed the enthusiastic support of the media justice community, greedy telecom corporations will at last have their wish — that the internet will become a lot more like cable TV — five hundred, or five thousand channels, but nothing worth watching. The proposed FCC regulations will allow corporations even more power to control and restrict the content delivered via wireless broadband internet, thought to be the internet delivery technology of the future. Needless to say, the telecom and cable companies are well pleased. Their paid stooges at the Alliance for Digital Equality, the Minority Media Telecommunications Council, LULAC, the National Coalition for Black Civic Participation and the NAACP, and the Congressional Black Caucus are raking in telecom donations and cranking out press releases assuring us that giving their benefactors more control over the internet will create jobs and opportunities for all of us little people.
The five member FCC is scheduled to vote on the proposed rule changes on December 21. Certainly chairman Genachowski will vote for his own rules. Amazingly, it is possible that the two Republican commissioners may not because they object to any regulation of corporations whatsoever. Commissioners Kopps and Clyburn, however, are still thought to be staunch supporters of network neutrality, and should be contacted by email, phone or fax and asked to oppose the Obama proposal to let corporations control what we see, hear and send over the internet. This is a case when doing nothing is better than anything already on the table. For more information on what you can do, visit www.savetheinternet.com That’s www.savetheinternet.com.
For Black Agenda Radio, I’m Bruce Dixon.
I wonder where those organizations stood on the digital television transition? BAR ran articles years back calling the transition “grand theft digital” and noted how dismantling analog would hurt low-income communities (particularly black and elderly). Some groups came out against it but I can’t remember who. It was a huge theft of public airwaves and handed over to the telecoms, giving them a large operable space for wireless broadband.
What’s interesting is that few people are talking about the “white space” spectrum in connection to net neutrality. The telecom lobby CTIA tried to block the FCC’s “consumer choice measures” that aimed to make the spectrum more open to competitors and devices. Telecoms and CTIA have always hated this. But the current net neutrality proposal would make wireless be hands off to openness principles of net neutrality. That could complicate things if CTIA returns with another suit and says the FCC is outside its enforcing role.
This is why Commissioner Clyburn has the most important vote. She is expected to be the first Commissioner to side with Genachowski and could make the Chairmans plan be ascertainable since it would mean one more vote. But Clyburn has recently said she doesn’t want to vote on a proposal unless it extends to wireless. This is crucial. Clyburn and Copps holding out would put the pressure on Genachowski to change the proposal rather than Clyburn siding with Genachowski and then the pressure being on Copps to fold (which is what everyone is banking on to happen).
If those organizations or anyone who saw the digital transition as a theft of public airwaves wants some sense of justice so that spectrum is available and open for the public, they need to contact and tell Clyburn to not allow another theft to happen by allowing wireless and said stolen spectrum to go unchecked.
wait a minute. So you’re telling me that Obama is going to let this hapoen? But how can you monoplolize the Internet though. it’s too much power, too much money. I don’t see the vote being passed on the 21st. I hope it doesn’t get passed.
This is gettin outta hand… When will it stop?
-Jordan S.