Wednesday, April 23, 2014

Website Censorship

The FCC has finally caved into Comcast et al to allow them to block certain websites. This is a very slippery slope because they can just slow down the base service and the only decent speed will be for the people who pay up, effectively discriminating against small website owners like me. This is a very slippery slope I have no desire to explore. We need to keep the internet as a free and open forum where all people can talk freely. Looking across the world access to internet and other freedoms are very closely correlated and we need to make certain the United States stays ahead of the curve. We need to defend our constitution.

Call your representative and senators today: http://www.usa.gov/Contact/Elected.shtml

http://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2014/04/net-neutrality-finally-dies-ripe-old-age-of-45

More legalese explanation: our founding fathers put in a public postal service as a job of our government. If our founding fathers were alive today I have no doubt they would see the existence of a free and open internet equal to importance to a well run postal service because of the possibility of corruption of companies that deliver mail. Having public oversight in a democracy provides a protection that the private sector in a monopolistic or oligopolistic market cannot provide. The same can be said about the internet, there will only be one major internet provider in any area, and we have seen Comcast become the largest ISP in the nation. Without regulation it is very possible that Comcast could abuse their position and removing these regulations will do just this. We need to protect our liberties in the spirit of our founding fathers to protect the free flow of information which was clearly important to them and is the American way. This decision is not just an assault on the internet but a direct assault on the fabric that makes America such a special and unique country among 196 different nations. This type of decision is going to damage our position on economic and liberty indexes and erode our liberties when these companies abuse their position for all of these reasons. History has shown unregulated monopolies routinely abuse their position, which is why we have the FCC in the first place to protect our civil liberties and political and economic culture.

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