The Black Agenda report on the Court Ruling Re: the Internet: [View all]

[truedelphi]

Link to article:
http://www.blackagendareport.com/content/us-court-appeals-internet-plantation-comcast-verizon-att-its-masters

Article by Bruce A. Dixon
US Court of Appeals: The Internet is a Plantation, With Comcast, Verizon, AT&T Its Masters
(and us users as the slaves)

From the article:

This is one of those ground breaking, those earth shaking moments that reveal how capitalism works, how greedy corporations have captured the media, the courts and the other two bipartisan branches of government in these United States. This ruling is anything but a surprise. It's what the telecom companies have demanded for years, and what the administrations of President Bush and Obama alike seem determined to give them.

President Obama did campaign declaring he would take a back seat to nobody in fighting for network neutrality. The White House has occasionally, though increasingly feebly renewed that pledge. But Obama's first FCC chief was Julius Genakowski, a former telecom lobbyist who wrote the 1990s laws privatizing the internet backbone, which was built with taxpayer dollars, giving it to telecom companies like Comcast and AT&T for pennies on the dollar.

Under this notorious privatizer, the FCC did almost nothing to assert the public right, to advance the public demand for a free and open internet, to head off this disastrous ruling of corporate rights over public property which was clearly in the pipeline. It's not the first time this or any president or Congress has campaigned on the public interest, but governed in the corporate interest, and telecom companies are always big campaign contributors.
(Snip)
For more and ongoing information on how to preserve the limited degree of internet freedom we now have, visit the web site of Free Press, at freepress.net. (That freepress.net.) Sign on to their alert list and let the White House and the FCC know that the internet cannot be a plantation, and you are not a serf.

For Black Agenda Radio, I'm Bruce Dixon. Find us on the web at www.blackagendareport.com.