[Sosfbay-discuss] [Fwd: Congress is selling out the Internet]

[Cameron L. Spitzer]

>From: Andrea Dorey <andid at cagreens.org>
>Date: Sun, 23 Apr 2006 15:50:31 -0700
>To: Green South Bay Discussion <sosfbay-discuss at cagreens.org>

>Cameron,
>You might send this POV to KPFA

Ha ha ha that's a funny joke.  KPFA has their experts,
the same way See Nothing Network and Faux have theirs.

I'm not in their rolodex.  If I question their
experts, even around the edges, I'm just one of
the zillions of dittoheads that heckle them all the time.

KPFA's rolodex includes spam advocates EFF, ACLU,
and Movon.org.  I disagree with those organizations'
pro-spam positions.  That makes me a heckling dittohead
as far as KPFA is concerned.



> who recently did a "chicken little"  
>on this subject

Well, that's the problem.  What subject?
AOL's "email tax" where corporate spammers pay to bypass AOL's
spam filters?
Bandwidth hogs?  Telco mergers?
It's all muddled together.



> and got their listeners all in an uproar.

>I also received a mailing from the media-alliance organization that  
>is concerned about public access as the last bastion of free speech  
>on TV.

That's related, to the extent that that synchronous
television (broadcast and cable content that you watch
at the instant they are transmitted) is already
being replaced by Internet traffic streams of various
kinds.  There's no equivalent of public access
in that medium, never has been.  No need, because the
network isn't time-constrained the way broadcast and
live cable are.  Network owners
have always been free to block anything they like,
to the extent their customers don't object or don't know.

Eventually the
right wingers who run Comcast and AT&T/SBC are going
to figure out that 99.9% of their customers won't
care when they block access to Democracy Now's podcasts.
And EFF and Media Alliance will be too busy fighting
for the "right to spam" (doing the Direct Marketing
Association's dirty work of destroying the public
email system) to do anything about that.

The Internet routes around damage quite automatically,
but only when that damage is noticed.  When physical links
go down, the routers at each end notice automatically.
But an *intentional outage* like blocking Democracy Now
is something only Democracy Now's viewers would notice,
and they might not be interested in "just a technology
issue" like that.  Or confine their response to utterly
useless and futile actions like calling "technical support."
The bad guys are counting on the left's well known,
stylish helplessness around computers and related systems.
We might very well put up with quite draconian
censorship, because "we're not technical."

That's what public access activists should be
worried about.


Cameron