crime: June 2006 Archives
End of the Internet?
The Senate has been hearing testimony about Network neutrality on the Internet and is expected to take up the subject in telecommunications legislation next week.
MARK COOPER, markcooper@aol.com,
http://www.savetheinternet.com
Director of research at the Consumer Federation of America, Cooper said today: "Network neutrality has existed throughout the history of the Internet and created the most dynamic environment for innovation and competition the nation has seen in generations. Good government policy decisions created an open, neutral communications platform over the objections of the telephone companies. It is the opponents of Network neutrality who would burden the Internet with Network discrimination. ... Network discrimination alters the fundamentally open architecture of the Internet and forces innovators to negotiate with network operators before they can get into business -- ending the era of 'innovation without permission,' as Vint Cerf, one of the fathers of the Internet, calls it."
JEFF CHESTER, jeff@democraticmedia.org,
http://democraticmedia.org
Founder and director of the Center for Digital Democracy, Chester wrote the piece "The End of the Internet?" He said today: "Getting rid of Network neutrality will make the current open Internet more closely resemble the closed world of cable television. Content that will dominate will be what is associated with the big phone and cable companies. Other content providers will be confined to the Internet equivalent of a dirt road. And it's not just PCs but also information going to mobile devices and such that will be affected."
SASCHA MEINRATH, sascha@ucimc.org, http://cuwireless.net, http://www.saschameinrath.com
Meinrath is founder and project coordinator of the Champaign-Urbana Wireless Network (CUWiN). He said today: "Telecommunications giants are trying to make everyone pay for their poor business planning. They overbuilt in many locations during the Internet boom in the late 1990s, creating a glut of dark fiber that could be utilized for broadband provision. But instead, the telcos are spending billions of dollars buying each other in an attempt to prevent the very competition that would lower prices and increase service options for consumers.
"Network neutrality is needed to maintain an Internet free from excessive charges and without content discrimination. These corporations are attempting to artificially limit customers' choices so they can double-charge Internet users. Today, people and providers already pay for broadband access –- these are the fees we pay to get connected to the Internet. However, the phone and cable giants are trying to make it so that content providers will be forced to pay a second time to prevent their content from being discriminated against; in essence, the network owners want to charge content providers once for access and a second time for speedy delivery."
Meinrath added: "CUWiN uses open-source software to provide free Internet connectivity to residents of the Champaign-Urbana community and many other locations worldwide. We have built clouds of WiFi coverage throughout our city -– allowing people free broadband access and the use of free services and applications (e.g., telephone/VoIP, streaming audio and video, webhosting) via this network. Currently, we get contacted every day from organizations and municipalities that would like to learn from our successes and are interested in replicating our service provision model."
Institute for Public Accuracy
915 National Press Building, Washington, D.C. 20045
(202) 347-0020 * http://www.accuracy.org * ipa@accuracy.org
The Free Press -- Independent News Media - Election Issues
At Last!!!!
The story of the stolen election of 2004 has FINALLY busted into the mainstream media, thanks to Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., and Rolling Stone Magazine.
We all owe them great thanks.
Now we'll see if there's any further media follow-up. And if the Democratic Party actually DOES SOMETHING about the fact that America is about to be hijacked again in 2006, and then for the third straight presidential race in 2008.
The massive article in this week's RS focuses on the impossible contrast between exit polls showing a clear and overwhelming Kerry victory versus bogus "official" vote counts giving George W. Bush four more catastrophic years in the White House. It also details some of the horrific intimidation, manipulation and outright theft used by Ohio's GOP Secretary of State J. Kenneth Blackwell to deny hundreds of thousands of mostly Democratic voters their right to a ballot. And it discusses in some depth the fact that Diebold and other electronic voting machine and software producers make it possible for any inside operator to use a laptop and a few keystrokes to flip an entire election in a matter of seconds.
It reminds us that the one good thing that can be said about George W. Bush is that the American people have never actually elected him president of the United States.
