Open Internet advocates just received a parting gift from Attorney General Alberto Gonzales.
In a Thursday filing to the Federal Communications Commission, Gonzales' Department of Justice urged the agency to oppose Net Neutrality -- the principle that all Internet sites should be treated equally.
 Last-minute favors for friends in Texas |
The DOJ ruling once again proves the point -- argued here at Huffington Post and elsewhere -- that powerful corporate and government gatekeepers are working together to dismantle Internet freedoms and impose their will upon the Web.
While Gonzales' feckless reign at Justice is near an end, his department's legacy is becoming clear: The DOJ has established itself as a friend to the powerful and enemy to the basic freedoms that Americans once took for granted.
As Gonzales slinks back to Texas, he is pulling last-minute favors for friends in high places. This week's filing reeks of the same sort of cronyism that has left a slime trail wherever the Attorney General has gone.
Going AWOL on Internet Freedom
In October 2006, the DOJ went AWOL on its duty to protect consumers and competition when it rubber-stamped AT&T's bid to gobble up BellSouth. It was left to the FCC to step in and restore Net Neutrality safeguards to the massive merger.
When AT&T was accused of illegally tapping its customers' lines, it was DOJ lawyers that moved in under the cover of night with an attempt to dismiss the suit.
It was late last month that Director of National Intelligence Mike McConnell admitted the extent to which the government and AT&T had conspired in far-reaching efforts to spy on Americans without legal warrant. The Bush administration is now pushing for immunity from prosecution for telecom firms that eavesdrop on customers.
AT&T has long sought to use "deep packet inspection" tools to sift Internet user content. The company has already 'demoed' this technology to the RIAA and MPA as part of a plan to scour the Web for file sharing that doesn't conform to the industry's draconian interpretation of copyright.
Without Net Neutrality protections, it was only a matter of time before phone companies and government used this same technology to spy on the everyday activities of Net users.
Parroting Ma Bell
Thursday's filing by a lame duck Attorney General is instructive in this context. According to public interest lawyer Harold Feld of Media Access Project, the DOJ document reads like the "Cliffsnotes version" of AT&T's own anti-Net Neutrality filing.
"The filing parrots the industry arguments that adopting a rule that would prevent telephone and cable companies from monitoring and filtering internet traffic would harm investment and innovation," Feld writes, "despite mounting evidence from Europe and Asia that the opposite is true."
Indeed, the DOJ filing uses hollow industry rhetoric about market forces to provide cover for more nefarious aims. According to the filing:
Other proposals would require interconnection, open access and structural separation of companies offering both Internet access services or transmission and content or applications deliverable over the Internet.This is utter nonsense. The DOJ knows, as does anyone paying attention to American broadband, that there is no "free market competition" or consumer choice when high speed Internet services are controlled by so few.
The Department submits, however, that free market competition, unfettered by unnecessary government regulatory restraints is the best way to foster innovation and development of the Internet.
Open Internet = Free Market
Free market competition is exactly what we need. To get it, we must move beyond the broadband duopoly that has left America far behind the rest of the world in services and connectivity.
Moreover, we need to safeguard Internet traffic from the types of surveillance and "content shaping" now being deployed by these same companies.
Net Neutrality should be the cornerstone of any nation broadband plan. It frees the types of economic innovation and competition that have been a hallmark of the Internet's development until very recently.
Net Neutrality guarantees that each of us gets an equal voice and equal choice without meddling from the likes of Gonzales and his friends at Ma Bell.
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so paying for the service should be understood to be a fair business practice. But, when you get to movies-on-demand, you start entering this ugly realm where big fish eat little fish,
I think you should still get your DVD movies from the video store, instead of trying to have aT1 pipe in your home etc. But, some people are lazy, and have money, and end up influencing all else that goes on, as a result...
Tim
Fidonet dates back to 1984 and had international connectivity. Off the top of my head, I believe the first community bulletin board was around 1975.
I've been out of that scene for ten years, maybe time to haul out the dialup modem and resurrect old technology. There's more than one way to thwart The Man.
BBs!
This is another Orwellian strategy to control the masses, not unlike the banning of the internet from our troops in Iraq ("Don't let them know the hell they're living in isn't working and there is no plan to get them out of there.").
The internet is the last hope that "We The People" have for any semblance of a Democracy. It shouldn't surprise anyone that the knuckle crawling, bottom feeding Gonzo is instrumental in this assault on our freedom.
But, if a Democrat wins the presidency in '08, don't be surprised if they follow the same corporate nanny state agenda. Freedom and democracy isn't about us, my friends. It's an illusion.
But as I read the paucity of responses to this issue, it reinforces my belief that we're just not interested in the nuts and bolts of freedom--and that's what this issue is really about.
Just as a free press was important enough to warrant constitutional protection, so should a free internet.
Maybe, we have grown too soft and complacent about our freedoms. Wasting our time watching diversions like "reality" tv while the real world players aren't wasting a minute stealing our past and our future from us.
Maybe we are hypnotized by the spin machine in D.C.
Or, maybe we are just too scared and dis-empowered to feel that we still have any control over our own destiny. We know the CIA and ATT are listening, but we worry about terrorists, gangs, and the creepy guy down the street to the point that we are imprisoned by our own inertia.
Your main point--"only a matter of time before phone companies and government used this same technology to spy on the everyday activities of Net users." should have the entire country marching, but today is sunday and the NFL is on...
One only needs to look as far as the Pearl Jam concert that was censored by ATT to see what the future holds if this is allowed to stand.
There is no "free market competition."
The market, our pubic airwaves, utilities and now, even infrastructure,are sold by Bushco to the highest bidder with the sleaziest lobbyists. That's MONEY IN!
Supports, subsidies and tax breaks that the Republicons would label Socialist, and worse,if offered to working class Americans, are the other hand in this equation of you scratch mine and I'll scratch yours. And I don't mean backs! And that's MONEY OUT!
Out of our pockets, out of our taxes, our of our social support programs. Do you think we get what we pay for?
They fear the internet more than any other single thing in this country and will do everything they can to control it. Don't let them.
11, thank you, now 12...13, 13.5, do I hear 14?
Mmm, mmm, government donuts...